The first quilt I ever made is called Old Girl.
To be fair, she has only been called that since this morning.
I made her when I was seventeen, out of old jeans because quilting fabric was expensive and jeans were readily available. I pieced the top myself, then took it to my grandmother's house, where my grandmother and aunt helped me hand quilt it in the front room. My grandmother was the primary teacher. She hadn't quilted regularly in years, although she remembered doing it when she was younger. My aunt, apparently aware of exactly how much work remained, joined the operation.
There was nothing elaborate about the quilting. We used thick thread and stitched along the seams. We worked and talked.
I don't remember everything we talked about.
I still have the quilt.
Old Girl goes camping with me now. Some of her seams have started coming apart, and I've whip stitched them back together. She's faded and frayed in places, but still perfectly capable of keeping me warm.
That was the whole point, after all.
Or at least, it was the beginning of the point.
More Than Warm
At its most basic, a quilt is an intensely practical object. Layers of fabric and filling are stitched together to make something warm.
And then humans get involved.
We piece hundreds of tiny shapes together. We coordinate colors. We embroider. We appliqué. We spend hours stitching elaborate designs into layers that were already perfectly capable of functioning as a blanket.
People have been doing this for centuries. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American quilts were made primarily for use, but their makers still designed them to be beautiful. Others were created specifically to demonstrate artistry, commemorate events, celebrate marriages or preserve relationships.¹
In other words, warmth explains why quilts exist.
It does not explain everything people have done to them.
I know this because I've been quilting since I was seventeen, and at some point I became good enough at it that the question stopped being only How do I make this? and became What else can I make this do?
That is when things get weird.
One of my quilts has bright teal, orange, pink and purple fabric. Another has mushrooms. One has black-and-white geometry edged in mustard yellow. I put striped binding on another because apparently even the outermost half inch of a quilt is creative real estate.
I have sewn multiple decorative tags onto a single quilt for the same reason.
And then there is my Halloween quilt.
It has ghosts and eyeballs and stars and tiny Halloween objects. Its label says MADE UNDER A FULL MOON. I quilted spiderwebs across the entire thing in highlighter-yellow thread.
None of this makes it warmer.
That's precisely why I love it.
What We Have to Work With
Looking through historical quilts now, one of the things I notice most is fabric.
Today, the choices available to me are staggering.
If I want mushroom fabric, I can have mushroom fabric. Lion fabric. Ghost fabric. Solids in seemingly every conceivable shade and hue. Thread comes in an absurd range of colors, fibers, weights and finishes. I can decide that ordinary thread simply will not do and that what this situation clearly calls for is something bordering on radioactive yellow.
What an absolute blessing.
Historical quiltmakers worked within very different textile worlds, and those worlds changed dramatically over time. Early American quilts could incorporate homemade or imported cloth. By the nineteenth century, industrial textile production had dramatically expanded the fabrics available to American makers, including brightly printed cottons that became increasingly accessible.²
So the familiar image of the historical quilter forced to cobble together a blanket exclusively from precious scraps isn't quite right. Quilts have been made from reused clothing, certainly, but also from fabric deliberately purchased for the purpose. Some were exercises in economy. Others were displays of considerable material wealth and skill. The history is much more interesting when we allow quiltmakers the same range of motivations we allow artists working in any other medium.²
Sometimes you use what you have.
Sometimes you choose exactly what you want.
My first quilt was old jeans.
Decades later, I have eyeball binding.
Both tell you something about the person who made them.
The Work Around the Work
There is another thing Old Girl remembers.
My grandmother's front room.
Quilting has a long association with community, particularly through the romantic image of the quilting bee: women gathered around a frame, working together while conversation flows around them.
The reality was more varied. Group quilting has taken many forms, and the Library of Congress cautions that our cultural image of the quilting bee can overshadow what communal quilting actually looked like. Some groups quilted through churches to raise money. Some gathered regularly. In one documented twentieth-century group, members didn't often gather at all; the quilt was simply left in a central place and women stopped by to work on it when they could.³
But the association between quilting and community isn't imaginary.
Sometimes the community is literally sewn into the object.
In 1846, nearly one hundred friends and relatives contributed signed blocks to an album quilt for a New Hampshire woman named Merinda Shedd Wright. The people represented on it ranged from small children to people in their eighties. They came from families of farmers, laborers, shoemakers, doctors, clergy, merchants and mill workers. Ninety-six blocks carry their names.⁴
It is difficult to imagine a more literal version of a community leaving something behind.
My first quilt wasn't a quilting bee or an album quilt. It was three people in my grandmother's front room.
But something passed between us nevertheless.
My grandmother had learned how to do this long before I arrived with my pile of denim. She didn't quilt regularly anymore. The knowledge was simply still there.
Then she showed me.
More than two decades later, it's still here.
There is something lovely about spending time together and having something physical to show for that time. Most conversations disappear as soon as we have them. I couldn't tell you everything my grandmother, aunt and I discussed while we stitched Old Girl.
But I can show you the stitches.
A Textile Record
This is where quilts become particularly interesting historical objects.
History is spectacularly good at preserving certain kinds of lives. Important people leave papers. Governments leave records. Wealth leaves buildings and portraits and collections.
Ordinary life can be harder to catch.
Textiles are especially vulnerable. They are worn, washed, stained, repaired, repurposed, handed down and eventually discarded. Even museums historically paid less attention to objects like quilts because they were utilitarian, homemade and often anonymous.⁵
And yet the object itself contains information.
The Smithsonian's National Quilt Collection includes more than five hundred quilts and quilt-related objects, and describes inscribed quilts as a kind of “textile record” of the people connected to them.⁶
One of those records belonged to Hannah Nicholson.
In 1843, members of Hannah's Quaker community gave the nineteen-year-old an album quilt shortly before her marriage. Its blocks contain names, dates and places connected to friends and relatives. Decades passed. Generations passed. Eventually one of Hannah's descendants donated it to the Smithsonian and explained that the family had carefully tended the quilt and regarded it as an heirloom.⁷
We know Hannah's name.
Curiously, we don't know the maker's.
That doesn't surprise me as much as it might have once.
I have a quilt that came from my husband Dylan's grandmother. She didn't know who made it either.
Whoever did make it painstakingly pieced together one-inch squares.
By hand.
I say this as someone who loves quilting: this is an absolutely deranged amount of work.
I would like to know who did it.
I would like to know what she thought about while she worked. Whether she enjoyed it. Whether she also cussed her way through the tedious parts. Whether those fabrics were chosen because she loved them or simply because they were what she had. Whether she knew she was making something that would survive her.
I can't know any of that.
Her name has disappeared from the object.
Her hands haven't.
Every one of those tiny seams proves somebody sat there and did the work.
Dylan's grandmother gave the quilt to me because she knew I would take care of it. I knew enough about quilting to understand what I was looking at.
Sometimes inheritance means receiving something made by someone you love.
Sometimes it means becoming the caretaker of work made by someone whose name has been lost.
The Part Where I Swear at Fabric
There is a danger in writing about handcraft that everything starts sounding terribly serene.
For the sake of the historical record, I would therefore like it known that when I quilt, I listen to The Silmarillion audiobook and cuss constantly.
I adore designing quilts.
Adore it.
Choosing fabrics is my favorite part. I love color. I love finding combinations that shouldn't quite work and making them work anyway. I love making an unusual decision simply for the satisfaction of making an unusual decision. It scratches an itch in my brain.
The rest?
Tedious.
Piecing. Pressing. Quilting. Binding. All the thousands of tiny steps required to turn the thing in my imagination into an actual object.
I hate most of it.
And then I finish.
And the finished quilt is worth the tedious parts by a factor of about a billion, so eventually I do it again.
Or I used to.
I haven't made a quilt in years now. Quilting is something I have to emotionally move toward, and lately I haven't felt the pull.
I'm okay with that.
The evidence of all those years of making is everywhere in my house.
Heirlooms That Still Have a Job
My quilts aren't stored away.
They're folded over the backs of couches. They're on beds. They're tucked into cabinets. My family uses them constantly. I rotate them seasonally so that one doesn't wear out much faster than another.
The fact that I have made enough quilts to rotate them is still wild to me.
My daughters have already started discussing which ones they intend to claim someday.
Apparently I have inadvertently created a textile succession crisis.
But underneath the threats of future sibling warfare is something that means an enormous amount to me:
They want them.
Not quilts.
My quilts.
I put more care into them now because I know these objects have a life beyond me. They are becoming heirlooms before anyone has inherited them.
But I don't want to preserve them so carefully that they stop being quilts.
I want my family underneath them.
I want them on couches and beds. I want them carried around the house. If a seam eventually gives way, it can be repaired.
Old Girl taught me that too.
She is faded now. A few seams have opened over the years. I've whip stitched them closed. The stitches I made at seventeen now sit beside repairs made by an older version of the same person.
Then I take her camping again.
Perhaps that's what I love most about quilts.
They can be art without ceasing to be useful. They can preserve memory without being locked away from life. They can carry the choices of their makers and the wear of the people who use them. They can hold the traces of conversations nobody remembers anymore.
A quilt doesn't remember everything.
Hannah Nicholson's quilt remembers names but not its maker. Dylan's grandmother's quilt remembers the maker's hands but not her name. Old Girl remembers a seventeen-year-old learning beside her grandmother and aunt, even if she cannot tell us what they talked about.
And the quilts I'm making now will remember something about me.
They'll remember that I loved color.
That I eventually got very good at matching points.
That I considered every available inch an opportunity to make another decision.
That, given the option between ordinary thread and highlighter yellow, I was always going to have questions about the ordinary thread.
My daughters may someday remember things when they look at them that I couldn't possibly stitch into fabric.
Until then, the quilts are still here doing what quilts have always done.
Keeping the people I love warm.
Footnotes
1. Amelia Peck, “American Quilts and Coverlets,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/american-quilts-and-coverlets
2. Amelia Peck, “The Materials and Techniques of American Quilts and Coverlets,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
https://www.metmuseum.org/de/essays/the-materials-and-techniques-of-american-quilts-and-coverlets
3. “Blue Ridge Quiltmaking in the Late Twentieth Century,” Quilts and Quiltmaking in America, 1978–1996, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.
https://www.loc.gov/collections/quilts-and-quilt-making-in-america-from-1978-to-1996/articles-and-essays/blue-ridge-quilters/blue-ridge-quiltmaking-in-the-late-twentieth-century/
4. “Album Quilt, 1846, Merinda Shedd Wright,” National Quilt Collection, Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_556484
5. American Quilts & Coverlets in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
https://www.metmuseum.org/met-publications/american-quilts-and-coverlets-in-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art
6. “Introduction,” National Quilt Collection, Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/national-quilt-collection/introduction
7. “Album Quilt, 1843, Hannah Nicholson,” National Quilt Collection, Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_556204
