Marcia Hohn has been running The Quilter's Cache since 1997. Let that sink in for a second. That's over 25 years of one person, from Pittsfield, Maine, building and maintaining a free quilting pattern website by hand. And it is enormous.
The centerpiece of the site is Quilt Blocks Galore, which Marcia calls "Home of a Gazillion traditional and LOTS of my original block designs." That's not much of an exaggeration. There are 60 pages of block patterns, each page showing 24 blocks with pictures you can click through to get full instructions. Sixty pages. I started clicking from the most recent and just kept going. Crown and Star, Stepping Stones, Union Square Variation, Blue Chains, Dolly Madison's Star, Crow's Beaks. They just keep coming. Every pattern includes supply lists, cutting instructions, and step-by-step assembly directions, all written in Marcia's own voice.
And what a voice it is. The whole site reads like getting a letter from a very knowledgeable friend. The homepage greets you with "Use it Up, Pass It On, Wear it Out! What is so comforting as that quilt made of your Grampy's ties?" The FAQ page answers "What's a SCANT 1/4 inch?" with genuine care for beginners. Her newsletter, called "Letters from Mamabear," is exactly what it sounds like. The most recent one, from November 2023, talks about her barn roof needing repair, a garlic cheese bread recipe she tried, canning split pea soup, a new Lyme disease infection she caught early, and a quilt called God's Eye that's been hanging half-finished on her design wall for six years. "I even love it!" she writes. "Just can't seem to get up there and SEW!"
The teaching section alone is worth the visit. There are six structured lessons that walk you from absolute zero through the whole process. Lesson One covers the supplies you need (she's an Olfa and Gingher loyalist). Lesson Two is a thorough walkthrough of calculating yardage for a full quilt, with a worked example using a 12-inch Starflower block for a full-size bed. She literally walks you through five steps of math, color by color, rounding rule by rounding rule. Lesson Three covers paper piecing. Lesson Four does hand appliqué, including freezer paper methods and needle turn. Lesson Five handles binding, with diagrams for straight grain, cross grain, bias, mitered corners, the works. There's even a color theory lesson.
Then there's the How-To's page, which is a grab bag of practical quilting knowledge: how to make flying geese, how to speed piece nine patches, how to make T-shirt quilts, how to clean your sewing machine, pressing tips, fabric conversion charts. Some link to other sites, but a lot of it is Marcia's own writing, marked with little asterisks.
One page that really caught me off guard was the Missing Quilts page. It's exactly what it sounds like: a bulletin board for stolen or lost quilts. There's a hand-pieced quilt that vanished from a European hobby show. A guild raffle quilt that disappeared from a meeting in Raleigh. An art quilt last seen in San Antonio. A Marine's wedding quilt stolen from a U-Haul in Delaware while the family slept at a motel. Some have been found (marked with "FOUND!! YIPPEE!!"). Others are still out there. It's a surprisingly moving page.
The Inspirations gallery showcases quilts made by readers from around the world, and Marcia clearly gets a kick out of every single one. "I'm crazy about Emily's great Log Cabin Carpenter's Wheel!" and "Feast your eyes on this beauty! Tony's Caned Seat quilt!" You can feel her genuine excitement about other people making things.
The site runs on donations and a handful of small banner ads. The support page is refreshingly honest and low-pressure: "If you think you have spent a few hours browsing patterns and enjoyed your time, how about donating the price of a movie ticket?" She even provides her actual mailing address in Maine for checks.
This is a site built by someone who loves quilting and wanted to share everything she knows, for free, with anyone who shows up. It's been here for over a quarter century, quietly doing its thing. Go click around. Start with the block patterns. You don't even have to be a quilter to appreciate what's here.