Well, it’s an obsession that she wants to share with others in her classes, and forms the core of the six that she will be teaching at International Quilt Festival/Long Beach this August 4-6.

“All of my classes have the background of continuous designs, and I’m going to share all my tips and secrets how to do that,” she says via Zoom. They include the Longarm Hands-on classes “Row by Row—Free-Motion Quilting,” “Crosshatching with Stencils and Rules,” “Grids Galore,” and “Quilted Mandalas.” She’ll also offer the HQ Capri Hands-on classes “Finding Your Path” and “Floral Confetti.”

You could feasibly say that Hruska has quilting appliquéd into her DNA. She comes from four generations of quilters on one side of her family, and three on the other.

“I don’t think I could have ever gotten away from doing something with quilts! It’s everywhere in our family!” she says. “My mom is super crafty and she made all of our clothes. Even though they were corduroy culottes I had to wear to school. And our Barbie dolls had matching clothes!”

By the time she made her first completed quilt—a Lone Star pattern at the age of 15 that was a surprise gift for her mother—Hruska had already been sewing for years. She graduated from college with a degree in Business Admin/Accounting and worked in that field, but also pieced quilt tops and continued making garments on the side while she and her husband raised two children.

At the age of 33 and after the birth of her second child, she purchased her first longarm machine (a Gammill), but by the next year had decided to devote herself to quilting full time. And with that came questions from people. Lots of questions. Soon, Hruska also found she had a natural affinity for teaching.

“I loved helping people, and it became natural to want to show them how to do things. And being in central Missouri, there are longarm manufacturers all around, she says.

And just as she learned to really pay attention to every line item in her accounting career, Hruska carried that approach over into her new field.

“With accounting comes attention to detail and overanalyzing everything. I’ve very OCD, everything’s got to go together just right, and that lends to my style of quilting!” she laughs. “Free-motion is OK, but it’s sometimes unorganized. That’s why I love to teach grids and cross hatching and ruler and stencils. It’s all very exact and structured and everything has its place.”

Asked if she could have a quilting “super power” what would it be, she quickly says “more energy” (which seems impossible if you see her). She then modified that to “more time.”

“Quilting is a business and you’re there to make money, but I want to try a lot of things and do them faster,” she says, before returning to her devotion to continuous stitch quilting.

“All those starts and stops take a long time. So it became an obsession to find a [continuous stitch].” If one has any doubt about that, just check out some of the videos on her website. She also sells her books, patterns, stencils, and notions there.

And videos and online classes are what she’s really done more with in the past couple of years. Understandably, given how the pandemic has changed everything.

“The amount of information that is now online is amazing,” she marvels. “And when I started 20 years ago, there were some longarm classes at shows and that was it. I lost eight shows I was supposed to teach at during the past two years. So we all had to transition and see how we could still get that information out to people.”

As for the future, Hruska’s wished-for super power better come in quickly. She’s already got plans for five more books to write and 13 online classes to create, while also trying to keep an active and engaging presence on social media.

Coming back her classes at the Long Beach Festival, she says the one thing she hopes her students take away is this: That the seemingly complicated big picture can be acheiveable, if you just break it down to detail. Sort of like accounting.

“When people see my work, they think ‘Oh gosh, I could never do that!’ And I know my samples are over the top! But you can,” she sums up. “It does look intense, but I like breaking it down into basic, small designs and show people how to transition into something that’s more detail-oriented. It can be done!”

For more information on Dorie Hruska, visit Forever-Quilting.com