Claudia Pettway Charley Mini Blocks with Strips Door Mat

Claudia is a fourth-generation quilter from Gee’s Bend, Alabama. With her mother, she co-founded Heritage Builders, a nonprofit with a gallery right in Gee’s Bend where local artists sell their work. The goal is keeping the quilting tradition going and making sure the next generation can earn a living from it. Claudia, her mother and her daughter sew hundreds of pot holders a month and still can’t keep up. Her door mats bring her quilt designs to your front step, and you buy them straight from her shop, Gee’s Bend Way.

Gee’s Bend is a small, mostly Black community in a bend of the Alabama River in Wilcox County, Alabama. For generations the women there have made quilts from whatever they had on hand, like work clothes and feed sacks, and passed the craft down from mothers to daughters and from neighbor to neighbor. Today those quilts hang in museums around the world, but the tradition belongs to the whole community. More than a hundred Gee’s Bend quiltmakers are on record, and the women we carry are only a few of them.