Dianne Miller
Dianne Miller
Home Town – Plymouth, Massachusetts
email – diannedesigns@verizon.net
Instagram – dianne.miller53
Dianne Miller is an artist whose medium is quilt making. Although nationally recognized for her pictorial quilts, Dianne also creates traditional quilts. Her specialty is applique. Dianne loves antique quilts and enjoys restoring, repairing, and caring for the quilts in her extensive collection.
Dianne studied illustration at the Massachusetts College of Art and subsequently worked as a technical illustrator. In 1985, she took her first quilting class. Soon, Dianne began combining her training in traditional art and graphic design and her long-standing love of the needle arts and textiles with her quilting skills to create a style uniquely her own. Her prize-winning quilts have been displayed in numerous shows, galleries, and museums — both in the U.S. and abroad. They have appeared in books and magazines (most recently, Quiltmania Issue 141), and are featured in several private collections, including that of the prestigious International Quilt Festival.
Dianne has always needed to be creative. After high school, she attended a technical school where she studied graphic design for two years. She then transferred to Massachusetts College of Art, planning to be a children’s book illustrator. After several years there, she started working at a technical magazine doing layout, paste-up, design, and photographic darkroom work. After two years, ready for a change, Dianne got a job as an artist in the art department at a high-tech company outside of Boston where she advanced her technical skills as a drafter and designer of publications. During the ten years Dianne worked there, she married her husband, Paul, and started her family. Dianne now has two wonderful adult sons, Adam and Benjamin.
As a young, stay-at-home mom and needing something creative to do, Dianne found her way to the local quilt shop. She loved the fabrics, the colors, the people who worked there, and took her first lesson, a Baltimore Album class. She was hooked on applique and soon began to make and teach Baltimore Album and pictorial art quilts and enter her work in quilt shows, the first being the Great American Quilt Festival in New York City. Her quilt was not accepted, which only made her try harder for the next show she entered; the Labor of Love contest at the Houston Quilt Festival. This time, her entry quilt, “Paris ’76,” was accepted and won the first runner-up prize in that contest. Paris ‘76 was later selected as a Judges Choice as one of the 20th century’s best American quilts in the Ultimate Quilt Search. Paris ‘76 is now in the permanent collection of Quilt’s Inc. in Houston, along with, Sconset Girls, another large pictorial art quilt.
Throughout the 1990s and beyond, Dianne entered many shows – local, regional, and national – winning many awards and receiving numerous requests to present quilt talks, trunk shows, and workshops at guilds. To date, Dianne has lectured and given trunk shows at more than 40 different guilds across the country and taught at nine local quilts shops. Dianne teaches template-free applique using the lightbox. Using this technique, her students have further increased their enjoyment of applique for their traditional and contemporary quilts.
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