There's a Dramatic Beef in the Quilting Community, Over a Pair of Scissors

A star quilter named Karen Kay Buckley has filed suit against a sewing company, alleging that they’ve been ripping off her own specially designed quilting scissors. PennLive reported on the lawsuit.

Buckley is apparently a big name in the quilting world—court documents note that her quilts “have received hundreds of awards including fifteen (15) Best of Show. Two of those Best of Show quilts are now owned and displayed in the National Quilt Museum. Photographs of Buckley’s original quilts have been featured on the cover of sixteen (16) national or international magazines.” She’s hot shit, in other words. She is also an instructor who has a line of quilting gadgets and supplies, including the scissors. The filing alleges:

In 2017, Universal contacted Buckley regarding becoming a distributor of her products. Philip Samuels, Universal’s CEO, stated that Buckley’s PERFECT SCISSORS were becoming the best-known scissors in the market and that Universal desired to become a distributor. Samuels agreed that Universal would only distribute Buckley’s products through its more than a dozen sales representatives to independent sewing and quilting stores in the United States. Samuels agreed that Universal would not sell to mass retailers including Walmart, Kmart and JoAnne Fabrics, and it did not and would not sell to anyone selling products on Amazon.com.

Buckley eventually determined that Universal was selling outside those agreed-upon channels, the filing continues, and she pulled the plug. Which brings us to the present. In 2019 “Buckley learned that Universal was manufacturing, promoting, marketing, advertising, selling, and distributing medium and small size scissors” called “Wonderful Scissors” that looked suspiciously like her own—as did their packaging. The suit includes this image of two pairs of scissors, one by Buckley and one by Universal.

Granted, scissors are scissors, and I am no intellectual property lawyer, but I literally cannot tell these apart.

PennLive reported that, “Buckley is asking Senior Judge Sylvia H. Rambo to award her financial damages equaling three times the amount of any profit Universal made from selling its contested scissors, plus other unspecified monetary compensation,” as well as the destruction of the alleged infringing scissors. Don’t cross a quilt lady.