Brenda Ratliff used to sell mortgages for Quicken, but after her son, David, was born five years ago, “I was bored,” she says. She had become more of a stay-at-home mom than she intended, because eight-week-old David needed open-heart surgery. (He’s fine now.) After the crisis was over, “he took a lot of naps.” She had a sewing machine, though she hadn’t ever used it much, and “I saw a quilt on Facebook that a friend made. A lot of traditional quilts are complicated, and this looked ‘makeable’ and uncomplicated. But it wasn’t ‘uncomplicated-ugly.'” Ratliff doesn’t physically use air quotes, but they’re implied in her diction.
She soon became a skilled quilter and began importing fabrics she liked better than the traditional floral calicos and sold them out of her garage. Her life partner Jason Elliott started helping out on evenings and weekends. When Pink Castle Fabrics outgrew the garage, they moved to an industrial park near Costco.
Quilting turned out to be such a rich, underexploited vein in the economy that Elliot has since quit his job at Blue Newt, a local software company, to join Ratliff full time. They now have seven employees and have just moved again, into a gritty warehouse squeezed between Big George’s and Master Tech off W. Stadium Blvd. Only a small pink sign stuck on a forbidding gray concrete block exterior alerts retail customers that it’s open for business thirty hours a week, selling yardage, quilt supplies, patterns, and packs of precut coordinating fabrics.
That “makeable quilt” Ratliff found on Facebook, with its bold, streamlined aesthetics, eventually led her to found the Ann Arbor Modern Quilt Guild, which now has about seventy members at its monthly meetings. It’s still small compared to the Greater Ann Arbor Quilt Guild, which has about 300 active members. The two quilting societies aren’t mutually exclusive, but Ratliff explains that, broadly speaking, traditional quilts are “reproductions of Civil War-era quilts. They use a lot of browns.”
Ratliff imports a lot of Japanese fabric, like that in a colorful children’s print: “It’s cute, but it’s not so ‘baby.'” Another one of her fabrics has sophisticated etchings of trains, planes, and helicopters. She has nothing against flowers, but hers tend more toward Art Deco-ish stylized floral prints.
Her most expensive fabric is Liberty of London cotton lawn at thirty-something a yard, but most are in the $10 range. One of her employees, Hayley Cason, is wearing a shirtwaist dress she made out of an octopus print from the Pink Castle shelves, which gives the slim, bespectacled twenty-year-old an offhand retrograde chic. Cason, busy assembling fabric packs ordered online, says she loves to help retail customers, especially those new to quilting. “People will come in and say, ‘I’ve got a pattern. What do I do? What does this yardage thing mean?'” Cason too is a quilter. Her quilts decorate the walls alongside Ratliff’s.
Ratliff casually mentions that one of her suppliers, RJR Fabrics, invited her to design her own fabric line, which will be coming out this summer: “This is the advance yardage,” she says, flipping through a stack of samples the company sent her, which she’ll use to make mini quilts for an upcoming trade show. Her fabric line, called Pie Making Day, uses the bold, small graphics she favors, in colors like plum and grass green.
Still another side of Pink Castle is Camp Stitchalot, Ratliff’s workshops in Pleasant Lake that draw people from all over the world. And because “it’s not practical for people who come from New Zealand or Brazil to bring their own sewing machines,” she’s going to start selling them, just so she’ll have some around for camp.
Pink Castle, 1915 Federal, (877) 808-8695. Mon.-Fri. 2-7 p.m., Sat. & Sun. noon-5 p.m. pinkcastlefabrics.com
