Quilters Then and Now: Piecing Women’s Stories

“Blessed are the quilters, for they shall be called piecemakers.” So reads a popular t-shirt among quilters. Quilting has been used as an apt metaphor for life. While some folks demand a whole piece of a new cloth in order to make something, quilters take the scraps given and turn them into something very beautiful. One of the characters in Quilters, a play by Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek, says that much of a woman’s work is the kind that perishes with the using. Part of the beauty of quilts is their fragility, especially older quilts that have wrapped generations in their warm, frayed and faded as they are.

Historically, for colonial and pioneer women, these scraps were left-over fabrics from sewing the family’s close, or recycled bits of worn-out clothing, such as a daughter’s school dress or even the quilter’s wedding dress. Today’s culture often do the same, making quilts from their husband’s ties, t-shirt, or from family photographs, thanks to home computers and printers.

Quilts were often made to mark special occasions, such as births, weddings, or a new home. Girls made quilts to fill their hope chest. Sometimes a quilt was fashioned to wrap a deceased family member for burial. Today’s women add to that list other occasions, such as for a grandchild’s college dorm room, for a friend battling cancer, or to remember a special vacation, raise funds for charity, or bring awareness to a social cause.

From simple geometric shapes, women have designs blocks to reveal their experiences, express their beliefs, or celebrate the beauties of nature: the Dugout, Log Cabin, Butterfly, Four Doves in a Window, Rocky Road to Kansas (or anywhere, for that matter), Double Wedding Ring, Robbing Peter to Pay Paul, Baby’s Blocks, Tree of Life. Women chose traditional designs they learned from previous generations of quilters or created new ones to be passed on to their daughters. Some created “story quilts” recounting Biblical narratives or historical events they witnessed, such as a meteor showers, or family tales. Therefore, quilts often provide women with one of the few creative outlets open to them, providing them with a way to work through emotions or give substance to their longings.  Just as the various, jumble scraps were brought together into an ordered design, making a quilt could provide order to a traumatic time in a woman’s life. And they often provided women with community through quilting bees.

So, each quilt tells a story—through the fabrics chosen, through the occasion and recipient it was made for, through the design and stitching use, through the quilters vision for it and experience making it, as well as through its history after it left the quilter’s hands.

Although today’s quilters have access to a wider variety of fabrics and embellishments, patterns, computer design software, techniques and time-saving machines such as the long arm quilting machine, their quilts also tell the stories of the women (and men!) who created them. And since 1971 when, for the first time, quilts were exhibited in an art museum (the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York), quilting has surged in popularity and prestige. What is known as the art quilt is being taken more and more seriously as the artistic medium in its own right.

We hope you enjoy this exhibit of beauty quilts from the past and present, and the stories behind them.