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verge / january / 15

to bee or not to bee/ a quilter’s question
kathy & rob mullis answer with new quilting store on telfair

Kathy Mullis has not forgotten how cotton feels in her fingers. Unlike most of us who put it on each morning, dry our hands on it, wipe our mouths with it, and lay our bodies down in it at the end of the day, Mrs. Mullis touches her cotton like it’s a new silk from the Orient. “All quilters are that way,” she protests. “We need to feel our fabric.”
Kathy Mullis and her husband Robert are opening downtown Augusta’s first quilting shop. The old EatCetera building at Fifth and Telfair Streets has been incubating a transformation for the last year and a half. In preparation for its opening in early 2009, the Quilt Shop on the Corner is already stocked with the beginnings of a quilting inventory. It now has the requisite cutting table, notions racks, and a beach mural in the bathroom.
“Quilt shops notoriously have fun bathrooms,” says Mrs. Mullis, turning on the light to reveal palm trees, sand, and a bather caught unawares. Mullis laughs at the accomplishment of her muralist friend, Beth.
The Mullises want to create a place for the community. Situated in a central location, the shop will serve as a needed outlet for creative people. But Mrs. Mullis quickly admits how challenging it will be to cater to all the needs of the diverse immediate neighborhood.
Historically, people have always connected over quilt-making. Beginning in the mid-19th century, women would gather together to help each other finish their quilts. Some people, including those involved with the recent African-American Quilt Exhibition at the Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History on Phillips Street, claim that quilts also served as roadmaps to freedom for a community of runaway slaves before Emancipation. Among the upper class, crazy quilts displayed the wealth of a family in strips of luscious material. Nearly all quilts were relational as well as utilitarian.
Kathy Mullis began quilting in 2002 when her daughter graduated from high school. Mrs. Mullis gathered together all her grade school memories and stitched them into a t-shirt quilt. Still, at that time she dabbled only reluctantly.It was after her mother died in 2003 that Mullis began what she calls “fabric therapy” sessions with a good friend. Quilting became her comfort, a way to see something fragmented come together into a beautiful whole. As a former nurse—she officially retired at the beginning of December to work on preparing the shop—Mrs. Mullis knows better than most people how deeply the world needs consolation.
“I used to tell Robert that quilting is cheaper than therapy,” she quips, “but (renovating) the building has sort of messed that (theory) up.”
The two have had to laugh a lot over the last several months. The Mullis’ only previous experience in retail was running a cottage business making t-shirt quilts. When they decided they were ready for a larger entrepreneurial challenge, the old building in downtown Augusta, which is Megan now lived as well, was the perfect place to build the store they had in mind. They and their teenage son moved from Alpharetta in the summer of 2007 and made their home in the apartment above the shop.
But there has been much to learn in starting a business like this. One necessary complication is in renovating their historic building according to the Olde Town Neighborhood Association’s stipulations. The structure was originally built in 1894 as a grocery store, which it remained until the 1970s when it became the sandwich shop EatCetera. Then the downstairs have sat empty for the last eight years after the exodus of last resident, a short-lived Chinese restaurant. Financial help for the Mullis’s preservation efforts is coming from the Mayor himself in the form of a façade grant, which will eventually allow the Mullises to restore the front and sides of their building to its past glory.
Beyond these large-scale concerns, the Mullises needed to purchase the actual goods to sell in the shop. At the 2008 Houston Quilt Market in Texas, they sat for hours with fabric distributers deciding on fabrics and fabric lines to stock the store. They ended up buying $25,000 worth of all kinds of material—Civil War reproductions, some African prints she hopes will be popular in the downtown population, and even some silks.
But their move was difficult for other reasons. Changing communities was a hard thing to do. Had the Mullises not gotten involved very quickly in a downtown church and the neighborhood of fellow small-business owners, they would have grown very discouraged. But it’s been a communal effort from the beginning. Members of the North Augusta quilting guild, Pieceful Hearts, have come offering their labor and expertise in areas of quilting that Mrs. Mullis doesn’t know as well. These ladies vary in ages and backgrounds. Mrs. Mullis hopes that some of these well-practiced quilters will also help fill the classroom space in the store with new generations of quilters.
In the end, Kathy Mullis loves quilts and other fabric arts. She and Robert want to share that love with anyone who will learn. And maybe all their new neighbors will be a little warmer this winter as a result.
by Charlotte Okie • photos by Elizabeth Benson
The Quilt Shop on the Corner is located at 428 Fifth Street. The shop will be open Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays: 10 am to 6 pm, Thursdays: 10 am to 8 pm and Saturdays 10 am to 4 pm. Learn more at http://www.quiltshopcorner.com/ or call 706.721.1298.