Most people buying a new home have certain criteria that the house has to have. But not everyone’s need is as unique as Kendra Warner’s was when she was coming home to Lenawee County after retiring from the Air Force: any house she bought had to have a basement large enough for her longarm quilting machine.

Warner, now the owner of Veteran Threads Quilt Co., got interested in quilting when she was stationed on Guam about 10 years ago. Scuba-diving wasn’t for her, so to pass some of her free time she learned to quilt from an American woman, a civilian, who’d started a quilt shop there.

That woman, in fact, was responsible for introducing quilting to that part of the Pacific. Quilting is “a big heritage thing” in Hawaii, Warner said, and in Japan too, but that quilt shop was the first one on Guam.

And Warner quickly discovered she had a new interest. “I had a quilt class [at that shop] and never looked back,” she said.

Warner grew up near Blissfield, graduated from Blissfield High School, and earned a bachelor’s degree in physical therapy from the University of Toledo and, later, three graduate degrees in health care administration, physical therapy, and military operational arts and sciences.

Part of her undergraduate work at UT involved doing a clinical rotation on an Army base, and that experience “really opened my eyes to the military,” she said.  

Warner chose the Air Force after learning from a recruiter that they were short on physical therapists — and didn’t tell her parents she’d signed up until after she had done so.

It was a three-year commitment. She figured she could do anything for three years, and then leave if she wanted to.

She went on to serve for almost 30 years.

Her 14 different assignments took her to bases across the U.S. and around the world, to locales as far-flung as Turkey, South Korea, Germany, and of course Guam. She was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan during the wars there.

Being in combat zones “was not a high point,” she said. “It was difficult and scary. But when you wear the uniform, you go where they send you.”

When she left the military about a year ago with the rank of colonel, she was the commander of the 325th Medical Group at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida.

She decided to retire when she did because when that assignment ended she was close enough to being in for 30 years that she would not have been able to complete another assignment before the 30-year limit hit.

At Tyndall, “I was running a clinic and had 300 people serving under me,” she said, and so retiring when that assignment was over was preferable to her other option: “I had a choice between being buried in an office job in Washington, or retiring.”

As she got ready to enter civilian life, she knew that even with having lived all over the world she wanted to come home to be near her parents — even though she admits the cold Michigan winters are a far cry from, say, the Florida panhandle, where Tyndall is located.

Once she got settled in the house she bought, she decided to start Veteran Threads Quilt Co. with the longarm machine — the one now residing in her basement — that had come her way years earlier when she came home on leave from Guam.

During that leave she paid a visit to The Quilt Patch in Tecumseh, and there learned that the machine was available. It had belonged to a retired teacher who had passed away.

“It just kind of felt like fate,” she said.

Warner’s specialties are T-shirt quilts, memory quilts, and working on people’s unfinished quilt projects. Recent projects included a T-shirt quilt she was making for her sister out of shirts her sister acquired while working with a dog rescue, and a military-themed T-shirt quilt for one of her friends who was retiring from the service.

“I’m really proud of this one,” she said of the latter quilt as she showed it off. “It’s probably my favorite one I’ve done.”

She also finishes what other people have started, such as what she did for a customer who handed her a stack of quilt blocks and said, “Can you do something with this?”

“I’ve done eight or 10 [quilts] where maybe three-quarters of the quilt blocks were done but they weren’t attached,” she said.

“And some folks will bring in a quilt top with the batting and the backing and say, ‘quilt it for me.’ ”

One of Warner’s next projects is something very personal to her: she’s planning a quilt that will use pieces of the uniforms she wore during all those years she spent in the service.

To her, being a quilter embodies the motto she put on her business card: “Mission Complete.”

Those words, of course, represent the closure of her time in the military and moving on to the next chapter in her life. But they also represent the quilting process itself.

“Each quilt tells a story,” she said. “So each one that’s done, it’s like, ‘mission complete.’ ”

Warner said that what she loves about quilting is the creativity involved.

“I knew I was going to be a quilter when I retired,” she said. “It’s been awesome. I enjoy it. It’s great to be creative. … When you’re quilting, you’re taking material, or a bag of scraps, and you create something out of it. And it’s something that becomes a memoir.”

Veteran Threads Quilt Co. is on Facebook. Warner can be reached either there or by emailing veteranthreadsquiltco@gmail.com.