We are beginning and experienced quilters who share enthusiasm, knowledge, ideas, and love of quilts and quilting. We have friendship blocks, workshops, challenges, luncheons, and other activities, all described in a Membership Directory that is prepared in January of each year.

Pine Belt Quilters give their time to set up and staff educational exhibits at community festivals and venues in South Mississippi, including Hattiesburg’s Heritage Arts Festival, the Blueberry Jubilee at Poplarville, the Mississippi Welcome Center on I-59 near Picayune, as well as in many local businesses.

Pine Belt Quilters will host its 12th Biennial quilt show October 10-11-12, 2008. We outgrew our former location and the show has moved to a larger venue—Lake Terrace Convention Center—and has been expanded to a three-day event. See the Fiber Art & Quilt Show page for details on entering and attending.




Pine Belt Quilters participate in many service projects, focused mostly on the communities of South Mississippi. In December each year, members give stockings and gifts to the Domestic Abuse Family Shelter, an agency of United Way of Southeast Mississippi. We make children's quilts all year and donate them to for hospitals, child welfare shelters, children of deploying Camp Shelby soliders, and other places where we see a need. Some of the proceeds of our biennial quilt show are donated to charitable causes and used to purchase books for area public libraries.




Many of our guild members are also members of our state organization, Mississippi Quilt Association (MQA). The first Gathering of MQA was hosted by Pine Belt Quilters in Hattiesburg in February 1991, and PBQ members have remained active and supportive in all aspects of this vital organization. Five of MQA’s presidents have come from Pine Belt Quilters: Martha Ginn, Ollie Jean Lane, Ella Lucas, Ellen Hall, and Mary Nell Magee.

Under the leadership of Carol Vickers of Decatur, MS, MQA conducted a search project of quilts made before 1946, documenting more than 1,700 quilts. The outcome of this six-year project was twofold: the publication in 2001 (by University Press in Jackson) of Mississippi Quilts, written by Mary Elizabeth Johnson of Montgomery, AL, with photographs by J. D. Schwalm, of Jackson, and the mounting of a traveling exhibit of photographs, “Unfolding Our Past.” The exhibit traveled to eighteen venues across the state.

The next phase of documentation is to be a book on the life and quilts of Martha Skelton of Vicksburg. The book should be on bookshelves in 2008. PBQ members were a vital part of the fundraising efforts to finance the publication of this book. To preserve Mississippi’s rich quilting legacy, future plans are to study the lives and quilts of other Mississippi quilters.

Many of us are also active participants in the four-state organization, Gulf States Quilting Association (GSQA), which covers Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle.