The Cross Country Quilters

Five friends work on a "challenge quilt" that is symbolic of the problems they face in their personal lives.

Sarah, struggling to find a job and a sense of place in her new town, finds herself learning how to quilt from a cantankerous old woman who also teaches her about the deep love that can exist between friends.

Sylvia Bergstrom Compson and her fiancâe Andrew embark on a difficult journey to find her mother's missing heirloom quilts, all the while discovering secrets regarding her mother's life and untimely death.

The Elm Street quilters return, and again a round-robin quilt is made collaboratively by a group of friends, each contributing a border of patchwork around a central block.

The fourth book in the popular Elm Creek Quilts series explores a question that has long captured the imagination of quilters and historians alike: Did stationmasters of the Underground Railroad use quilts to signal to fugitive slaves? In her first novel, The Quilter's Apprentice, Jennifer Chiaverini wove quilting lore with tales from the World War II home front. Now, following Round Robin and The Cross-Country Quilters, Chiaverini revisits the legends of Elm Creek Manor, as Sylvia Compson discovers evidence of her ancestors' courageous involvement in the Underground Railroad. Alerted to the possibility that her family had ties to the slaveholding South, Sylvia scours her attic and finds three quilts and a memoir written by Gerda, the spinster sister of clan patriarch Hans Bergstrom. The memoir describes the founding of Elm Creek Manor and how, using quilts as markers, Hans, his wife, Anneke, and Gerda came to beckon fugitive slaves to safety within its walls. When a runaway named Joanna arrives from a South Carolina plantation pregnant with her master's child, the Bergstroms shelter her through a long, dangerous winter -- imagining neither the impact of her presence nor the betrayal that awaits them. The memoir raises new questions for every one it answers, leading Sylvia ever deeper into the tangle of the Bergstrom legacy. Aided by the Elm Creek Quilters, as well as by descendants of others named in Gerda's tale, Sylvia dares to face the demons of her family's past and at the same time reaffirm her own moral center. A spellbinding fugue on the mysteries of heritage, The Runaway Quilt unfolds with all the drama and suspense of a classic in the making.

The first three books in Jennifer Chiaverinias beloved bestselling Elm Creek Quilts seriesaThe Quilteras Apprentice, Round Robin, and The Cross- Country Quiltersaare brought together in one beautiful boxed set perfect for holiday giving. aClassics of their kind.aaThe Dallas Morning News

The impending marriage of Elm Creek's most renowned quilting instructor prompts the stitching of a perfect commemorative bridal quilt, an endeavor that is challenged by closely guarded secrets among the Elm Creek Quilters.