About Us

Judy Parkins

Judy is a retired Registered Nurse and Certified Case Manager, who dreamed of a second career in quilting. She started toward that dream in 1999, when she and her husband Larye relocated to western Montana. While between nursing jobs, she had the opportunity to learn longarm machine quilting at a local quilt shop, where she worked for a year before returning to nursing. However, the quilting bug had bitten hard, and in the spring of 2001, she retired from nursing, spending much of her new-found free time in volunteer work, piecing quilts for the local senior center's quilt program.

Another relocation to the Bitterroot Valley provided Judy the opportunity to set up her own quilting business, converting a partially-finished garage workshop into a quilt studio and installing a new, state-of-the-art Gammill longarm quilting machine. Judy is a member of the International Machine Quilters Association, the American Quilter's Society, the International Quilt Association, the Association of Pacific Northwest Quilters,the Bitterroot Quilters Guild, the Mission Mountain Quilters Guild, Stevensville Art and Sculpture Society (SASS), the Missoula Weavers Guild, and is active in several smaller special interest sewing groups in western Montana. Judy has been sewing since about age six and has been making quilts for about 20 years.

Since 2005, Judy has devoted more time to expanding her own creative horizons, adding beaded embellishments to her own quilted designs. as well as creating original artworks based on beads and fiber. She has won numerous awards for her original works. In September 2007, she was featured artist at the Red Poppy gallery in Ronan, Montana, and has had works hung at Whooping Crones Gallery in Missoula and the Sacajawea Gallery in Stevensville, Montana, A firm grounding in the traditional fiber arts led her also to weaving: her woven works to date have explored varieties of color and texture in both yarn and weaving pattern selection.

In the fall of 2009, Realizations Fabric Arts closed its custom machine quilting business in Montana and relocated to Western Washington, where Judy will focus on her fiber and fabric art creations. This web site will remain on-line to provide our very dear clients with access to galleries of the quilts they have made over the past eight years.

About Our Web

Our web site is maintained by Judy's husband, Larye, an Information Technology professional with more than 44 years experience in systems development and management, and who is also a quilter. The pages are dynamically generated from Larye's custom scripts written in PHP. Our web pages are designed to be viewed full-screen at a resolution of 800x600 or better, but can be viewed with scroll bars at a lower resolution.

As a service to our customers, a picture of each quilt is posted to the web as soon as it comes off the quilting machine. We use a Kodak P860 digital camera to shoot the quilts. Because of the space constraints in our shop, we can only show about half of the complete quilt, even using composite photo techniques. The photos are downloaded to an Ubuntu Linux workstation, and processed using the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). Photos are cropped, resized, and color-balanced. Lighter colored quilts tend to pick up reflected tones from the quilt studio walls and need to be shifted to look "natural." Some of the larger quilts are photographed in sections and the sections assembled into a composite photo to show more of the overall design of the quilt.

Contact Us

Email:

Judy

Larye

Directions:

Our studio is located in Shelton, Washington, a small city on Puget Sound 22 miles northwest of the capital city, Olympia. Please call ahead: we are open by appointment only.

Shipping Address:

Realizations Fabric Arts
600 Turner Avenue
Shelton, WA 98584