"My background is in words, and I start with a poem or a word or phrase," says the Rockville resident whose quilts are on display at the G Street Fabrics store in Rockville through Aug. 26 and whose tallit is on display at Strathmore Hall in the 25th Biennial Creative Crafts Council juried show through July 9.

"I am now working on a quilt based on a few lines from an Emily Dickinson poem, and have done a quilt based on Robert Frost's poetry.

"It's natural to move from words to words from the Torah or prayer book because words are the basis of my art. I get to take those words and these spiritual feelings that are evoked by the words and express them in the medium of fabric.

"I turn them into something tactile that I can wrap around me."

Fricke has been sewing and quilting since she was a child -- learning the arts from her grandmother. "I even got a sewing machine for my college graduation," she says, illustrating her passion for the fabric arts.

Her first Judaic piece was a tallit she made for her eldest son's bar mitzvah ceremony. About three months earlier, she had converted to Judaism.

Although she had been practicing Judaism for some 15 years -- her husband is a Jew from Chile -- Fricke says she had been reluctant to convert, leaving behind her Protestant roots, until she talked with the family's rabbi, Warren Stone of Temple Emanuel in Kensington.

"He told me that converting was like going through a door from one type of life to another," she recalls. "The rabbi said I was an integral part of the community -- was already living on the other side, but hadn't taken the formal measures to go through the door.

"He said that I wasn't leaving my family of origin, but joining my family."

She had previously studied Judaism before getting married and at a conversion class at Temple Emanuel.

That took her a long way from her childhood in Springfield, Ill., where she was born in 1960 into a religious Lutheran home and attended Lutheran elementary school.

Her education credits include a bachelor's degree in English from Illinois Wesleyan University and a master's from the University of Chicago in 1987.

Before moving to the Washington area in 1990, she sandwiched stints as an English teacher in Chicago and Chile around a period as theater editor for Chicago magazine.

She has donated several pieces of her work -- three wall hangings, a funeral pall and Torah mantles -- to Temple Emanuel.

Fricke does commissioned pieces -- she is working on a chuppah for a wedding.

And they're all quilts. "Everything I do is turned into a quilt -- three layers of material put together with thread," she says.

"I have made a quilted mezuzah, chuppot, challah and matzah covers."

Last summer, she had a bat mitzvah ceremony at Temple Emanuel. She made her tallit, adorning it with the names of her four children in Hebrew quilted into the garment.

"After all, I did for them," she says.