Cindy Roth

Cindy believes she was born with a needle and thread in her hand.  She has had an interest in sewing and fiber arts since childhood.  Beginning with making doll clothes, she took sewing classes in high school, and soon was making all her own clothing. 

After high school, she married young and had three children.  Finances were tight so she sewed nearly all the clothes for her family.  After moving to the Northwest she began working as a seamstress to help with family finances.  She has sewn "almost everything" from bridal fashions to marine canvas - sometimes in the same day! Along with sewing for her family and others she also drove a school bus for 17 years.

In the mid 1980's Cindy became "burned out" with garments and discovered quilting.  She began teaching piecing classes in the South King County, WA quilt shops and through the Parks & Recreation departments of local cities. To finish the quilt samples for her classes she began to quilt them on her home sewing machine.  Knowing there had to be an easier way to quilt her  quilts,  she purchased her first longarm quilting machine in 1995. Her skills as a longarm machine quilter evolved, her cliental expanded and she won several awards both locally and nationally for her quilting. She began teaching longarm quilting at the national level at machine quilting conferences and in individual quilters home studios.

Longarm quilting was beginning to become popular and many of the local longarm quilters began to gather to share information and techniques.  During these meetings Cindy realized that there was a need for longarm education. She founded  Longarm University® where new and experienced longarm quilters could learn more about their machines and how to start their own longarm quilting business.

Her quilting style evolved from basic patterns to complex feather designs and Sashiko style quilting. To be able to easily create many of these complex quilting patterns Cindy has designed many quilting tools and templates.  She sells these items to other quilters on the Longarm University website.

Unfortunately, after 31 years of marriage, she and her husband divorced.  Since that time she has founded Innovations-a Machine Quilting Conference®, an annual event held each September in Tacoma, WA.  Innovations includes about 140 classes for machine quilters of all levels, a vendor mall and an amazing quilt show. Innovations is the ONLY quilt show on the West Coast that exclusively features machine quilted quilts.

In 2006 Cindy was a Teacher of the Year nominee from Professional Quilter Newsletter.

Cindy's children are now adults and she has several grandchildren. Teaching, quilting for others, designing new quilting tools and organizing Innovations takes up  lot  of her time, but she does find time to participate in endurance sports such as marathons, triathlons and long distance bicycling.