I live on another island north of you, and each year my friends and I anxiously look forward to visiting Vashon Island for an annual retreat. The highlight of our stay is being able to shop at Island Quilter.

We were quite saddened to hear that Island Quilter has to move, possibly away from Vashon.

As someone who lives in an even smaller community, I understand small-town politics, but I won’t presume to say that I understand anything about Vashon Island’s .

What we do know is that Island Quilter is a unique shop that draws quite a bit of business to your community. It may not seem plausible to folks who are not in the quilting and sewing community, but Island Quilter has a huge fan club. Over the many years that we have visited Vashon Island, we have come to know the owners, Anya and Paul, and I find them to be generous, vibrant, extremely hard-working people .

As we see it, Vashon Island has a unique opportunity to show the rest of us “island dwellers” what the power of a small, cohesive, community can achieve. You have the opportunity to come together to make some magic happen by helping to locate a suitable place for Island Quilter to call a permanent home and keep the income coming in to your island.

We will have to strongly reconsider making our annual visit to Vashon next year if Island Quilter is gone. We will miss visiting Giraffe, the silk shop, the bookstore, the drugstore, the tea shop, the second hand shop among many other shops, but the draw of Vashon for many of us is Island Quilter.

My friends, Janet Wright, Liz Pillow and Barbara Snider also share these thoughts.

— Marie Z. Johansen
Friday Harbor, Washington