Wanna score some fat quarters?

How about 25 fat quarters, a whole stack cleaned and creased and ready to cut?

Think you can handle it? There’s some local quilt shops and fabric stores that can hook you up.

Ah, not so fast: First you must have the Row by Row Experience, an annual competitive quilting craze that took off in 2011 and has since gone viral (yes, quilting can do that, too).

Here’s how it works.

Each participating store has designed a pattern for a row of quilting blocks based on the year’s theme; the 2015 theme is water (“Row by Row H20”). Visit eight of these stores. At each one, pick up the free pattern, or buy a kit with the fabric already prepared. Make a quilt by stitching together the eight rows in some creative configuration.

Take your finished quilt, bound and labeled, to any participating store — if it’s the first finished quilt to arrive, those fat quarters are yours. (A fat quarter, by the way, is a wide quarter-yard of fabric; 25 fat quarters — 6 and 1/4 yards of fabric — can equal $75 worth of fabric and more.)

Row by Row kicked off July 1, and participants can collect row patterns through Sept. 8. They have until Oct. 31 to bring their quilt to a shop that hasn’t seen a winner yet.

“Last year, I didn’t know what it was, and when I realized what it was, I signed up right away,” said Eda Lindstrom, owner of Custom Threads in Astoria. For her store’s design, she chose a Columbia River scene with breaching orcas.

A few blocks away, at Lydia Sorenson’s store, Homespun Quilts, the design is a group of fish and jellyfish swimming around corals.

On average, the stores see between five and 10 Row by Row enthusiasts per day. They have sold hundreds of kits. And, at both stores, those prized fat quarters are still sitting there, waiting to be claimed.

“It’s a great marketing scheme,” Sorenson said, smiling.

The queen quilter behind the Row by Row Experience is Janet Lutz, owner of Calico Gals in Syracuse, N.Y.

Lutz, noticing how online sales had hurt traditional quilt shops, founded Row by Row four years ago to boost the sales of brick-and-mortar shops during the summer months. (Quilting, after all, tends to be a “winter sport,” she said.)

Thanks to word of mouth — the “power of the people,” she said — the idea snowballed very quickly, growing from 20 stores entirely in New York to 2,655 stores in all 50 states and several Canadian provinces. Oregon and Washington joined the movement last year and now, respectively, have 81 and 101 stores participating.

“People loved it,” Lutz said, adding she continues to be surprised by how popular Row by Row has become. “People plan their family vacations around Row by Row.”

One couple who recently visited her store had taken a “Row by Row vacation.” They had driven from Kentucky to Maine and were winding their way back, stopping at one quilt shop after another in state after state, Lutz said.

Some retailers compared Row by Row — now a trademarked business — to an old-fashioned shop hop writ large. Lutz prefers a different analogy:

“It’s like a wine tour for quilters, but instead of sampling wines, they’re getting patterns for a quilt,” she said. “The quilt becomes a memory of the trip they’ve taken.”

Travel is only half the story. The other is the sheer joy of collecting, a common characteristic of the consummate quilter.

And not just patterns; as a side venture, many stores involved in Row by Row are selling quilted license plates as collectors’ items. Custom Threads’ plate reads, “RIVER CITY QLTS”; Homespun Quilts, “QUILTER 4 LIFE.”

Julie Walker, the owner of Center Diamond Fabric Store in Cannon Beach, is selling a plate that reads, “SEW BEACHY.” Asked why a quilter would want to add yet another collectible to the Row by Row Experience, Walker laughed. “Because we’re all crazy!”

Many people play, but few can win, so it’s almost better not to experience Row by Row solely in pursuit of fat quarters. Remember: Quilted art is functional art. Quilts can warm your body, festoon your wall and get your Christmas shopping over with.

The beauty of a nationwide theme like water is that, though the quilts are fashioned in different locations, they are connected by their imagery. Row by Row participants collaborating on a quilt can do their work separately, and when they unite their handiwork, “all the pieces fit together,” Lutz said.

Walker’s Haystack Rock pattern — which, coincidentally, she commissioned before his year’s water theme had even been chosen — would pair nicely, for example, with the North Head Lighthouse pattern available at Boardwalk Quilts in Long Beach, Wash. How they would pair with the toilet patterns of two other Washington stores is anybody’s guess.

Quilting “speaks to the artistic part of all of us, but you don’t have to be an artist,” said Teri Keizur, owner of Boardwalk Quilts and the Row by Row coordinator for Washington state.

Though it isn’t likely that the Row by Row Experience will continue to grow in the U.S. — because, of course, there are only so many quilt shops around — “I don’t think it’ll get any smaller,” Keizur said. “People that are quilters get pretty rabid about quilting.”

For more information, visit www.rowbyrowexperience.com and www.rowbyrowexperience.com/oregon.