Hello! I am Karen Aleta Miller, founder of Cosmic Quilting. I launched my business in 2014 to follow my passion in the textile arts. I had just moved to the area from Washington, D.C. to live closer to my mother and sons, and was in the process of looking for a position in higher-ed administration, where I had made my career over the past 25 years. Unsurprisingly, I was feeling no enthusiasm for this job search. One day, out of the blue, one of my sons asked me to make a t-shirt quilt. I had been sewing since childhood – making clothes, bridal wear, costumes, and taking on the gamut of custom sewing jobs – so my sons thought of their mom as somebody who could literally make anything out of whole cloth. After having fun with that project, a quilt for myself soon followed. I quilted both of these jobs on my trusted Janome. When a friend asked me to finish a king-size quilt from a bare quilt top, and not being one to say “no” to any sewing project, I rented a longarm quilting machine for the occasion. With that I became an instant fan of turning a quilt top into the finished product. Having caught the bug, I dove right into the deep end of this specialty and purchased the renowned Gammill Statler Stitcher longarm quilting machine, which remains the workhorse of my shop (along with another Gammill for free-motion jobs).