Almost thirty years ago we were living in Germany and I was blessed to find a group of women who were learning to quilt. The teacher was a lovely American woman who lived around the corner from us. I was a novice at quilting but having come from a long line of quilters and wanting to learn I joined the group. At the first meeting I was astonished to see the beautiful things these women were working on. But the thing I found most astonishing was that they had all gone out and BOUGHT coordinating fabrics from which they were making their quilts. A large part of the group discussion was concerned with questions like whether this particular green was right to go with these other colors. The reason I found this so amazing was that in my experience quilts were always made from the remnants and scraps left from the sewing a woman had done for her family. These "scrap quilts" were beautiful and useful and to me they spoke of the creativity and resourcefulness of hard-working women who used scraps too precious to waste and, given the limits of their color and pattern selection, were able to create something beautiful and useful. It somehow seemed like cheating to me that you would just be able to go out and pick all your own colors - where was the challenge in that? I wasn't sure I liked the idea but I got used to it.
Fast forward thirty years. Yes, I've been going out and buying fabrics for quilts. But since we buy most of our clothes ready made these days, who has a big box of cotton scraps lying around? Well, actually I do but probably many women don't. So my thinking has evolved on what constitutes a "legitimate" quilt.
What brought these thoughts to mind was an experience I had today. Becca and I went down to Long Beach to the International Quilt Exposition. As we wandered through the huge hall we oohed and aaahhhed over the antique quilts on display. The further we penetrated into the quilts created in the recent past, we both became strangely silent. After a little while we decided to go check out the vendors. Here there were hordes of women and hundreds , yea verily thousands! of nearly irresistible bolts of quilting cottons, fat quarters, patterns and every sewing and quilting gizmo and gadget known to man. Some booths were so tightly crammed with women one had to wait outside until a little opening appeared and then catapult oneself into the space, hoping eventually to get over to see and touch the things on display. Every so often we'd go back to viewing the quilts, which, oddly, had very few people browsing through them.
After a couple forays we looked at each other and had to confess that we really didn't like what we were seeing. The workmanship and detail on these quilts is beyond belief. The subject matter and message of the quilts was, however, vastly different from that of my old quilts. A quilt that shows the abstract form of a naked woman, or one depicting a giant pink octopus with his arms wrapped around a clock tower, or one with the four foot wide head of a child painted in thread across the quilt, or one with rubber ducks glued to the surface - well, even though the workmanship is amazing and I admit that they are works of modern art I have to say that they didn't appeal to me. The execution may be flawless but I don't like the message.
So once again the concept of "quilt" has been re-defined and there's no stopping progress. I'll go on making my old-fashioned kind of quilts and I guess that's legitimate. Maybe art is most valuable when it's an expression of who we truly are. But my feet hurt too much tonight to think very deeply about that...
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