Creative Stitches

Creative Stitches has been a Helena-area institution for nearly thirty years. Julie Hanrahan is its third owner. She took it over alongside partner Teresa Tomich on January 1, 2019 — a date she remembers precisely because the paperwork had to be signed by New Year's Eve. Together, Julie and Teresa gave Creative Stitches new life with a move to Main Street in East Helena.

At the time, Julie was a homemaker and a self-described new quilter who had learned the basics from her sister Joanna over video chat while living in White Sulphur Springs. During the pandemic, Buddy and Julie made the move to acquire Teresa's portion of the business.

"It was quite a step from newbie to owner," she says.

The leap made more sense than it sounds. Julie had found her community at Creative Stitches — the shop's long-running open sew days, where quilters bring their projects and work together, were where she reconnected with Helena after moving back to town. When the previous owner needed to sell, Julie had been working a couple days a week in the shop, learning the industry from the inside.

And she had a reason that went deeper than business. The company's legal name is Legacy Quilts LLC, and the story behind it hangs on a memory. Julie has a quilt from her grandmother's house — not one her grandmother made, it turns out, but one given to her by a woman from her church. It doesn't matter. Every time Julie looks at it, she remembers her.

"I wanted to be able to pass that on to my kids and grandkids," she says. "Leave them a legacy in the form of a quilt for them to remember me by."

Buddy Hanrahan took a longer road to the quilt shop. Twenty years in the Air Force — seventeen of them at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, much of it working the flight line at twenty below. He and Julie graduated from Capital High together in 1987. High school sweethearts, they went their separate ways for twenty years, then reconnected and married in 2010.

Even before retiring from the military, Buddy started an IT business. After the Air Force, he worked his way up through state government to CIO of the Department of Livestock, earned an MBA along the way — and then found himself the technical half of a quilt shop. He services and installs machines, handles the marketing and paperwork, and spends a good part of every day on the phone doing what Julie describes as "talking women off the edge of the cliff" — walking customers through thread jams and tension problems on Husqvarna Viking, Brother, and Janome machines that can cost as much as a car.

"I always try and tell them, call when you're walking toward the edge," Buddy says. "Don't get there and get ready to jump and then call."

The division of labor is absolute. "I try to stay out of the craft stuff," Buddy says. "Anything that involves a creative eye goes to Julie."

Their team runs deeper than the two of them. Kyle Shatraw manages the shop and connects with the younger crowd. Dave Anthony handles technical service on the Viking, Brother, and Janome sewing machines. Wendy manages daily sales. A rotating crew of volunteers — the Diannes and Shelley — fills the gaps, including running the entire store twice a year when the Hanrahans haul half the inventory to Choteau for a four-day quilting retreat where Julie's parents cook for everyone.

Last year the phone rang on a workday in April. Local number. Buddy was still splitting time between his state IT job and helping Julie run the quilt shop, so he answered — could be a customer.

"Hi, this is Lisa. I missed a call from this number."

He hadn't called her. But Buddy has a rule: never pass up an opportunity. So instead of hanging up, he asked what she did. She was the regional property manager for Town Pump. They were building a new station in East Helena and hadn't decided what to do with the old one.

"I want to be on your list," Buddy immediately told her.

"Who are you?"

"We're Creative Stitches, right down the road."

"Oh, I love that place. I've been in there with my sister."

That misdialed number — if it was misdialed — is why a former gas station on Highway 12 is now one of the largest quilt shops in southwest Montana. Buddy has his own theory about the call.

"I'm pretty sure God knows how to dial phone numbers."

When Town Pump handed over the keys in January, the building was rough. Dark rooms, mirrored walls, a black-floored bar that Buddy describes as "disco '70s," and years of accumulated grime. The renovation took four months of gutting, rewiring, and rebuilding — and it was a family project in the most literal sense. Julie's dad is an electrician. So is her brother-in-law. Her son is a contractor, her son-in-law a carpenter, Buddy's son a plumber. Having these skilled tradespeople in the family made for an economical remodel.

They finished the classroom ceiling the night before their first big event, with the visiting machine dealer — van still full of equipment — pitching in on the trim.

The result doesn't resemble a gas station. Light, bright, and open, the space holds a full fabric floor, a showroom of high-end sewing, quilting, and embroidery machines, a dedicated service area, and the classroom Julie spent months designing in her head — matching height-adjustable tables, outlets everywhere, TV screens, and a kitchen big enough to host events. Or, as she admits with a laugh, big enough to host her own family's parties, now that the family has outgrown her parents' house.

The move tripled their space. It also solved a problem they didn't know they had.

"We kind of agreed — hey, we're a destination business," Buddy says of their early years tucked away further down East Helena's Main Street. "They'll come and find us. And they did. But when we moved out to the west corner of town, right off of Highway 12, and put the signage up, the number of people who drove in and said, 'I never knew' — it blew my mind."

Quilting's core customers, Julie says plainly, are around 65 — people who grew up sewing with their mothers and grandmothers, and finally have the time and means to pursue it. But the shop is watching something shift. Since Joann Fabrics closed its doors, new faces keep showing up — including ones nobody in the industry expected.

"Some of these young people, even young men, have come in that are making their own clothes and selling them," Julie says. "One guy asked if I had jean material. He makes jeans and sells them for two to three hundred dollars a pop."

Kyle has been building on that momentum, teaching techniques beyond traditional block quilting — appliqué, and a Japanese fabric-and-foam-board art form that turns an X-Acto knife and fabric scraps into pictures. Her classes have drawn a set of young women in their teens and twenties.

The competition isn't only the shop across town — it's the internet. Julie doesn't pretend otherwise. But she's convinced the shop offers something a browser can't.

"Most people who come in are always like, we want to look here first. We want to touch and feel it, because you don't know what you're ordering," she says. "You can't normally return cut fabric. Getting them to appreciate the in-person experience, that they need to touch and feel it to understand the quality — that's the difference."

Buddy adds the other half of the equation: "We service what we sell. It's not the big box store where a teenager on the weekend sells you something and you never learn how to use it. We teach them. We're familiar with our machines. And we keep them running."

He means it geographically, too. As the only Handi Quilter dealer in southwest Montana, Buddy covers everything from Missoula down the Bitterroot to Dillon and the Ruby Valley — delivering, assembling twelve-foot quilting frames, and training customers in their homes.

The Hanrahans' commitment to East Helena runs beyond the shop. Buddy sits on the East Helena Community Review, an economic development group working through how the town should grow as new housing developments push it toward becoming Helena's rapidly growing neighbor. It's a continuation of a vision the couple first chased in White Sulphur Springs, where Buddy was involved with the chamber and a Main Street revival project.

"Part of being in East Helena is fulfilling a little bit of that vision," Julie says. "We want to help revive small-town Montana."

Buddy and Julie are also participating in something bigger: a statewide "shop hop" launching in 2027, connecting some 45 quilt and fabric stores across Montana through a shared magazine, website, and traveling event.

"We're big dreamers, but we're not really five-year dreamers," Julie says. "We're tomorrow dreamers."

The goals exist — a permanent training classroom with machines on site, national educators, maybe someday a second location. They're just not written down anywhere official.

"We sit in the hot tub and talk about them," Julie adds. "That's kind of our executive staff meeting."

Ask what they'd say to someone in the valley who's never walked through the door — someone who thinks quilting is something their grandmother did — and Julie's answer comes from what she hears inside the shop every week.

"A lot of people come in and say, I just want to look at something beautiful. I just want to be inspired," she says. "So come. Come be inspired, and let your creativity be ignited."

The building on the corner of Highway 12 used to fuel cars. Now it fuels something that lasts longer. Legacy was always the point.