Fons understands old guard quilters, in the familiar way a small-town kid carries a sense of her hometown with her, no matter how immersed in the city she becomes. "The people who are purists," she says, "they mean well. They don't want things to be lost, they don't want tradition to be forgotten. Because it's sacred, man. So you've got to do it right, 'no no no you can't do it that way.'" The "quilt police" as Fons calls "anybody who tells you you can't do whatever it is you're doing" have definitely caused uproar in the quilting community in the past. In 1988, a quilt made using a sewing machine rather than hand stitching won the grand prize at the International Quilt Association show, the nation's largest, for the first time. Quilters were outraged. "My mother was there," says Fons, "and she told me she saw women sitting on the curb, crying. Because it was cheating, you see." (Note to the hard-line hand quilters: The sewing machine was invented sometime in the 18th century. Doesn't get much more old school than that.) "Any quilter from 1910 would climb over her grandma to get to my sewing machine," says Fons. "But the technology thing goes right to the heart of the issue, because it's the same thing with the political quilts."