Quilters: tireless artisans creating heirlooms. They can be your mom, your aunty, your tutu, your uncle, or you.

What? Yes, uncles quilt too.

Tradition is highly respected in the world of quilting, but so are innovative designs with new materials and methods. From tiny squares pieced together country-style to machine and even "long­arm" free-design sewing on a machine, every quilt is unique and every quilter has a story.

Through April 6, 150 of those quilt stories are hanging on the walls at the Hawaii Quilt Guild’s annual show at the Honolulu Museum of Art School.

Margaret Teruya is the featured quiltmaker, selected for her unique designs and methods of quiltmaking. Though not a lifelong quilter, she promised herself she would join the quilt guild and master quilting as soon as she retired from teaching.

"Following the books with directions for quilting had way too many rules," she says. "I went for freestyle."

She displays a style that many call "painterly." Teruya describes her work as "playing with fabric, ignoring quilting rules."

Seventeen of her wall quilts are on exhibit. She begins with an idea, plays with fabric pinned to a wall, then cuts and sews using intuition, trial and error, and "a plain Bernina sewing machine."

Guild President Mary Ann Bufalini says fellow quilters anticipate that Teruya’s "Before," a wall-sized quilt, will stun viewers.

Resembling a Hokusai Japanese woodblock print, the wave is the recent tsunami in Japan. Close inspection shows a village frozen in the moment before the tragedy, then a black band with the lines of Richter scale and, finally, the wave crashing down.

Teruya says the sadness of the event was overpowering. "I had to do something with the tragedy, to put it into a visual form, stitched in time."

The out-of-towner entry this year is "My Hawaiian Garden." Appliqued in traditional Hawaiian style, the piece has 6,000 stitches and took quilter David Wotruba 1,100 hours to complete.

Wotruba, former president of the Hawaii Pharmacists Association, didn’t switch from needlepoint and knitting until he moved to Washington state.

"I don’t doubt my stitch count, I count pills for a living," he says.

A member of the Hawaii guild for several years, this is Wotruba’s 10th quilt and his second entry in the annual show. Wotruba hand-carries his quilts to exhibit in Hawaii.

His is the only Hawaiian quilt included in the upcoming international art book "500 Traditional Quilts," by Lark Crafts.

The title of the show, "E Ho‘onanea I Ka Mili Kapa: Come and be Soothed by the Quilting," came from Patricia Lei Murray, a longtime member of the club.

Her entry is what she calls a "rescue quilt." She explains that a family approached her for help completing the quilt: Their grandmother, who had quilted for the whole family, was too old to finish the piece she started for her final grandchild.

Murray said yes and quilted layers together to complete "Morning Glory for Rachel."

Another piece in the show is by Lorraine Tokuyama, 91, who created a Japanese sashiko style with white thread stitching on indigo blue fabric. The quilt includes hand- and machine- embroidered pieces.

Quilters will be on hand at the exhibit to talk about the vast array of styles and methods of quilting.

This isthe 30th anniversary of the Hawaii Quilt Guild, but quilting in Hawaii has existed since the late 1800s.

Hawaiian quilters are world-renowned for the symmetric patterns they design, draw, cut, baste and applique. The top, batting and bottom fabric are joined together in echo quilting — lines of quilt stitching that radiate toward the edges.

The method was created in the early 1800s, when missionaries who arrived in the islands taught patchwork quilting using tiny, leftover scraps of cloth.

They offered bolts of fabric to isle residents, who did not take long to realize that cutting up large pieces to make small pieces to sew back into large pieces was not an economical use of time. Their heritage of kapa making, repeat designs and layering led to the art of Hawaiian quilting.

Today, quilting techniques, textures and designs follow no rules.