Eleanor Patton Hamilton Sienkiewicz

Eleanor (Elly) was born January 6, 1942 in Mineola, New York on Long Island, where her father Donald Ross Hamilton was working as a Physicist on the Manhattan Project at Brookhaven National Laboratory following his doctoral work at Columbia University. Eleanor’s mother Eileen Patton was a lifelong artist and loving mother to Elly, her older sister Erica, and her younger brother David. Elly’s father Donald, the son of a minister from Tyler County, West Virginia, was born in Hartford, Vermont. Elly’s mother Eileen was born in Brixham, England, immigrated to the United States as a child, and would later attend Cooper Union in New York, where she was a celebrated artist and sculptor. Elly inherited her mother’s artistic talents, perceptions, and her selflessness, as well as her father’s deep intellectual curiosity, humility, and observational and philosophical propensities. From both parents, Elly inherited a rare and incredible capacity for love, hard work, sacrifice, pain-tolerance, grace, charity, and forgiveness. 

Elly attended elementary and high school in Princeton New Jersey where her father Donald was a Physics Professor and later, Dean of the Graduate School. They lived on Snowden Lane when Elly was a child. Elly and siblings Erica and David grew up playing in the neighborhoods, woods, and creeks of Princeton in the 1940s and 1950s and enjoyed regular visits to their family’s ancestral homestead in the McKim and Purgatory hollows of Tyler County, West Virginia. It was a simpler time back up McKim hollow, where Elly and her siblings Erica and David developed a love of nature. Elly would carry a deep connection to the hills and hollows and creeks of Tyler County, West Virginia for the rest of her life, where the whippoorwill sang late at night and generations of her ancestors on her father’s side were lain to rest at Fairview Cemetery… a peaceful ridge top that was originally donated to become the community cemetery by Elly’s ancestors. Elly’s mother and father are buried at Fairview, where a dawn redwood was planted upon her father’s death in 1972… a west coast redwood, owing to a special time in Elly’s family history when the family traveled west for her father’s visiting professorship at Stanford. Elly’s father Donald always told Elly and her siblings, “know your roots.” Elly never forgot her West Virginia roots. She never forgot to hold her family dear and to put it above all else.

Elly and her family later moved on to the campus at Princeton and lived in Wyman House where her family moved when Elly’s father Donald became Dean of the Graduate School. Wyman House was a graceful stone home that matched the University’s architectural heritage. Elly told a story of sunning on the porch roof at Wyman house with sister Erica one day as teens, and being startled to a chilly awakening by the water balloons of her beloved little brother David, hiding in the shrubbery below. The three siblings were very close and celebrated holidays together as life grew busy and each sibling grew and raised beautiful families. At Wyman house, Elly also told stories of being neighbors to her father’s Physics Department colleague, Albert Einstein and his family. It was here at Wyman house that Elly’s parents frequently and graciously hosted students and faculty for many a dinner on the field stone patio. Elly saw first hand, her parents’ generosity, kindness, and leadership in the creation of community at Princeton.

Wyman House would be the subject of Elly’s first quilt, which marked the start of Elly’s magical career as quilter, artist, writer, art historian, and teacher. Tragically, the majority of Elly’s quilts and life work were stolen by burglars from both Elly’s DE and MT homes in 2024-2025 while Elly was in elder-care – an incalculable loss to Elly’s professional and personal legacy.

Elly left Princeton to attend Wellesley College in 1960, where she would earn a degree in history in 1964. Elly stayed forever close with her “bosom buddies” Mary Jane Burbidge from Princeton High School and Maren Heidelauf Robinson from Wellesley for the rest of their lives. Elly knew well that family and friends and love are the only things of meaning in our short lives… that family and love transcend material possessions and the diversions of human ego.

After college, while home in Princeton, and on her way to becoming a history teacher in Lawrence, Township, NJ, Elly met the love of her life, Stanley (who was born “Slavomir” in a refugee camp in Germany while fleeing Stalin under the care of his parents Aleksiej and Claudia when he was a toddler). When Elly met Stanley, Stan was an undergraduate at Princeton in the political science department, who was then working at the cafeteria and spotted Elly from afar. Elly and Stan began dating in Princeton and would fall in love and marry in 1968.

Elly and Stan would have three children over the next decade, moving to Europe, Boston, Pittsburgh, Wellesley, D.C., and elsewhere as they worked to get their careers going, Elly was always incredibly entrepreneurial, and as they struggled as young families do, Elly rented out rooms, ran nursery schools in her home, and as would be the common thread through her life, nurtured her love of art, history and quilting, by teaching herself, and then others, to stitch together life’s loves, and tragedies and mysteries into the fabric of quilts. Quilts, Elly realized, were not just practical tools for survival, but they were art, sometimes high art, and always told a story. Elly’s Great Aunt Orpha back in West Virginia, who stayed on the old Hamilton hill farm in a log farmhouse until she died, was one of Elly’s first mentors in quilting. When Orpha died in 1978, dear relatives Atha Freeland Hamilton and her daughter Wilma Tallman became Elly’s quilting inspirations and mentors. They lived in a beautiful hollow along Purgatory Run, in the valley below Fairview cemetery.

One of Stan’s favorite recollections of these days of raising a family and visiting the ancestral homestead was Cousin Wilma telling Elly and Stan and their young children, while she prepared venison and green beans for dinner, “Now Ellnor that’s a piller, if you make six of ’em you got a quilt, and a quilt’s worth more than a piller…” Elly and Stan remained always mystified by the wisdom and incredible talents and resilience of their West Virginia family.

Elly had enrolled for a time at Harvard Divinity School to be a Unitarian minister, but even her childhood religion of Unitarianism likely held too many conventions for Elly’s expansive view of the world. Elly and Stan, completing their graduate programs and foundational jobs, landed in Washington D.C.. Elly had completed a masters degree in education at the University of Pennsylvania, while Stan picked up masters degrees at Pitt and Johns Hopkins. Elly began teaching at the Sidwell Friends School, while Stan began a 50 plus year career in public service with various government agencies including the Departments of State, Commerce, U.S. AID, and the Pentagon. By the dawn of 1980, Elly and Stan would have three children. Stan would continue his public service career while Elly became an entrepreneur. This arrangement would allow Elly to spend more time caring for their children while working from home. While she rented out rooms in the family home on 30th street, having as many as 3 bedrooms and the basement rented out at once, Elly also ran gardening co-ops, childcare co-ops, and started her quilting supply business with a friend, Betty Martin. Paying homage to Elly’s West Virginia roots, the business was aptly named, Cabin Fever Calicoes.

All the while, Elly’s love of quilting grew. She supported the local elementary school, Lafayette, by volunteering and leading the creation of a student-made class quilt for her kids’ classes, as well as teaching poetry as a volunteer using Shel Silverstein’s wonderfully engaging books with the eager children. Elly was always a teacher. Always a giver. Never a taker.

Leading up to 1983, having been captivated by the historic Baltimore album quilt style, Elly researched and published her first book, Spoken Without a Word—whose title bespeaks Elly’s fascination with the symbolism, meaning, and history of Baltimore album quilts. Elly would follow Spoken Without a Word with more than 30 more books as well as hundreds of lessons, articles, fabric designs, and other innovative creations. Elly is credited with the national and international revival of interest in the Baltimore Album quilt genre.

In these days prior to the internet, Elly gained notoriety and a devoted following around the globe, which is difficult to fathom from the perspective of 2026. Elly developed dozens or perhaps hundreds of lesson plans and her teaching gained demand around the globe. As much as her talents and passion, it was Elly’s kindness, warm smile, humility, and nurturing of a community around quilting that made her a beloved figure. She would later tell her son Alex, “I never could have been a successful artist and writer, were it not for your father steadily toiling through a long civil service career… always supporting my work and our family.” Elly was, at every stage of life, wise beyond her years. She understood that we achieve nothing alone in this life. She loved her family above all else, even in the midst of fame and notoriety and success. Elly lovingly attended her daughter Katya’s field hockey and lacrosse games and son Alex’s wrestling matches, often driving hours at a time over several decades to show up… Elly knew innately that that is what one does for family. One shows up. Elly and Stan were selfless, sometimes to a fault. Always giving.

As Elly’s career and fame rose in the late 1970s, she and Stanley purchased an old shack for $30,000, formerly “Fred’s Boathouse”, on what was then the end of a desolate dirt road outside of Annapolis on Little Round Bay. Stan and Elly would escape their busy work lives with their kids to their rustic shack on the Severn River. Stan, who had learned carpentry as a young immigrant working for his dad every summer, would work on the Severn shack for decades until it left the family, as always with Elly and Stan, to help someone in need. In the 1980s and 1990s, Elly and Stan would raise their kids on weekends on the Chesapeake tributary, the Severn: canoeing, sailing, crabbing for blue crabs, and catching, bluefish, perch, and even eels off of the dock that Stan built and lovingly maintained. The many box turtles and snapping turtles caused Elly to dub their hideaway “Turtle Hill.” Evenings at Turtle Hill were filled with friends and laughter on the terraces and decks that Stan had built above the brackish Chesapeake shore. Elly also loved her home at 5540 30th street in D.C. She loved puttering in the garden, and knew the name of every plant that grew under the verdant Washington hardwood canopy. These were idyllic days and possible only because of the decades long weeks Stan and Elly put in at work.

For many years, Elly wrote, and quilted, and designed, and traveled, and lectured, and taught, and established and managed the Elly Sienkiewicz Applique Academy. Her teaching took her across the U.S. from Paducah to Portland. From Seattle to Jackson Hole, Omaha, Boston, and many other places. Internationally she taught in South Africa, New Zealand, Spain, Japan, Norway, and elsewhere. She worked tirelessly, and pursued her passions, and always put her family first. Unlike some in her category of achievement it is not an exaggeration to say she was near-universally loved. This says a great deal about Elly’s character and integrity. In all her classes as the country was roiled by politics, she would tell her students that quilting was an art that brought people together, while politics divided us so asked them please not to discuss politics during the class.

Over the 6 decades or so that span Elly’s career, Elly was honored hundreds of times, through awards, speaking engagements, medals, and ribbons—many likely still attached to her quilts, wherever they are. Notably, Elly was honored with the International Quilters Festival Silver Star Award and was inducted into the Quilters Hall of Fame. 

Late in her career Elly wrote: 

“I am a happy woman, a lucky woman. Born in 1942, I remain blessed by Wellesley's liberating education, two life-long friends and happy memories. I'm grateful my father dissuaded me from a French major ("A skill, learn it later,") suggesting instead History's tree "whereon to hang what you love -- art, literature, religion broadly studied." I was blessed by loving parents -- the Artist and the Physicist -- as they protected our childhood innocence by waiting 'til asked (1963) to answer, "What your father has (multiple sclerosis from before my birth) is not arthritis. He will write you a letter." Seven years as a high school social studies teacher, feeling middle-child middling, I asked how he, a famous physicist, had come to father two history majors and a sociologist? "Man's greatest question is the nature of his relation to the Universe," he had replied, "While physics probes the nature of man's relation to the Universe, history probes man's relationship to his fellow man." I decided on my career freshman year, when, after supper, wearing my pajamas -- real red 'Doctor Dentons' with the feet, the flapper, & red shawl-wrapped, a dorm-mate, looking up, offered, "Elly, you'll make a perfect grandmother."

Elly is survived by her loving husband Stanley Sienkiewicz, of Bozeman, MT; her daughter Katya Sienkiewicz of Bozeman, Montana; her son Alex Sienkiewicz and his wife Holly of Livingston, MT; and her son Donald of New Hampshire. Elly is survived by eight grandchildren: Severn, Colter, and Rell Sienkiewicz; Scarlett Sienkiewicz; and Ellie, Elias, Davina, and Jana, Sienkiewicz. Elly is also survived by her beloved younger brother David Hamilton and his wife Grace Hamilton, as well as by her beloved Hamilton, Ross, Corbly, Tallman Clan including her many nieces, nephews, and cousins.

Donations in lieu of flowers may be sent to the Donald Ross Hamilton Memorial Lecture Fund, Physics Dept., Jadwin Hall Room 211, Washington Road, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-0708.