As a very small girl growing up in Duluth, Minnesota, Joanne Hillestad and her sister were always making something. Fabric is just one medium she loves to play with. As a teen, clothes were #1. When she married and later became pregnant, she switched to baby blankets, clothes and home decor.

Joanne made fancy bags with a thousand pockets for little cars and a play mat with a road on it to drive them around, tried to solve the Lego storage issues, sleeping bags for stuffed animals, etc.  When her mother-in-law told her about the quilts she was making, she was instantly hooked!

She worked for 22 years as a database analyst in the direct mail industry but always wanted to do something different.  On her birthday in 2013, Joanne woke up knowing that she had to follow her dreams. That was the day 'The Fat Quarter Gypsy' was born. She started out designing quilts, but in April of 2015 she had an idea for a springy thread catcher.  Once the Fat Quarter Pop Up came to life, everything changed and her business took a design turn towards dimensional products.

In the fall of 2018, Swirly Girls Design was added to Joanne's quilty family.

In 2019, she decided to change the name of Fat Quarter Gypsy to something that better represented where her designs have evolved.  Part of the change was a merge of her two pattern lines into the family business Nu Design, Inc. - a wire-forming business.

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In 2020, Joanne settled on the name Sew Organized Design.