Quilts Matter

On more than one occasion, as I work on either a reproduction quilt (see the Gallery pages on this blog) or a quilt in the spirit of an antique, I think about the impact on life that quilts have. It's amusing to me that my two major leisure activities include so much time for contemplation, since swimming, especially the long distances I favor, allows the mind to wander or focus as the consciousness dictates.

When I made my version of the Bird of Paradise quilt, I considered the anonymous woman who made that original masterwork. My own view of the quilt changed as I drew the designs for each square, trying to be as faithful as I could to what I could see in the miniscule photo I was using. I saw things in that quilt top that I never saw mentioned in the didactic information in the quilt books. This woman was a naturalist, cutting flowers and leaves to mimic the real flowers and leaves around her. The elephant was a little clunky but trying to stuff an elephant in a 14 inch square block isn't easy. It's possible to differentiate the rose leaves from the chestnut leaves on the quilt and each bird with eggs has eggs of the correct color. The layout is similar to the European wall decorations that I most recently saw at Fontainebleau with an inner design surrounded by a vertically oriented leafy design spread over several blocks. Then she added the mostly horizontally oriented band with the accurate depictions of racehorses. The elephant trainer has a heart embroidered on his fancy uniform. The photos that nearly always accompany any text about the quilt show newspaper patterns but the patterns are not found in the quilt--the woman is quite different in the fabric version and of course the man doesn't show at all. That doesn't mean that she didn't cut these newspaper patterns but that she altered her ideas as she worked.

But this unknown applique artist made something that is memorable and treasured, even though she never finished it. Her needlework skills are admirable as are her design skills and her awareness of her world. Quilting has been around for several thousand years. Right now more money in the US is spent on quilting and quilting materials than on golf and fishing combined so quilting drives economic growth as well. The Industrial Revolution would have been vastly different if the production of fabric had not been a focus of technology. Without the waste product of chlorine gas that the process of making stable green dye provided, the first world war would have taken a different course.

So quilts and their makers have always had an impact on their immediate surroundings and families, but they have also had an impact on history. Even though most of the quilt makers of the past remain anonymous, quilts matter.