2023-4 Board Members

Angela Raymond, Mableton

Angela is an Atlanta native and a second-generation quilter. Some of her earliest childhood memories were spent in fabric stores with her mom wishing she were somewhere else. She had dabbled with quilting and sewing off and on over the years but didn’t really catch the quilting bug until her daughter started college in 2013. Her husband had noticed her struggling to make a tablecloth with her worn out sewing machine and bought her a brand-new machine as a surprise. When Angela took the machine in to learn how to thread it up, she saw a block advertising a Block of the Month Club. She had to make that block! Never mind that it was an intermediate level club, she was going to do it. She did it with lots of help and tips from the club members and her mom. By the time the series ended she was completely hooked and had even finished the baby quilt she had started for her daughter in 1995. Now she has three machines including a very basic long-arm machine. She and her mom laugh about how her fabric stash has surpassed her mom’s and who is lingering the longest at the fabric shops.

Angela joined our guild about 4 and a half years ago after she and her husband, Randy moved to metro-Atlanta from Augusta. She’s maintained her love of all types of quilting but has really enjoyed the creative world of experimentation and randomness our guild has opened up to her. Angela is a retired Electrical Engineer and has really enjoyed having more time to quilt.  When she is not quilting, she likes to hike, read and travel.  

Tanya Heldman, Roswell

Tanya has been quilting longer than she would like to admit. Late 2018, she and her husband relocated to Roswell, GA from Los Angeles, CA.

Tanya began quilting during a period she was suffering from health issues. Playing with fabric provided the solace she needed. Eventually, Tanya began a longarm quilting business called Free Range Quilting. Once she moved to Georgia, she stopped quilting for business, and now she quilts for pure pleasure!

Late 2018, she and her husband relocated to Roswell, GA from Los Angeles, CA.

Early 2020, Tanya formed a diverse group of quilters, Remembrance Quilters, who have made art quilts memorializing African American who were victims of lynching as documented by the Equal Justice Initiative located in Montgomery, Alabama. Their quilt exhibit, Lives Taken, Lives Remembered is the result of 2 years of work. Working with the Remembrance Quilters has been a tremendously meaningful, rewarding and eye opening endeavor for Tanya.

Cheryl Hoffman, Woodstock

Cheryl grew up as an Army Brat, so she likes to say that isn’t from any one place. Her parents were from Lubbock, TX, and when she was a child that is where they went “home” to for holidays. She met her husband in Springfield, MO. They were married in 1990 after they had moved to St. Louis, MO. Shortly after their twins were born that same year, they moved to Springfield, Illinois. Cheryl and her husband, Mark, have a third child who was born in 1995. In 2004 Cheryl and her family moved to Woodstock, GA, where they currently reside.

Cheryl leaned how to sew in Home Economics class in the late 1970’s in Lansing, KS. She really enjoyed sewing at that time, but her mother had an old Singer sewing machine, and every time she tried to sew something, she spent most of her time resolving machine issues. So, she abandoned sewing until November 2019 when she decided to try making a table runner and placemats for her youngest daughter for Christmas. She watched a few YouTube videos on how to make a very simple placemat and

used a border fabric for the table runner, so no piecing was needed, but she did quilt it on her new Singer 7285Q Patchwork Quilting Machine. She was hooked.

In 2020, at the very beginning of the Covid Pandemic she was taking her Singer machine to Atlanta Sewing Center to see if it needed to be repaired and she dropped it when taking it out of the car. So, then she needed a new sewing machine, and there were very few to choose from at that time since they were being snatched up to make masks for the pandemic. She bought a Babylock Brilliant machine and with the help of more YouTube videos, she made her first quilt using fabric from Walmart.

Now Cheryl owns five sewing and embroidery machines and has a real obsession with sewing and embroidering. She estimates that she has made over 20 quilts and table runners and at least that many bags. Most of what she makes she gives away to friends and family, but she has kept a few precious quilts and bags for herself.

Cheryl has been with the MACQ guild for a little over a year and is looking forward to joining the board as a Vice-President.

Cassandra Gaul

Cassandra is one of the increasingly rare Georgia natives from the metro area. She grew up with her mother's quilts and sewing room, never quite understanding (1) why there needed to be a whole room for it and (2) why there needed to be so. much. fabric. It's okay. She gets it now. But it took an international pandemic for her to really dive in. Beginning with sewing button-downs, her journey shifted to quilts after figuring out that fitting pants is just hard and flat things are easier.

Professionally, Cassandra works for the government and leverages technology and automation to modernize business practices to ensure that the right people have the right information at the right time. That said, she is loath to look at a screen or check email in the evenings and would much prefer to spend half the time sewing, and the other half taking one of five cats off her sewing. She enjoys casual bird watching on hikes, curling up with a science fiction book or show, and going to the zoo, the Shakespeare Tavern, or Fernbank with friends. She dreams of one day also having her own sewing room with so. much. fabric.

Rachael Arnold, Atlanta

Rachael caught the sewing bug young, crafting doll clothes and historical(ish) dresses for play time with the help of her great-grandmother, then creating formal gowns and fantasy costumes as a teenager. After a break, she came back to sewing around 2010 and discovered that quilting didn’t require fitting 3D curves like garments and costumes did. She had a brief affair with more traditional styles, then found the growing Modern quilting movement online and fell in love. 

These days, she’s an equal opportunity sewist, splitting time between quilting, garment making (thanks to the rise in indie pattern designers), and other fabric crafts. She appreciates that there is always something exciting to do with fabric—whether simple projects to quiet her brain with, complex challenges to engineer, and everything in between.

By day, Rachael puts her mind to work crafting code for industry-leading automotive software solutions. She lives in Midtown Atlanta with her spouse, toddler, and a curmudgeonly dog.