One of the world’s foremost quilt designers, Judy Martin has long sought to bridge the gap between the traditional and modern. In the wake of the Bicentennial Quilt Revival, Judy was an enthusiastic proponent of machine piecing and helped bring pattern presentation into the modern era. Her work remains rooted in the shapes and styles of traditional quilts but feels fresh and original. Judy’s inventive plays on Log Cabin and Lone Star Quilts—each the subject of multiple books and a dazzling array of variations—have become two of her hallmarks. Over the course of her prolific four-decade career, Judy has inspired and empowered quilters to do their best work. 

The daughter of a sewing hobbyist, Judy stitched her first quilt out of dressmaking scraps in 1969. Ten years later, she began her professional career in quilting as an editor for Quilter’s Newsletter and Quiltmaker, where she quickly became one of the principal pattern designers on staff. There, she published countless patterns and articles as well as her first books. In 1987, she left to start her own publishing company, Crosley-Griffith, with her husband, Steve. In the following years, Judy’s work expanded to fabric lines and a series of rotary cutting rulers invented by Judy herself, a natural progression of Judy’s creative traditional-meets-modern approach to quiltmaking. Since her first release in 1980, Judy has written 28 quilt books and has published over 1,200 original designs. Her work has been featured at numerous shows and exhibits, including a career-spanning retrospective at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky.

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