Karen Hinton stands at a quilting machine in her Shiny Thimble Quilt Studio in Mt. Vernon.

Just as crafters bind quilts, so can quilts bind communities.

For proof, look no further than Karen Hinton and the Grant County Piecemakers Quilt Guild. For close to a decade, they’ve been dispensing comfort, compassion and honor to local residents — one lovingly crafted quilt at a time.

Hinton, the Piecemakers’ president, was born in Walla Walla, Washington, and grew up in the Northwest Oregon town of Estacada. “I’ve sewed my whole life,” she says. “I started making clothes for my Barbie dolls when I was really young.”

Hinton was introduced to quilting at Estacada High School. “I took back-to-back quilting classes to satisfy my elective requirements,” she recalls. Since then, she says, she’s made hundreds of quilts.

Moving to Grant County in 2005, Hinton worked in John Day for a number of years at Step Forward, which ran facilities for the mentally and physically disabled. Then, “I was laid off, and decided I might as well do something I like to do,” she says. “So I opened a quilt shop in Mt. Vernon.”

In business since 2012, Hinton’s Shiny Thimble Quilt Studio offers everything for the serious quilter: manuals, patterns, sewing tools (known as “notions” in the quilting world) and row after row of brightly colored fabric. The shop also houses two “longarm” sewing machines that ease and enhance the quiltmaking process for Hinton and her customers.

Ninety percent of her sales, says Hinton, are to local customers — “and my New Year’s resolution is to grow the business online.”

For fun, Hinton’s currently crafting a whimsical “stack-and-whack” quilt. “Sometimes you don’t know what it’s going to be until it’s done,” she explains. “You stack fabric randomly, cut and arrange it into an eight-point star, and it comes out a surprise.”

For the past seven years, Hinton has led the Grant County Piecemakers Quilt Guild. Its members — ladies all — volunteer their time, expertise and creative talent to craft quilts for area residents and causes. Recipients include newborns at Blue Mountain Hospital and people suffering illnesses “who,” says Hinton, “need a pick-me-up.”

As well, “we make quilts for people who lose their homes to fire. We made two for a family in Prairie City who lost their home on New Year’s Day.”

The Piecemakers also have donated quilts to the Blue Mountain Healthcare Foundation and the Grant County Fair and Rodeo Court, which have offered the quilts as auction items at their annual fundraising dinners.

And every spring, the Piecemakers sponsor an exhibition at the Grant County Fairgrounds which features quilts made by local crafters. This year’s show, says Hinton, is scheduled for May 6 and 7.

For the past half-decade, the Piecemakers have been an affiliate of the national Quilts of Valor Foundation — whose mission, as per its Website, is to “cover service members and veterans touched by war with comforting and healing Quilts of Valor.”

“We do lots of work with Quilts of Valor because we want to support our local veterans,” explains Hinton. “We’ve made 25 quilts a year for four of the past five years.” The quilts have been awarded to veterans at events at the Elks Lodge in John Day and the Clyde Holliday State Recreation Site near Mt. Vernon.

Some of the veterans’ quilts “are made by individual members, and some are a group effort,” explains Hinton. “The first Quilt of Valor I made was for my father-in-law, Ken Delano Sr.” — a career naval officer who, later, managed the Grant County Soil and Water Conservation District. “He’s the greatest man I’ve ever met.”

For more information about Shiny Thimble Quilt Studio or the Grant County Piecemakers Quilt Guild, call 541-620-0120 or email gcpiecemakers@gmail.com.

NAME: Karen Hinton

RESIDENCE: Mt. Vernon

AGE: 56

OCCUPATION: Owner, Shiny Thimble Quilt Studio; president, Grant County Piecemakers Quilt Guild

NOTABLE: Licensed as an heirloom sewing instructor by the Martha Pullen Co., which operates a nationally accredited instructor certification program