Since
2021
About Erika
How Little Glass Quilts® came to be.
Hello there! My name is Erika Pinkley and I live just outside of San Antonio, Texas where I was born 50+ years ago. My business is called Little Glass Quilts where I make stained glass panels based off traditional quilt block designs. When I talk about what I do, I like to describe it as my “accidental business”! You see, my husband and I had just started the process of building our forever home. We had just moved back down from Missouri where I had gotten a little crazy back in that house; let me explain … I am half Hispanic and half Swedish, which basically means that I live inside a Crayola box in my head! I LOVE COLOR! LOL! So, in that Missouri house I had painted just about all the walls a different color. Sure, they were soft pastel colors, but no two walls were the same! And so, as we were building our new house, my husband literally begged me to not go crazy on the wall color again! But, as I like to point out, he didn’t say Boo about the windows!
Just before we had started the building process, we also tragically lost my mother to pancreatic cancer. She was the most incredibly talented woman that I ever knew. I was lucky enough to had been put in front of a sewing machine with her at the tender age of nine but over the years she had spent 60+ decades teaching sewing & quilting lessons to me, my friends, and countless students, either in small shops or in her private home sewing studio. After her passing I was going through the process of clearing out her old studio, I found some of her old lesson plans. Her favorite thing to teach by far was quilting and for those classes, her go-to lessons were lap quilt samplers. As I was going through her old binders, something in my head just clicked! Instantly my minds’ eye saw her favorite quilt teaching block designs made of bright & colorful glass hanging in the windows of my new home. I quickly got online and became a YouTube University Graduate! I taught myself about all things-stained glass and began incorporating her favorite quilt block designs into my plans as our house was being built. When the house was done 10 months later, so were my window panels and I finally got to complete my colorful vision of little glass quilts all throughout my new home.
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As I shared my story and photos of the completed works on social media, requests began flooding in for custom orders of glass from fellow quilting fans for their own windows. And so it began. I quickly came up with a business name, Little Glass Quilts. Designed a logo based off one of my mothers’ favorite blocks, the Monkey Wrench. Then, it was off to the courthouse to register my DBA, and I immediately began taking orders for custom Little Glass Quilts. With every LGQ I create, I like to think that my mother’s love for everything beautiful and quilting related caries on as an homage to her. While I may have only been working in this medium of glass and lead since only 2020, but I have found that my love of all things quilting have effortlessly translated into every block I do!
When I make needle & thread quilts for my own home, I have always tended to lean towards bright colors with a good dose of textures in them and luckily for me, working in glass & lead easily translates into that realm as well. Often time my cloth quilts are furnished by my mother’s enormous fabric stash so I do tend to lean towards scrappy looks; again, and easy transition in glass. Traditional blocks like the nine patch, log cabin and sampler blocks are easiest for me to use in either medium because it lets me focus less on the block construction and more on the rhythm of the colors. That being said, I do still start each glass project on paper first, just as I would a fabric version, after all, I am not reinventing the wheel here. Rather, I’m just taking it out for a different kind of spin!
Living room windows
Made to Match
Hand quilted king size spread
perfectly coordinated with the modern looking stained glass windows