Paula Nadelstern
Worlds of Wonder: Paula Nadelstern’s Kaleidoscope Quilts
By Cynthia Van Hazinga
There’s no one like Paula Nadelstern. She’s an artist who makes quilts-and what quilts! They’re instantly recognizable for their imaginative and complex designs in rich, jewel-bright fabrics inspired by the bilateral symmetry of a kaleidoscope. The very word means “beautiful form,” and as she says, “promises surprise and magic, change and chance.”
Always crafty, Paula started making kaleidoscope quilts when she fell in love with the bright, lively fabrics made by Liberty of London. “Until I met quilts, I thought I was creative but not talented,” she says. “To find something you love to do is a gift. To achieve recognition for it is a miracle.”
Making Connections
International recognition has come to this fearless but friendly woman who still makes quilts on the same block in the Bronx where she grew up. For more than 20 years, she sewed on a 40″ kitchen table, true to her artistic vision, and though she says she’s not awfully good at sewing and not at all mathematical, her designs are based on fractals of a 360-degree circle and she’s a master at invisible seams. “That’s what makes me different,” she says, “creating a seamless connect” between pieces.
Paula adores and understands fabric and she’s an innate colorist. Her kaleidoscope designs are usually, not always, bilateral, and based on resonating triangles made of machine-pieced slivers of patterned fabrics. She quilts and appliqués by hand. “I put my whole life, everything I know, into my work,” she says, and though it may take 18 months to make a kaleidoscope quilt, she’s happy to be working on the thirty-fifth in the series.
Taking New York by Storm
In 2009, Paula was honored with the first ever one-person exhibition of a contemporary quilt artist at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. It was 
a show that dazzled the city. For many years, she had refrained from selling her quilts; “I had a dream,” she says, “to one day have an exhibition in New York of the body of my work.” (She’s also been exhibited in Japan and has written five books on her techniques, including her latest, 
“Kaleidoscope Quilts—The Workbook” from C&T Publishing.)
Inevitably, Paula began to design printed fabrics that suited her schemes, all produced by Benartex, Inc., and on sale in quilt shops. “I need an eclectic mix of multi-talented fabrics,” she says, and makes no apologies for the size of her own stash. “I love fabrics that tickle my imagination,” she explains, “designs with hyper-abundant colors and charismatic patterns, textiles that sometimes set the stage and sometimes dance on it. I want it all, I want it now.”
When she’s not quilting, Paula is teaching, and her straightforward directions and sense of humor make the prospect of making one of these exquisite quilts seem possible.
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