In the United States today, there are more than twenty-two million quilters who collectively spend more than one billion dollars on quilting every year. The annual International Quilt Festival attracts more than 50,000 dedicated visitors from around the world. Festival prize money can reach $100,000. Drawn into this material world by a newspaper assignment, Spike Gillespie soon found the personalities who populate serious quiltmaking as compelling as the art itself. Quilty as Charged is not a history or how-to guide; it is a collection of many small stories, including Gillespie's, stitched together in the spirit of quilting, separate scraps made into a cohesive cloth.

Quilting today is a world of traditionalists and visionary artists, collectors and connoisseurs, and it encourages the same intrigue, innovation, and inspiration found in "fine" art. (Many of the quilts themselves hang, deservedly, in fine art museums.) Inevitably, Gillespie begins piecing together a quilt. But while her effort begins as a helpful tool for understanding her subjects, what she ultimately understands is that she, like all inspired quilters, is sewing her own pattern.