Latimer Quilt & Textile Center

Carol Weber | President

Carol started doing fiber arts with the Extension Services just after she got married. Her first project was to sew fringes on dishcloths as gifts for family members. She went on to sew a lot of clothes, for herself and her family. She has been quilting for 20 or 30 years. She first came to Latimer around 18 years ago, and was asked to join the board quite quickly after. She has been the President of the board for about 14 years.

efore her involvement with Latimer she and her sister-in-law Suzanne Weber had a yarn shop called Cordelia's, and the knitting group at Latimer is still called Cordelia's Knitters. They also ran a cake and catering business, and we reap the benefits with Carol's marvelous baking for Open Houses and our Board Meetings.

Lorie was the manager when Carol first joined the board, followed by Linda Machuta, and then Kim Schauss, who managed the Center for many years. We went through a couple of bumpy years with managers after Kim retired, but now we are blessed with our two managers who have revitalized the Center (see upcoming profiles of them in this space).

Carol met her husband of 65 years when she was a junior in high school. They dated for a while, then married. They had three children, one of whom lives in heaven. They now have two sons, four grandchildren, and six great grandchildren. Family has always been very important and most of us have met some of the grandchildren and great grandchildren when they join Carol at Latimer. Carol is in charge of organizing all of the Latimer exhibits. She got started on these with Shirley Metzger. She usually has them booked out about a year or more. Carol and others in the repository do bed turnings to display the historical quilts, both here at the Center and throughout the state.

For the future of Latimer, like many of us Carol thinks we need more young people involved in the Latimer. It would also be really great if we could acquire the property across the road to build a classroom.

Rhoda DeGiovanni | Vice President

Rhoda moved to the Tillamook coast from Milwaukie, Oregon in 1980. I asked her what brought her to the coast, and she replied, "my husband's fishing". She has two children, a son and daughter, and now she has grandchildren and great grandchildren. Her children and most grandchildren live in the area, except for a grandson and his family in Florida. She stays in close touch but lives alone now with her dog in Bar View.

Rhoda has been quilting for "quite some time" (her own words), starting with odds and ends, and then being introduced to the Latimer by Jim and Nancy Cole, where she perfected her skills. When she was younger she did some other fiber arts, but once they moved to this area she decided to try her hand at quilting. I asked her how long she has been on the board, and she wasn't sure, but says she came to a meeting once, excused herself to use the restroom, and when she came back she was on the board. Kent and Jill Haddock She still meets with the quilting guild every week and is looking forward to their upcoming retreat.

She also meets with a quilting group at Jane's Fabric Patch, and now she is making about a quilt a year. She used to hand stitch her quilts, but now she has just pieces the tops and has someone else do the quilting. She makes hats, covered coat hangers, and kitchen towels for buttoning on to things, for sale at the Latimer. She also checks the consignment sales for the Latimer. Rhoda is excited about our new management team at the Latimer. She says she doesn't think about the future too much, she will just keep coming.

Kathy Park | Secretary

Kathy and moved to Manzanita with her husband Dick about 25 years ago, after retiring (involuntarily) from OHSU. Kathy was a long-time knitter but was suffering from tendinitis and decided she needed a new creative outlet. Dick told her to find something she could do for the rest of her life. She took a weaving course at the Multnomah Arts Center and that was it. She found a loom through the center, and also heard about the Latimer, so when they settled in in Manzanita she came to the Latimer and started working with Shirley Metzgar. Eventually she got a new loom and donated the original one to the Latimer, where it is in use in the weaving room. Kathy joined the board about ten years ago and currently serves as secretary.

Kathy's extended family includes two children, several grandchildren, and now a great grandson. Many of them live in Redmond Oregon, although a few live out of state. None of them seem to have an interest in fiber arts. Kathy and Dick enjoy traveling and keep pretty busy with their church. Kathy recently joined a knitting and crocheting group at her church, and she is learning a new skill: crocheting. She enjoys doing this in the evenings while watching television and has made a baby blanket and has a second one in hand.

Like many of us, Kathy hopes the Latimer can attract younger people to get involved with fiber arts. She noted that the new list of classes can help with this, and she thought reviving the Saturday working group, where people can come and work on anything they want, might be a good way to get people busy with work and families to come in. You can usually find Kathy in the weaving room on Fridays.

Linda Machuta

Linda has been quilting since she was in her 40s; she also crocheted and knitted. She moved to the Tillamook area from southern California in November of 2007 (just in time for winter). Her daughter's mother-in-law, Lorie, introduced her to Latimer. In 2008 Carol Weber convinced her to become the manager of Latimer, and she felt she should learn the other fiber arts too, so she learned weaving and rug hooking, and honed her knitting skills.

Linda was the director for "a long time, five or six years". During that time she was involved in getting the Quilt Trail started. Now she does mostly weaving (dishtowels) and quilting. She works in the repository with Carol Weber and LaRayne Woodward, getting the collection organized and entered in the computer, and making sure that new acquisitions are properly cared for.

Linda has three children who live in Michigan, Idaho, and here in Tillamook. Currently Linda works for Tillamook County at the county campground in Bar View.

Marilyn Roossinck

Marilyn learned to embroider, knit, and crochet as a child, from her mother. Apart from making monogrammed handkerchiefs for her numerous siblings for their birthdays (there were nine of them in all), the embroidery never really took, but crocheting, and later knitting became a constant hobby. She dabbled in tiedying with Ritt dyes but then discovered the world of fiberreactive dyes and began dyeing the lab coats that her students and postdocs wore in the lab. She found the yarn colors that were readily available in yarn stores boring and began to dye her own yarns too. Much of what she uses for knitting and weaving today are from items that she has dyed.

As a postdoc at Cornell University, she shared a lab bench with an avid knitter from New Zealand. They commiserated about the increasing costs of yarn, and the Kiwi mentioned that in New Zealand she owned two sheep and spun her own yarn. Intrigued, Marilyn bought an Ashford Spinning Wheel kit and began making her own wool yarn. She continues to spin today but has been involved lately in weaving. Marilyn always had an interest in weaving, but as a professor at Penn State University she didn't have the time for it. She bought an old defunct four harness table loom at a garage sale, and it stayed in storage until she retired and moved to Oceanside at the end of 2019. She brought the loom to Latimer, and Stephany Anderson explained what was needed to be functional: new heddles and new reeds. Another member of the Fiber Artisans Guild gave her a copy of Deborah Chandler's book "Learning to Weave". Shortly after she purchased the parts she needed for the loom, the COVID pandemic hit, and Latimer was closed. She taught herself how to weave from the excellent book and used some old scrap yarn to experiment with various patterns. Once Latimer re-opened, she was able to learn to weave a rug on a floor loom, under the guidance of the expert weavers at Latimer. She still considers herself a beginning weaver, but in addition to rugs, she has woven several rose path blankets. Lately she has been using hand dyed upcycled t-shirts to weave colorful placemats and bathmats. She is always looking for more old t-shirts.

Arlene Sachitano

Arlene grew up in a military family; she was born in California, moved to the east coast, and ended up in Oregon when her father left the military when she was about 10. They moved around to various parts of Oregon until she left home. She had a career in high tech, getting in at the very start of this industry. She ended up in management the tech industry, taking classes at the community college to shore up her work. When the company she was working for downsized she started working for a Japanese company.

She took a break from working to help her youngest son get started in a Spanish Immersion program and then was hired to help set up a temp work program to service the burgeoning electronics industry in Portland. When her youngest son went off to college she started to write. While taking a writing class she helped write a mystery serial for a magazine. She joined "Sisters in Crime", first writing a book in the Cozy Mystery series that was set in the high-tech industry. She had also started quilting, working on story quilts with a group, and she wrote a story for one of the story quilts, called "Seams like Murder". This was followed by a four-part series called "Seams like Halloween" to accompany a set of Halloween quilts. She contacted her publisher in Cozy Mysteries and suggested switching from the tech industry as a theme, to quilts. Thus began her Quilt Mystery series, and she published thirteen books in this series. She has a new publisher now and has finished one new book with them.

Arlene began fiber arts as a child knitting and later sewing. She made many of her children's clothes. She began quilting a number of years ago and learned applique. She makes a quilt for each book she writes. She continued knitting and began teaching knitting when she and her husband bought a house in Tillamook. She met Carol Weber at Cordelia's, a now defunct gift shop in Tillamook, and began to teach knitting classes there. Carol moved to direct Latimer, and Arlene moved too. For the past 20 years she has been running the knitting group that meets on Thursdays.

Arlene lives in Portland and Tillamook with her husband. They have three children, a son who lives in New York, a daughter in Portland, and another daughter in the Ashland area.

La Rayne Woodward

LaRayne was born in Tillamook county in 1941, and has lived in the area all of her life. After she married in 1960 she moved to a farm with her husband, and says she learned the farm way of life: keep busy!

They had two children, adopted two more, and also raised a granddaughter. LaRayne says her son, daughter and granddaughter stay in close touch.

LaRayne began quilting in the 1970s, with everything hand stitched. She says she was afraid that if she didn’t do all her quilting in the traditional method the “quilt police” would come after her. Now she does modern quilting, and focuses on making the quilt tops. “There are a lot of young women who have spent a lot of money on fancy quilting machines”, she says. “I feel it is my responsibility to help them pay for those machines.

LaRayne has been with the Latimer from its beginnings “when it was cold and raw”. She has been on the board for most of the life of the Latimer, and has seen it grow and change over the years to become the amazing center we have now that we all call our second home. “It’s my happy place,” she says. She spends every Wednesday at the Latimer, mostly working in the repository with the historical collection of quilts. She joins Carol taking our collection to various exhibits around the state and occasionally out of state. She finds the history that we have in our collection fascinating.

I asked her if she had any advice or concerns about the future of the Latimer. “We are all too old,” she said, “we need younger people to get involved, and we need to find ways to make that happen.

Tamara Yinging

Tamara is the newest member of the Latimer Board. Her immediate family consists of just one sister, who lives in Washington. Tamara and her husband Gary lived in New Mexico where Tamara worked for the Federal Government, as an information specialist for the BLM, dealing with freedom of information issues, a demanding but interesting job. Twenty-five years ago, she met three weaving "experts" in New Mexico who were setting up an old loom, with a warped beam. They were winding their bobbins with a Hamilton Beach mixer. These women taught her how to weave, and she remains good friends with one of them.

In 2007 Tamara and Gary moved to Hillsboro to be closer to Gary's family, and Tamara was able to move her job to Oregon. She retired in 2018, and while visiting Latimer, Tamara met Stephany Anderson who got her set up on a loom (that needed a little work!). She began weaving at Latimer, and commuted from Hillsboro once or twice a week, usually carpooling with Stephany Anderson and Liz Winsche. Tamara and Gary began to spend summers in Garibaldi staying in their RV., and last year they bought a house in Netarts. The house needs a lot of work, so they have been living in the RV while remodeling. They hope to be in the house in September.

In addition to weaving, Tamara is an avid knitter, spinner, and dyer. She took a course in acid dyeing, and how to mix new colors. She sees Latimer in need of younger members and would like to see more involvement of young people in classes and start to teach classes in the schools.