SPANISH FORT, Ala. — Say quilting, and you probably think of men and women sitting in a circle, painstakingly stitching bits of fabric together. Or someone doing the work by themselves with needle and thread.

Maybe a sewing machine or two is involved, especially to bind the edges of the quilt together. But, you don’t expect a computer. And you don’t expect a $30,000 computer/long-armed sewing machine that can stitch a variety of patterns.

That is what Barbara McDonald of Spanish Fort uses to create a variety of colorful, practical quilts. She thinks it’s part of the future of quilting, a craft that some say may have roots in ancient Egypt.

“I’ve been quilting for more than 30 years,” said McDonald. She first learned to sew from her grandmother, but she says she was “bad at that.” She taught herself quilting by reading and taking some lessons.

The Mobile native attended the University of Southern Mississippi, and launched a career teaching music. Her husband, Charles, teaches seventh-grade science at Central Baldwin Middle School. The couple has two children.

McDonald taught band and elementary music to youngsters in the Mobile Public Schools. She is now retired from teaching.

“How can you not have fun going to work,” asked McDonald, “when you are going to sing songs with kids?”

The sewing bug kept biting, and McDonald found out that she is a good quilter. She likes the exactitude of quilting. Like a waltz, there is a rhythm to the work. However, she kept looking for new ways to get her quilts done.

She likes “top stitch,” or the act of putting the design of stitches in the top of the quilt.

Her long-arm machine is a regular sewing machine with an arm, or middle part, about six feet long. McDonald inputs the pattern for the top stitching into the computer. She says just about any pattern can be used or designed by the operator.

“Some of the newer machines hold multiple spools of thread and bobbin,” said McDonald.

She has customers that stitch their quilt tops together themselves, and then bring them to McDonald to stitch the “batting” (the fluffy stuff between layers of a quilt) and the back, or the plain-colored reverse side of the quilt.

This is probably one of the most time-consuming parts of making a quilt, and although McDonald’s machine can accommodate quilts up to 12 feet wide, she prefers to work on smaller items.

While some traditional quilters aren’t sure of what to think of McDonald’s use of a machine, she says it’s just another step in the evolution of quilting. She went to Missouri to learn how to use the device, and has taken classes from the manufacturer.

“A lot of ‘shortcuts’ have been invented that have redone quilting,” said McDonald. She uses as an example the rotary cutter, a device that looks like a pizza slicer, but is much sharper and was developed to cut multiple layers of cloth at once. This is something Colonial quilters didn’t have, but it has made creating designs much easier for the modern quilter, McDonald pointed out.

But while the technology is great, and melding it to an old craft is exciting, McDonald thinks the best part of quilting is being able to preserve memories and create heirlooms that are passed down through generations.

“I’ve done wedding gifts and baby gifts,” McDonald said. “The new trend is the T-shirt quilt, where you take a T-shirt from various events and make them into quilts.”