by Quilt Alliance | Nov 8, 2013 | On this Day in History Quilts series
On this day in 1900, author Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia. Mitchell was a free spirit fascinated with writing and stories as a child. After leaving Smith College to help her family, she took a job as a journalist for the Atlanta Journal to make ends meet, earning $25 per week. Injuries forced her to quit and it was during this time that she began writing the book that would make her famous, “Gone with the Wind.” She died in 1949 from injuries sustained when she was struck by a taxi in downtown Atlanta. This quilt, titled “Whisper to the Wind,” was made by Cheri Rabourn of Lee’s Summit, Missouri in 2011 for the Quilt Alliance’s “Alliances” contest. From Cheri’s artist statement: “I dedicate this quilt to my Niece – “Shonda full of beauty and grace may the sun shine softly up on your face. You’re a free spirit loving and kind sent to this earth for blessings to find. As a gentle breeze blows through your hair, whisper to the wind all your hopes, dreams and prayers.” The annual Quilt Alliance quilt auction, titled TWENTY this year, begins Monday, November 11. Starting Monday at 9pm Eastern, you’ll be able to view and bid on the Week One quilts on eBay.com by searching for “Quilt Alliance”. As soon as the auction is live we’ll also post links our website, blog and FB page. Thanks in advance for helping to make this important fundraiser a success! View this quilt on The Quilt Index to find out! Read more about its history, design and construction. Be sure to use the zoom tool for a detailed view or click the “See full record” link to see a larger image and all the data entered about that quilt. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mitchell Posted by Amy E. Milne Executive Director, Quilt Alliance…
by Quilt Alliance | Nov 3, 2013 | QSOS Spotlight, Uncategorized
We’ve just posted several new interviews with quilters from Northfield, Minnesota and nearby towns from interviewer Heidi Rubenstein. Their interviews are a wonderful reminder of how different each quilters’ voice can be. Though all of these women live in the same area, they each have a different perspective about the kinds of quilts they love to make and explore. Jean Vick told Heidi Rubenstein about her favorite quilts: “I would say they probably have some striking colors. Color is important to me even though I struggle with it. I don’t like overly designed quilts. I still like to think of them as blankets.” Sandra Dockstader talked in her interviewabout whether quilts were ‘art’ or ‘craft’: “[Quilts are] art. Definitely. Craft to me is a Nine Patch, machine quilted, thrown on a bed. That’s a craft. For me, I do wall quilts. I don’t do bed quilts. I do pictorials. I do art. I try to push the envelope to make it realistic. I consider it art. I’m not so thrilled about the painted quilts. I don’t think that’s really quilting. That’s textile art. There’s a fine line where we are pushing theboundaries and it’s not the fabric that’s making the quilt, it’s the paint. I’m not sure that’s the way to go. That’s the next fight. There was that whole thing between machine and hand. It just changes every year. It’ll go back to the traditional or it will go beyond. We’ll have to wait and see.” Rosie Werner said she was looking backwards in time for inspiration lately: “I don’t get thrilled by contemporary quilts. I love to look at them, but I see trends in quilting today that I don’t want to follow… I don’t think I learn a lot from them. I like to look at them and they are beautiful. They are art pieces. But I find that my inspiration oftentimes comes from old quilts and from the designers I’ve been studying. Lately I’ve found that I enjoy taking an unfinished old quilt and finishing it or making it in the style of. I think I’ve retro-moved to the 1900s…” You can also read more stories about quilts and their makers at the Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories page on the Quilt Alliance’s site. Posted by Emma Parker Project Manager, Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories…
by Quilt Alliance | Oct 29, 2013 | International Quilt Festival, Quilt Story Search
If you’re headed to Houston for the International Quilt Festival this week, come see us in the Quilt Alliance booth (in the nonprofit area at the far end of the Exhibit Hall). See our 2013 auction quilts: 36 of the TWENTY contest quilts including the Grand Prize and 1st, 2nd and 3rd place-winning quilts. You can view all of the TWENTY quilts on our website and bid on them on eBay.com beginning November 11. Quilters Play Manhattan, pictured at left, the quilt created by guests at our 2012 Quilters Take Manhattan After Dark Party and Victoria Findlay Wolfe, will also be in our booth. This quilt will be auctioned on eBay during week 4 (Dec. 2-9) of our annual quilt auction. Join or renew your membership: While supplies last at Festival only, Quilters Take Manhattan Goody Totes free with all $50 memberships (or $15 separately). All Quilt Alliance members, including those who sign up or renew at Festival will be eligible for our exciting End-of-Year membership drawings for prizes donated by Quilt Alliance business members like Aurifil, Fairfield, Quilting Treasures, stkr.it and Olfa. Join or renew your membership online anytime on our website. We’re also launching a fun new way to get to know the Quilt Alliance and our partners. Quilt Story Search is a quarterly online quiz created to introduce you to projects like Quilters’ S.O.S. – Save Our Stories and The Quilt Index. And top scorers will be entered to win a prize by a featured sponsor. The Fall Quilt Story Search is sponsored by Click here to play the Fall Quilt Story Search through November 30! We’ll draw from the highest scoring players to win these Aurifil…
by Quilt Alliance | Oct 28, 2013 | QSOS Spotlight, Uncategorized
Today’s Q.S.O.S. Spotlight features Denyse Schmidt, an iconic quiltmaker, teacher and entrepreneur whose quilts reinterpret traditional patterns with a modern sensibility. Quilt Alliance president Meg Cox interviewed Denyse at the Quilters Take Manhattan event in September of 2012. Denyse shared with the audience at the Fashion Institute of Technology a bit about how she became interested in quilting: “[W]hen I was at Rhode Island School of Design, I started looking at historical quilts more and then after I graduated and had moved to Connecticut and I was… I didn’t have a network of friends there yet and I was working as a graphic designer and it was kind of a very mass-market mind-numbing job [laughter.] I became an expert in Barbie Pink and I was making a quilt for a friend and it was simple nine-patch. I got really interested in the whole, all the stories of quiltmakers and how–whether and how accurate it is or not–those stories of women coming together in a community and the whole barn-raising idea. I was longing for my own community and all my friends were kind of far away and I think I kind of latched onto that idea of quiltmaking, plus, at the time I got really interested in old-timey music, like, Appalachian string-band music and to me it kind of had the same resonance of people coming together, rolling it up, and you didn’t have to be great at it. And I think the quilts I kind of fell in love with, they weren’t about matching corners and being precise. There was a beautiful kind of happenstance and accidental quality in some cases to them. And so making–so I kind of fell in love with all of that and then I was making a quilt as a gift for a friend. I think having a tangible record of the amount of time I spent hand-quilting––you know, “here’s 3 hours” as opposed to my graphic design work, which is in many cases, very ephemeral: it’s printed matter, I’m spending hours kerning space between letters, no one ever notices. It’s on a piece of paper that gets crumpled up and thrown away, versus this very tangible record of time that I had spent and then that it was also a lasting object that was useful and beautiful. So it had this graphic quality and a tactile and textural quality plus, you know, the bits of fabric my mother––I’m youngest of four kids and both my parents had careers but they were very handy makers of things and my mother sewed all her clothes and I grew up in central Massachusetts and we used to go to all the mill stores and stuff, so to me the whole collecting fabric thing was very connected to my mom and being with her. And so to make a quilt that sort of combined all of these things, to me it seemed really magical.” Denyse has been called “the godmother of modern quilting”. She described how she saw her role in the origins of the modern quilting movement: “It’s funny, these days it happens so fast that we’re kind of finding the origins of things,which is kind of odd. I think, while it’s flattering, I try not to take it too seriously because I think, I think I was in a place and a time and I was always presenting my work. It’s great–on one hand I think, I kind of got my message out there. It look a long time but people noticed and that’s really gratifying. And on the other hand, nothing is ever one person. It’s a kind of confluence of events and things that happen. When I started out, I used the word ‘modern’ because I was talking to an audience that didn’t have any other reference point and in some ways, was that the right word? I’m not really sure. I’ve never been very good at absolutes. I kind of recoil from them because to me, nothing is all one thing or another. However it gets defined, I’ll leave that to someone else, to do the defining.” Denyse also shared a story about re-discovering the simple pleasure of hand-quilting a small doll quilt for her book Modern Quilts, Traditional Inspiration: “I don’t have that much free time and it’s like anybody who does a particular thing–like how the carpenter has all the unfinished construction jobs at home. I think the last thing I want to do is get behind a sewing machine when I have free time. One of the last projects that I made start-to-finish was one of the quilts in my book [Modern Quilts, Traditional Inspiration.] and of course making a book is very labor-intensive… In this book–and all the quilts that are on display here are from the book–and it was my chance to pay homage to all those historical quilts that inspired me in the first place. But one of the quilts in a book is a little doll quilt and I hand-pieced it and hand-quilted it. I got to watch movies while I did it and I enjoyed every second of it. It was really nice. And I knit, occasionally. But lately I’m just trying to do less. I’m trying to do less. It’s really easy, in today’s world, everybody’s on devices and communicating all the time. I’m finding it exhausting these days. So I’m just trying to learn how to get back to something that feels simpler.” You can read the rest of Denyse’s interview with Meg Cox here. Some of Denyse’s quilts are on display at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky through January of 2013. You can also read more stories about quilts about quilts and their makers at the Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories page on the Quilt Alliance’s site. Posted by Emma Parker Project Manager, Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories…
by Quilt Alliance | Oct 25, 2013 | On this Day in History Quilts series
On this day in 1771, career midwife Catherine Kaidyee Blaikley died in Williamsburg, Virginia. Blaikley was widowed early in her marriage and to maintain her inheritance she took up leasing rooms and midwifery. At the time of her death the Virginia Gazette praised Blaikley for delivering more than three thousand children.” Edna Cable Stanton of Tennessee hand pieced and appliqued this Shooting Star quilt around 1885. The Quilt Index record states: “Edna Stanton was a midwife and farmer, widowed when her husband died in the Civil War. Anna Stout did the quilting in 1953. She died in 1984 at the age of 96.” A family member documented the quilt during the Quilts of Tennessee project. View this quilt on The Quilt Index to find out! Read more about its history, design and construction. Be sure to use the zoom tool for a detailed view or click the “See full record” link to see a larger image and all the data entered about that quilt. Source: http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Blaikley_Catherine_Kaidyee_ca_1695-ca_1771#start_entry Posted by Amy E. Milne Executive Director, Quilt Alliance…
