A few years ago a Los Angeles couple stayed too long in Central Oregon, leaving only one day to get back home and to work. Vowing to stop for nothing but gas, food, and restrooms, they left Bend at full speed. The man drove the first shift and the woman fell asleep. Turning into the quaint little town of Sisters, he saw a sign heralding “The World’s Largest Outdoor Quilt Show”

“Thank God she’s asleep,” he muttered. Then he saw the first colorful wave of quilts hanging from the wooden buildings and said “I can’t do it.” He pulled over, shook her awake, handed her a camera, and said “It’s a quilt show; you have half an hour.”

He was a good man and he knew, instinctively, what mattered.

The Sisters’ quilt show – just one of many every year – is a sign of the enormous popularity of quilts and quilting. Even the uninitiated man from Los Angeles saw in a flash that this was some- thing big. If you don’t know what quilting is all about, or if you just want to learn more, go to a quilt show. They are a good place to see lots of quilts in a wide range of styles. You’ll see brilliant displays of American patchwork, rich examples of Amish-style quilts, and gorgeous picture quilts. You’ll rapidly become familiar with well known patterns like double wedding ring, log cabin, stars and crosses, Sunbonnet Sue, Texas star, tumbling blocks, and more. If you are a contra or square dancer or a folk musician, some of the names will be like dances and tunes you know.

Quilt shows occur all over the county, all year long. Some are big and some are small, but they’re all wonderful. In Southern California you can probably find at least one show a month put on by quilting groups, museums, church bazaars, county fairs and art galleries. Watch for them in your newspaper’s calendar. Besides being just plain fun, they’ll give you a feeling for the skill, inventiveness, cultural heritage, color sense, and artistry of the local quilters.

If you can’t wait for a show to see quilts, visit your local quilt shop. Find a quilting guild and see what they’re working on. Go to the library.

Quilting has been around for thousands of years or more, but fabric is fragile. It hasn’t lingered to tell the stories we’ve learned from the more durable tools, pottery, and bones of our ancestors. An “ancient” example of quilting – a Mongolian rug – was found in 1924, well preserved in a tomb. It was a little over 2000 years old, just a baby compared to a million-year old Stone Age axe.

We can speculate, however, that when people began using woven fabrics instead of animal fur, they got pretty cold before they learned to pad their fabrics with fluff. The fluff could have been wool, cotton, cat tail fibers, or dried grass. Whatever it was, it would have inevitably slumped to the hems, leaving the top of a garment thin and cold and the bottom lumpy. Someone figured out that additional “hems” all over the garment would separate and stabilize the insula- tion Thus basic quilting was invented. These quilted fabrics became shoes, petticoats, jackets, blankets, rugs, and even armor for soldiers.

In fact, it was probably soldiers that inadvertently introduced the western world to decorative quilting. Soldiers wore quilted garments as light, protective armor or as padding against the weight of heavy metal armor. They even sandwiched sheets of iron between the layers of weskits to deflect arrows or spears.

When the Crusades to save the holy land began in 11 A.D., the soldiers headed east wearing clothing of wool and linen, the only fabrics that Western Europe produced. When their garments tore, they patched them with any scraps of fabric they could find. These patches would have grown more exciting as the soldiers trudged farther east and closer to the home of Asia’s elegant silks and cottons. The Crusaders incorporated the new fabrics and ornate embroidery stitches into their clothing and brought home a new art form as well as a hunger for the new materials.

By the 17th century, much European clothing was elegant, made of fine cottons and silks embroidered in gold. Quilted bed- coverings were also made of fine fabrics and lavishly embroidered in patterns adapted from Far Eastern ones. The colonists left this abundance and came to America where there was very little fabric, elegant or otherwise. Women trying to keep their families warm were forced to use and re-use all the fabric they had, the pieces growing ever smaller. They redesigned their Old World patterns to accommodate the smaller pieces and, out of scarcity, American patchwork was born.

Americans quilted routinely from colonial days till around the Second World War, then took time out. With central heating, electric blankets, and television, who needed quilts or had time to make them? Mainstream America flowed on, giving little, if any, thought to quilts. For all they knew, quilts were extinct.

But the quilters had started traditions that wouldn’t die just because their quilts were no longer needed for survival. Survival wasn’t their product anyway. They’d known that all along. They tucked their babies into bed at night, finished their chores, brought out their sewing baskets and made ART. They stitched beauty and told stories. They paid homage, saved memories, and said hello and goodbye to babies and friends. They captured the patterns and the colors, the joys and irritations of their days. And they kept their families warm.

What a blessing it was that quilts were necessary for so long. It gave women time to socialize, to relax, to be creative. It gave them time to develop patterns and traditions and to pass these on. Without this endless, essential task, women would have sacrificed the creative pleasures of quilting and turned their attention to more pressing and onerous work.

Somewhere around mid-century, people in the mainstream began to realize what a treasure the old quilts were. Art dealers bought them. Galleries displayed them. Ethnographers, photographers, collectors, and folklorists began interviewing quilters and their families and recording their stories. They didn’t just learn about patterns and fabric; they uncovered family and social history. Just as a child learns from the patches on Granny’s old quilt what his family wore to work and play, so have the historians learned about broader patterns and trends.

Meanwhile, the families that had never stopped quilting kept on. Now that it was regarded as an art form, classes formed, filled quickly by brand-new quilters. Shops began stocking fabrics designed especially for quilting. Over the past half century, drafting tools, modified for quilters, have found their way into fabric stores and sewing machines come in models that make quilting easier. Some genius invented rotary cutters, tools that look like really sharp pizza cutters that cut smooth, straight lines through several layers of fabric. In short, since the re-discovery of quilting as art, it’s become a Big Deal.

It’s not hard to see why. Quilting is a folk art. Like folk music, it emerges from our everyday lives, is transformed by the artist, and returned to the people to see their lives in a new light. We are enriched by what we already have and are.

Someday, somewhere, a quilt will take your heart. Like music, its patterns and colors interweave and harmonize. They set each other off. A tiny, jarring shred of chrome yellow may be the quilter’s equivalent of a sharped musical note. Themes, repeated over and over, beg for variation. Busy quilts and quiet ones do for the eyes what jigs and waltzes do for the ears and feet. Quilts, like songs, tell stories to amuse you and to make you weep. Some mark major historical events and others speak softly of private joys and sorrows.

Quilting, like music, invites sociability. You can quilt alone just as you can fiddle alone but the pleasure grows when it is shared, whether in quilting bees or music jams.

The Los Angeles Museum of Natural History recently had an exhibit “A Communion of the Spirits,” that featured African American quilts and their makers. The quilts ranged from traditional styles through story and picture quilts, much as you’d find at any quilt show, but Roland Freeman, the organizer, did not want to show a common style. He wanted to give a sense of the spirit linking generations of African American families and to show how history and cultural traditions are transmitted by quilts and quilters. He’d learned as a child that the women who sewed and quilted in his grandmother’s kitchen were doing more than just finishing up their day’s work. They were sharing their daily stories of laughs, tears, tragedies, and tedium as well as the tales handed down from their mothers and grandmothers.

The sense of community, heritage, continuity, and sociability drives many a quilter and is captured in several songs about quilting. Seeing Nellie home from “Aunt Dinah’s Quilting Party” was both a community service and a courting ritual. Eric Peltoniemi’s song Tree of Life names many quilt patterns in the chorus and sings in one verse:

We’re only known as someone’s mother,
Someone’s daughter, or someone’s wife,
But with our hands and with our vision,
We make the patterns on the Tree of Life.

John McCutcheon’s charming Water From Another Time weaves together the priming of Grandma’s pump with ancient waters and the history he learns from a tattered quilt:

Now wrapped at night in its patchwork scenes,
I waltz with Grandma in my dreams,
My arms, my heart, my life entwined,
With water from another time.

Pete Sutherland’s Endless Chain uses the same themes. This sociability suggests one way to categorize quilts. If you scan the categories at a show or in a quilting book, you will see quilts called “Amish,” “Hawaiian,” “crazy,” “American patchwork,” “watercolor,” “double wedding ring,” “protest,” “pieced,” “historical,” “friendship,” “art,” “AIDS,” “African American,” and so on. These names describe, variously, the patterns used, the people who made them, and the purposes for which they were made.

It’s easiest to describe quilts in terms of their construction and patterns. A quilt is either pieced or it’s not and a log cabin is a log cabin no matter how wildly different it is from the last one. Styles aren’t so easy except for a few so distinctive that they are inextricably associated with the people who made them, like Amish and Hawaiian. You would have to be Amish to make a true Amish quilt, although anyone could make one in the Amish style. You don’t have to be crazy to make a crazy quilt nor American to make American patchwork, but you do have to be African American to make an African American quilt.

Traditional American patchwork is known and used all over the world but with so many variations that it isn’t always easy to recognize. Its unifying characteristic is the block pattern, the device that allowed Colonial women to make use of small scraps of fabric. Patchwork is “pieced”, that is, small pieces are sewn together to form the top layer of the quilt. It differs from styles that quilt around a pattern that’s been printed or appliquéd onto a one-piece top. You can find appliqués on pieced quilts though, as well as embroidery, buttons, and photo transfers. You will agree, half way through your first quilt show, that quilts aren’t always easy to classify. The striking Hawaiian quilts are typically made with just two contrasting colors. The design is cut from a single piece of fabric folded into eighths or fourths, much as we cut snowflakes out of paper. It’s then appliquéd onto a solid background and quilted, the rows of stitches often paralleling or “echoing” the appliqué. Many of the designs are taken from nature and stylized. Some belong to particular families and others are shared.

The Amish people of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana have long made beautiful traditional American quilts. Collectors prize their vivid colors, bold designs, and intricate patterns of tiny stitches. They are always pieced, never appliquéd, and their designs are always geometric shapes. In the stricter religious orders of Pennsylvania, only straightedged shapes are used but the Midwest Amish may use curved designs, including the popular Drunkard’s Path. Amish women seem to have always had an instinct for combining their richly dyed woolens into pleasing combinations. Collectors prefer quilts made before 1940 when modern fabrics, dyes, and battings came in.

Crazy Quilts were inspired, it seems, by Japanese exhibits at the Philadelphia centennial world’s fair. The Japanese displayed fabrics and graphics that used the patterns made by ceramic glazes that had “crazed”. Quiltmakers were enchanted by these random, somewhat grotesque patterns and incorporated them into their patchwork, embroidering the edges of the odd-shaped pieces with ornate stitches. As the century drew to a close, women began to bring more order to the crazy quilts, combining them with traditional patterns or adding a central, unifying patch to each square.

Skeptics often ask why people buy good fabric, cut it up, and sew it together again. They wonder why people use up their time and eyesight making more bed coverings than they need. They quilt because of family tradition.

They quilt because they are in love with something. It may be the colors, it may be new variations seen in an old pattern, or it may be just the process of cutting, sewing, and quilting. It may be the fun and comfort of being with other quilters, sharing stories and ideas. It’s also the fun of giving their quilts away, protesting something, and saving a momentous event for posterity.

They give quilts to babies, newlyweds, and graduates to celebrate their rites of passage. They make friendship and memory quilts for any kind of occasion — anniversaries, illness, birthdays, or friends moving away. Such quilts are often made by groups, with each person contributing a square. Whoever organizes the quilt determines the size and general pattern of each square. Local contra dancers have made baby quilts for new potential dancers and friendship quilts for sick friends. These can be wonderfully varied. A wedding quilt made by family members might contain photo transfers of great grand-parents, bits of Aunt Hedwig’s old lace hankies, and an embroidered poem written by Grandpa to Grandma. Similarly, a quilt given to a departing friend might be a collection of squares depicting shared memories or simply the signatures of the friends on otherwise identical traditional squares. Some quilts express national pride or commemorate historical events. The Reagan Library showed a collection of historical quilts a few years ago, mostly very serious ones. One, however, was “The Demise of Sunbonnet Sue,” made by a group of women who’d grown sick and tired of the faceless little girl. The quilt depicted her demise in events taken from the year’s news, thus qualifying it for the historical exhibit. She tumbled about in tornadoes, mudslides, and train wrecks. She met disaster in epidemics, car-jackings, and every other weird happening of the year. She was even cut in two by a rotary cutter run amuck. Very funny, at least to some viewers. Others objected loudly and Unlucky Sue was withdrawn.

Many quilts express political opinions. One variation was the Ribbon Project that Sally Rogers and friends organized to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. They collected little 2’ x 3’ quilts decorated with peace-oriented designs to tie together in a ribbon to encircle the Pentagon. They needed five miles of little quilts and collected enough for twenty!

The AIDS quilt is undoubtedly the best known of any quilt. It’s the ultimate friendship/memory quilt, made up of thousands of highly idiosyncratic squares designed to convey grief and to capture the memories of lost loved ones. Most are non-traditional squares made by non-quilters but they show true imagination and instinctive sense of design and color. The spirit of the quilt surges and you feel love, loss, compassion, understanding, and forgiveness. It’s hard to walk more than fifty feet along it without tears. Cathy Fink’s song I’m Sewing a Name has some of the same spirit:

I’m sewing a name like a gift from the past;
It has tattered edges and a spirit that will last.
I’m sewing this name for the world to see
That the life you lived is now part of me.

Story or picture quilts are another type of quilt. They combine traditional elements with any modern technique or material that helps the quilter tell a story or describe a vision. Many of the banners at the Solstice Festival of the California Traditional Music Society are quilts illustrating songs, stories, dances, and musical instruments.  Another category is quilts that are made for sale. Obviously these can be any type. The Amish make quilts for sale as do many church groups. What would a church bazaar be without a quilt raffle?

One last comment is about the people who do all this quilting. Most people and stories assume that quilters are always women even though a lot of men quilt. In oral histories about quilting, many women speak fondly of precious evenings quilting with their husbands. Many depend on their husbands to cut the patterns and to do the machine quilting. We suspect that men enjoy, first, the precision of the patterns and, second, the machinery involved. Some men specialize in quilting the layers together with special long arm sewing machines. Some do the whole thing, relishing the colors and the design process as much as women do.

In conclusion, the easiest way to start quilting is to walk into a store that specializes in quilting. Ten minutes of browsing through the seductive books and fabrics and you will find yourself signing up for a class in rainbow hearts or log cabin trees.

If you want to be seduced at your own pace, peruse the books on color, design, and technique in the 746.46 section of the library. Or go to a savvy bookstore that knows how vulnerable we are to beauty and self-expression and stocks luscious books to guide us.

Another source of inspiration and guidance are the quilting guilds. There’s probably more than one close to you, wherever you live. To find out their names, try your local quilting store. See if they have a little guidebook called The Quilters Path, ed. Lea Veronica, 9626 Lurline Ave., Unit A, Chatsworth CA 91311. It lists guilds, teachers, classes, tours, upcoming shows, and stores. You can probably call 818-993-4648 and get a copy.

The Internet is an overwhelming source of information about quilting. Narrow your search to something like “quilting shows, November, La Mirada CA” or you will get five thousand responses in seconds.

There is, incidentally, a show of 19th Century Mennonite quilts called “Sunshine and Shadow” going on now at the Craft and Folk Art Museum at 5814 Wilshire Blvd, L.A., 323-937-4230, Wed-Sun 11-5. The Mennonites are the group from which the Amish split off in the late 1600s.

SOME STORES IN THE AREA

• Crazy Ladies and Friends 2451 Santa Monica Blvd, Santa Monica 310-828-3122
• Treadleart 25834 Narbonne, Lomita 310-534-5122
• Once Upon a Quilt 312 Manhattan Beach Blvd, Manhattan Beach. 310-379-1264
• Q is for Quilts 620 So. Glenoaks Blvd, Burbank 818-567-0267
• Wildfiber 1453-e 14th St, Santa Monica 310-458-2748
• Joann’s Fabric Stores
• Luella’s Quilt Basket 1840 Sepulveda, Manhattan Beach 310-545-3436

ASSORTED FRAGMENTS OF SONG/QUILT RELATIONSHIPS

• I’m Sewing a Name© Cathy Fink and sung by Sally Rogers and Claudia Schmidt on While We Live© 1991 Red House Records
• Endless Chain© Pete Sutherland with Malcolm Dalglish and Grey Larsen, on Metamora, 1985, Sugar Hill Records, Inc.
• Water From Another Time© John McCutcheon, 1985 Rounder Records Corp.
• Tree of Life© Eric Peltoniemi, sung by Gordon Bok, Ann Mayo Muir, and Ed Trickett on Fashioned in the Clay© Folk-Legacy Records, Inc.

FolkWorks Volume 2 Number 1

---

Valerie Cooley lived in West Los Angeles when this was originally written. She currently lives in Coos Bay, Oregon. She still loves folk music, dancing, and crafts. She co-chaired the Banner Committee for the CTMS Summer Solstice Festival where she was able to indulge her love of pretty colors, fabrics, and the enthusiasm of the people who put them together.