About

Hi, I am Jan Altomare and here is my short story.

I retired from AT&T after 20+years in my final role as a Senior Manager for Call Center Operations.  That’s right those places you hate to call, since you rarely get to a live person.  After that I took another job as a Director of Project Management for North America working on Call Centers for Ford Motor.  Once that job was no longer fun, I decided to call it a day and retire for the last time.

In 2010, we decided to move from the Detroit area to the West side of Michigan.  I started MJAltomare to blog about our house build in December, 2010 to keep the family and friends up to date on our build and move.  I enjoyed the process of documenting what was occurring.  Once the build was complete and we were moved in, I started to look for things to keep me busy.

I gravitated to quilts.  In Fall of 2015, I made my first quilt and fell in love with the whole process.  So I started to blog about it to keep track for myself of what I was doing and what I had done.

I’ve decided to use the MJAltomare blog for family stuff and start a new blog to keep track of my quilting fun.

Cocoa Quilts was born.  I named it after my constant companion, our Hungarian Vizsla, Cocoa.  I bought her for my husband’s birthday.  They say the Vizsla is like Velcro, sticks to you.  How right they were.  We lost her in 2017, after 14 awesome years.

I hope you enjoy reading this blog as much as I enjoy writing it.  If you do please make sure you say “hi” and introduce yourself.

If you would like to follow along on my journey of buying fabric, cutting fabric and putting it back together you can find me on FacebookInstagram and Pinterest.