Carol Bruce is known for her creativity and refuses to be limited to one medium. One day she can be found photographing butterflies in her wildflower garden, while the next may find her building Renaissance costumes, designing fabric, painting landscapes or creating an art quilt. Carol is a published writer, photographer, and quilt pattern designer, and her quilts have toured in international shows.

Born in Tulsa, Carol Bruce was raised in a family of quilters. Her mama set her on the Kenmore and let her sew small quilts or doll clothes made out of scraps from her flour sacks and fabric stash. She remembers her mother giving her the freedom to create without criticism and helped her when she asked. 

Bruce married her high school sweetheart, making a home for herself and her husband wherever the Air Force transfered them. While she was taking college courses in journalism in Michigan or living in Las Vegas, Carol would pick up quilting or other crafting knowledge and skills. She notes that “Quilters in Montana and Michigan were more traditional, while Las Vegas had a large art quilting community, and then a large modern quilting group. Here in Arkansas traditional and modern styles seem to be most popular again.” Looking back, she can see how her style developed from snippets of all the classes taken plus the art quilting experiments.

In the early aughts, Carol Bruce was working on costumes in Las Vegas for the Seigfried and Roy show and painting murals in their homes on the off days. She found an eclectic group of hobbies and communities in Las Vegas, having joined belly dance troupes, making family Renaissance costumes, joining the large local quilting community. 

In 2001, Bruce formed her business Needlesongs and began designing and marketing her own original quilt patterns, as well as teaching numerous classes for shops and quilt guilds across the country. One technique she developed is a fun, easy trapunto related method for making textured trees in landscape art quilts– a technique that separates Carol’s unique art quilts from the rest in quilt shows and guilds. She has recently shown her work at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History’s annual Quilt Fair and the Ozark Folkways space, the Modern Quilt show in Rogers, and the NWA QUILT show in Benton County. 

As a quilter and painter, Carol hopes her Stars Over the Ozarks barn quilts at the Shiloh Museum will share the comfort of quilts with more people than could ever be wrapped in a single regular quilt and will bring positive attention to the quilting community.