Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Michelle Trimble. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Michelle, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I always knew that my career path had to be something I was passionate about – not just a job. I fell in love with chemistry in high school, and thought about going into pharmacological research, but realized in graduate school that lab life just didn’t suit me. Instead, I took my passion for chemistry into the classroom, and taught high school chemistry. I loved getting students to those light-bulb moments when they made connections they’d been struggling with previously.

Fast forward twenty years; I was still thoroughly loving my avocation, continuing to grow professionally, and finding joy nearly every day with my students in the classroom. Around this time, I picked up quilting; I found a meditative quality in the repetitive motion of piecing and machine quilting. I made a variety of functional quilted items including personalized birthday placemats and a memory quilt for my mother in law.

Then my principal made a completely unexpected announcement over the intercom – there was a suspected case of COVID-19 in our school, and students were being sent home immediately. We returned after three days, only to be sent home again when our city issued their lock-down order. Over the next few months, I did what I could to provide learning experiences for my students, teach myself how to operate Zoom, and reimagine my curriculum so I could make it interactive in the digital interface while my students were uncomfortable or unable to show themselves on screen.

In all, I taught via Zoom for eleven months, not counting the summer break. Teaching on-lilne primarily to a black screen and the sound of my own voice was emotionally exhausting, and I was burnt-out like I never had been before, by October. The following school year when we returned to the classrooms, I thought it was going to be all better, but found the burn-out remained.

My quilting practice brought me through this difficult time – I completed a total of 10 throw- to bed-sized quilts the year I taught from home. While these quilts were all sewn from patterns, I also started challenging myself and experimenting with different techniques. I completed my first art quilt in the summer of 2022, and on the insistence of my quilt guild-mate, entered it in a nearby quilt show. I was pleasantly surprised to win a ribbon. I met another quilter at that show who had quit her day-job to pursue quilting professionally, and my conversation with her planted the seed – maybe one day I could be a professional artist as well…when I was ready to retire, that is.

Meanwhile at school, I decided to take a sabbatical to dive deeper into my quilting practice. During my sabbatical, I dove into a bunch of art classes, applying what I learned to my quilting designs. My first quilt pattern design was accepted by a digital quilt magazine, Make Modern. I proposed several workshops to QuiltCon, and was thrilled when one of the workshops was accepted – meaning I would be teaching at a national quilt show the following year!

By March of 2024, I really felt like I was hitting my stride, and was disappointed at the prospect of only four more months to really dedicate to my quilting. With my husband’s support, I resigned from teaching and established Quilting Chemistry, where I offer workshops to local quilt stores and guilds, and will self-publish my first pattern in January 2025. I hope to expand my skill set to offer live Zoom-based lectures and workshops to quilt guilds in 2025, and am excited about several new quilt pattern designs in the works for 2025.

Michelle, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a quilt pattern designer with a modern minimalist aesthetic and a quilting educator. I know that many of us convince ourselves that we are less capable than we truly are, and I weave my belief in a growth mindset into my teaching practice. I honed my teaching skills in the high school classroom, teaching chemistry for twenty years. I can break down complex skills into more manageable chunks and explain how to tackle these tasks in a variety of ways to make new skills accessible to a variety of students. I leverage these years of teaching expertise when I teach in-person workshops, or develop video tutorials. I love teaching in person, seeing students gain confidence as they work on a new technique. I incorporate teaching in my patterns via imbedded video tutorials. I am currently offer in-person or Zoom lectures to quilt guilds, and in-person quilting workshops on improv piecing, sewing curves, and color theory.

I’m thrilled that my first quilt pattern, Dew Drops, was published in Make Modern’s 60th issue in September 2024, and look forward to self-publishing an expanded pattern offering 5 sizes and video tutorials in January 2025.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I have a hard time narrowing this down to one most rewarding aspect, because I feel like I have two distinct aspects to my practice that feed one another. I really enjoy finding inspiration in the world around me – architecture, a mural, a sunset – then playing with the line and form in that inspiration, and bringing my new vision to life in fiber. These projects rarely get finished the “easy way” – there’s a way that seems to bring more life to my vision, and I spend the time necessary to get it done right. Along that journey, I find a skill or related design that I think would be interesting and more approachable to others, and the educator and/or scientist in me perks up. I then go to work trying to figure out the best way to piece the design together in a way that I can more effectively explain to others. The process of refining my design and writing instructions (a quilt pattern) or a lesson plan for a workshop is just as exciting for me. While you may not agree, education and engineering both have aspects that feel very creative for me, and the education and engineering aspects of my art practice are equally as exciting for me as designing and creating a new art quilt.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I have pivoted several times over the course of my life. One of the best things about life is our ability to re-invent ourselves. As a high school educator, I often tried to convince high school juniors and seniors that they didn’t need to figure out what they wanted to be when they grew up just then, and that it was OK if they took several about faces in that process along the way.

I went to graduate school in organic chemistry, thinking I would go into pharmaceutical research. Two years into the PhD program, another graduate student in my lab invited me to coffee and shared his concern for me – that I seemed unhappy, and challenged me to do something else if life in the lab was not making me happy. Although I had been unwilling to admit it to myself, he was right. Upon reflection, I realized that what I enjoyed most about my graduate work was explaining it to people in my life who had very little understanding of chemistry, and finding creative ways to give them a basic understanding of what I was trying to do in the lab. It took a few weeks, but I finally found the courage to approach the professor I was doing research for, and tell him that I no longer wanted to continue in the PhD program, but wanted to go into education instead. He was understanding, and connected me with a former student who was a community college professor, encouraging me to explore options in education before I left his lab. I was convinced that I wanted to be a high school science teacher though, and the universe has a way of providing opportunities if you are open and willing to say yes. I soon found a long-term substitute position as a science teacher, which turned into a full time position the next school year. More than twenty years later, after becoming a master teacher who presented at state and national teaching conventions, I made my next pivot…to a quilt fiber artist!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.quilting.chemistry.com
• Instagram: @quiltingchemistry

Image Credits

Catherine Sparacino