Jackie Kunkel stands beside her long arm quilting machine and shows off the pattern she designed that is being published in Quick Quilts magazine. Photo: dotCANTON
By Steve Wilder dotCANTON.com
It all started innocently enough about 17 years ago, when Jackie Kunkel was pregnant with her first child and getting ready to leave her job as a vocational rehabilitation specialist to become a stay-at-home mom.
Her well-intentioned husband, Rod, thought that “maybe I ought to get a hobby, that I might get a little bored,” she recalls with a smile.
Jackie took him up on the idea and attended a quilting class. She didn’t like it much, but went to another and became smitten. These days, Jackie Kunkel’s involvement with quilting is so expansive that she has to laugh when she says, “It’s kind of like a hobby gone awry.”
Colorful threads. Photo: dotCANTON
Today, Kunkel operates her own business, Canton Village Quilt Works, out of her home in North Canton. In addition to her primary job as a “long arm quilter,” she manages her own website and blog, is a sales rep for a quilting machine manufacturer, an online retailer of fabrics that she ships around the world, the producer of a podcast that’s listened to worldwide (she has done 16 of them), and now she’s getting into giving lectures and designing patterns. In fact, Quick Quilts magazine is about to make Kunkel a published designer for the first time, with “Pop Squares” appearing in soon-to-be-released issue #117.
Kunkel packs most of this business activity, including her computer assisted long arm quilting machine and its 15-foot table into a room that measures about 800 square feet on the second floor of her home.
Some of the fabric available through Canton Village Quilt Works. Photo: dotCANTON
How does she stay on top of all this? “I have to be very regimented,” she says. “I have to stay in a business mode. I’m usually at it by 7 a.m.”
When Kunkel’s children started going to school, she considered a return to the 9-5 world, but decided she “wanted flexibility” in her life. “It’s important,” she says, “for me to be here with my family.”
Kunkel purchased her first long arm machine in 2000 and started her business. As a long arm quilter, she receives quilt tops and backs from clients around the country, adds a layer of batting in between the two and quilts it all together with the decorative stitching that quilt lovers so appreciate.
And what is it that keeps her passion for quilting burning?
“I love the contact I have with all my customers,” she says. “They are creative, smart and loving people.”
