Judy Dales

Judy Dales

Le Rowell interviews Judy Dales, a renowned quilter at a quilt convention. She discusses how she got involved in quilting from a young age and the first quilt she owned. She talks about the challenges she faces in quilting, from doing challenging designs to writing a book about quilting and publishing it. She discusses the personal and emotional aspects of quilting through an anecdote about the quilt she created after the death of her mother. Dales talks about her involvement in the White House Collection of American Crafts, created by the Clinton administration. She discusses various aspects of quilting, including what makes a great quilt, whether quilting is an art or a craft, and the future of quilting.

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Quilts

Quilting

Textiles

Women

Books

Needlework

Families

Crafts & decorating

Textile artists

Decorative arts

Spirituality

Judy Dales

Le Rowell

10/22/1999

Ruth Danner

Houston, Texas

Le Rowell

Le Rowell (LR): Today's date is October 22, 1999. I'm conducting an interview with Judy Dales for the Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories in Houston, Texas. The time is 9:12 am.

LR: Judy, where are you from?

Judy Dales (JD): Oh, trick question. [laughs.]

LR: That's okay.

JD: I grew up in Vermont and I consider myself from Vermont, but Vermonters don't consider me a real Vermonter 'cause I wasn't born there. I spent most of my married life in New Jersey, and I live in Houston, Texas now.

LR: How many years have you been coming to the Quilt Festival?

JD: Oh, probably ten or twelve, not every single year but started long ago.

LR: Tell me about the piece you brought today.

JD: Well, when you said bring a quilt, the primary concern was do I have a quilt left at home because everything I own practically is hanging at this show. I have seven quilts in the show this year, and I have a few quilts in France, and here, there and the other place. But this was the one left at home due to, you know, the time line of the social life of my quilt, and I was pleased that it was this one because this quilt is personally meaningful to me for a number of reasons. Number one, all these little figures that you see on the quilt, [points to figures on her quilt "Figments."] I think of them as spirit figures, and they were a series of drawings that I did over the course of about four months. I do a lot of drawings and some of them turn into quilts and some of them don't. And during this time it seemed that each one of my drawings ended up looking like a little figure. It had a head. It had wings. [laughs.] So these figures ended up being put in my book sort of on the side with a little side bar, and I just love them. I'm just sort of very attached to these little people. So I decided that I would put them all in a quilt. And in the course of making a quilt I wondered why I had made this decision because as you can see they are quite small and very intricate and they're all pieced. And I'm a bit hard headed. And it probably would have been easier to appliqué them, but I don't like to appliqué. So I pieced them and I complained violently the whole time I was doing it. And I think one of the functions of this quilt was to see how far I could take the machine curved piecing, and this is about as far as I want to take it. [laughs.] This kind of represents the pinnacle to me. I would like to go back and do some of these figures again, but I would make them larger so that they're a little easier to handle. So this was a challenge quilt really, and I managed to get through it with a lot of complaining, but you know these personal goals you set for yourself are one of the things, I think, make quilting so rewarding. And this was definitely a personal goal to quilt.

LR: The fabrics. Tell me about the fabrics.

JD: Well, I've always been known for using a lot of different fabrics and a lot of unusual fabrics. I've always used decorator weight fabrics which are a little more difficult to handle and to stitch through. The fabrics range from extremely wild to quite subdued, and I would say there are probably, off the top of my head, maybe three hundred different fabrics in the quilt. There may be some that are repeated, but for the most part each piece has a different fabric in it. So, wide variety of multi colored fabrics.

LR: You mentioned your book. Tell me about the book.

JD: The book came out a year ago. It was published by C & T. I had thought about writing a book for a long, long time, but I just couldn't get around to it because writing a book is a scary thing. Doreen Speckman and I used to talk about it a lot because we were both reluctant authors, and she said a couple of things that I agreed with a hundred percent. Number one, when you write a book you have to finish every sentence. [laughs.] This is quite a challenge [laughs.] and body language does not come into it. We were reluctant to do this. I also felt that, you know, you can say anything and then retract it, but [laugh.] in a book it's hard to retract it. So it's really making a commitment, so I just keep putting it off and putting it off and the day that we moved from New Jersey to Houston. There was nothing left in the house but the telephone and the phone rang and it was Joyce Lytle from C & T and she said, 'Judy, we'd really like you to write a book for us.' And I said, 'Your timing is horrible. Call me in a couple of months.' [laughs.] And so they talked me into it, and it's about curved piecing, it's a very instructional, educational book. I decided first and foremost that I'm a teacher and that's what the focus of the book was. Luckily I have lots of quilts to rely on so I didn't have to make too, too many new quilts. And people tell me that they have thoroughly enjoyed it because you can sit down and read it from cover to cover, as well as being instructional, it's entertaining, so they say. And people have told me that the writing sounds exactly like the way I speak. I don't know how else you would write.

LR: What is your first memory of a quilt? Where did you start?

JD: When I went off to college, I was the youngest of six children. My family runs a hotel in Vermont, and by the time they got around to sending off the sixth child, nobody paid much attention. I packed my own bags. I got myself to college. I arrived at this very upscale college from my very small town in Vermont, and everybody had their room decorated to the tees with, you know, curtains and bedspreads and all I had was this sort of utilitarian blanket. So the second year I came back to college determined that I was going to have something very special on my bed. And I grew up in an extended family so we had attics full of things that were either my grandmother's or my aunt and uncles, you know, it kind of all accumulated. And so I went up to the attic or the closet. I don't remember where I found it. And I found something that I thought was suitable for my bed and I took it to college and I used it for three years and it was in fact a quilt. It was a Log Cabin quilt probably from the 1890's. It smelled musty. It was not very attractive. It was sort of drab and brown with the traditional red squares. It had a beautiful chintz fabric on the back, and it was sort of starting to shred so I just ripped it off and got rid of that part. And nobody in my family knew that I had this quilt. Nobody notice that I took it away and everybody at college thought I was very strange because this was an odd thing to have on your bed. It smelled kind of funny and it, you know, wasn't frou-frouy. And that's the first quilt I ever remember having a relationship with and I still have that quilt today. It's a little, well, it's three years in the dormitory didn't do it any good [laughs.] and I realize now that it's probably a museum quality quilt. And the fact that that's what I chose to take to college at age eighteen, nineteen, I think was pretty significant. I started quilting when I was twenty-five actually, so it didn't take me long to actually get into it. But I have no histories of quilting in my family, and I think my grandmother quilted but only with the Grange organization and we don't have any of her quilts. She taught me all the other forms of needlework. I learned to sew from her. I learned to knit and crochet and do all those kinds of things. But quilting was not part of the family legacy, and I knew nothing about quilting.

LR: How does quilting fit in with your family now? How do you balance your quilting life and your family life and friends?

JD: All my friends are quilters. If they're not quilters, I don't want to hang out with them. [laughs.] They--I call them civilians--I find them very difficult to communicate with because I'm so immersed in quilting. I do force myself to do a couple of non quilting things. I belong to the choir at church, and I walk every day and that's a non quilting activity. [laughs.] My family grew up with quilting because I started quilting when my first child was born. And my husband is a workaholic, so when he would come home from work all he wanted to do was sleep late and take a nap and have a quiet weekend. And I used to think, 'Let's go somewhere; let's do something.' And then I discovered quilting. He thought this was wonderful because I was very content to stay home and sew 'cause I had this all consuming passion. And he thought quilting is really great. He encouraged this. [laughs.] And it fit in quite nicely with having small children because in those days I was doing hand piecing so you could pick up a piece and, you know, do your little thing or when you took them to the pediatrician's office. 'Don't sit on my lap. I'm quilting.' [laughs.] So my boys grew up with it, and they didn't know that their mother was strange. They thought all mothers were like this. And then my husband discovered that there was a down side to all of this and that I was no longer staying at home. Now he's staying at home and I'm traipsing around the world. He's learned how to cook and, he can run the washing machine if he has to. So, the quilting has been a part of our life and it certainly has directed the family life. My boys were very self-sufficient growing up because they had to be because, I mean, I was a good mom and that was my primary focus when they were at home. But I also had another passion that prevented me from being a door mat. I think if a woman doesn't have something she truly cares about; it's very easy to make yourself too accessible. And I always said, 'No, I can't do that now,' or 'Do it yourself, I'm busy.' And I think that's a good thing. I think that women need to have something that they feel passionate about. The other thing I think that's significant and I'm sure you'll find many quilters telling you this. The old stereotype of the husband going off to work, growing, becoming better, more sophisticated, and little wifely sitting at home stagnant, that has certainly not been the case in my marriage because I'm the one that's done the most changing and the most growing. And my husband has had to accommodate himself to that. I think I'm very lucky that I have a husband who could do that or who was willing to do that. I don't think quilting is necessarily good for marriage. [laughs.]

LR: Tell me about, you mentioned you had quilts in France and you have some in this show. Can you tell me about where the quilts are [Judy repeats with Le 'where the quilts are,' and says 'Where they go.'] the competitions, maybe some of the awards [Judy says, 'Okay.'] that you have won.

JD: I have not won big awards like a lot of other quilters, which is why I was so astounded when one of my quilts was chosen to be one of the Hundred Best. The one that's in that exhibit won a second prize at Paducah, and that's the most significant actual award I've ever won. I suppose the most important exhibit I've ever been in, and it was a landmark happening for me, was the Great American Quilt Festival back in 1986. My quilt was chosen as the New Jersey winner, and it's owned by the Newark Museum. They purchased it sight unseen. And I warned them that it would be on tour and I could not guarantee what kind of condition it would be in when it finally got back to them, and they said, 'We don't care, we want it for historical significance.' So that was an important exhibit. And I also have a quilt in the White House Craft Collection, which was put together in 1997 by the Clintons to celebrate the Year of the American Craft. And it's kind of ironic because there were seventy-seven pieces in this exhibit, only three quilts, and, there was a little bit of controversy about the quilts because they were not hung on the wall as they were supposed to be. They were draped over the back of the couch, and I'm afraid I didn't quite have the--well, to use the basic word, the guts, to discuss this with Hillary. [laughs.] But after the fact I did write a letter and said, you know, this was inappropriate treatment for the quilts. But I think the really interesting story to that is that, after the fact everybody sort of realized that it's against White House policy to solicit works of art from living artists. And so the seventy crafts people were sitting there, thinking 'What does that make us; that either we're not artists or we're not alive?' But I think it's kind of significant that the Clinton White House did not know that. After the fact they sort of scrambled around trying to figure out, well, what are we going to do with these seventy things? So the exhibit has actually been touring since that time, which is nice because it's been seen by a lot of people and they'll probably end up in the Clinton's personal library, presidential library. And there was an article in the Wall Street Journal that called this a bait and switch operation, which I [laugh.] think is kind of funny. [laughs.] It's interesting 'cause that quilt in particular was a very personal quilt, it was one that I'd made to help me work my way through my mother's death. People always say, 'How could you send a quilt like that off into the world,' but I think that quilts have their own destiny. That one in particular has a fascinating story and the story continues. And I wish that I knew what's happening to it, 'cause I think it's having wonderful experiences. So, those are two of the highlights of my career. Other than that I just sort of have quilts in exhibits all over. I find I get invited to do a lot of exhibits. The one in France was an invitational actually. Someone had purchased my book and contacted me and asked for permission to teach my method. And I said, 'Of course, you know, that's what the book is for.' And so when they were mounting this exhibit, she thought it would be nice to have some of my quilts and some of her quilts and some of the students' quilts. So, I thought that was a good idea also.

LR: You mentioned the one quilt from New Jersey that had historical significance. Can you tell me about the historical significance?

JD: Yes, those quilts were made for the first Great American Quilt Festival which was a rather spectacular happening in New York, and the contest that year was to celebrate the centennial of the Statue of Liberty, and the theme was patriotism. We didn't realize at the time how much significance this contest was going to have. It was one of those events that you look back on and you realize how important it was. Many of these quilts have gone on to be in museums or to represent that specific quilt maker in an important way. Some people's careers were sort of jump started with those quilts. And the fact that New Jersey and New York have this running controversy about who actually owns the Statue, the winner, which was Monica Calvert's quilt and it's actually in the Hundred Best. She and I had exactly the same theme. We based our quilt on the phrases in "America the Beautiful." So the quilt has the Statue of Liberty, spacious skies, purple mountain's majesty, fruited plains and amber waves of grain. And I was told after the fact by one of the judges that my quilt was in the running for the top prize right up until the last minute. But I suspect the reason they chose Monica's was hers had many fewer pieces than mine, and they had promised to publish the pattern in [laughs.] Good Housekeeping magazine. [laughs.] That top award, first place, was a purchase award so her quilt ended up in New York at the Museum of American Folk Art. And I'm very happy that my quilt ended up in New Jersey because I was living in New Jersey, and it, the Statue of Liberty, they think it belongs to New Jersey so it was kind of wonderful the way it worked out. Newark Museum has a very nice quilt collection. It isn't often on display because it's so difficult to display textiles, but they have over the years purchased a number of quilts. Ulysses Dietz, who was the curator of decorative arts, thought that this one was historically significant. People said at the time, 'How could you sell a quilt like that?' And I said, 'Well, you know, it would look kind of funny on my living room wall,' and I said, 'It's wonderful to have a quilt in a museum collection. It will be here long after I'm gone.' I mean, what better thing can an artist hope for--

LR: What do think makes a great quilt?

JD: Soul, and don't ask me to define that. There is something about some quilts, they just, speak to people. The quilt that went to the White House Craft Collection, I was very interested as to how it ended up being in that collection. I suspect that they had not intended to have quilts... There was a lot of glass and wood and smaller pieces, decorative pieces that would sit on tables. It ended up that the quilts were quite problematic, you know, where to hang them and what to do with them. So I called Michael Monroe, he was the director of the Renwick at the time and he curated the show. I received a letter saying, 'We would like to have your quilt, the one with the stars with the dark background.' Well, pretty vague description which could have applied to about five of my quilts. So I had to call and ask him. I said, 'You know, I'm very curious as to where you saw my quilt and how you found it.' He was also involved that year in a project where they made a tree skirt for one of the Christmas trees, and they wanted a panel from each state. And so, it was a logical choice to go to the Museum of American Folk Art because they had run all these contests where they had state winners. [pause.] I'm assuming that they sent him a large packet of information and one of the things they sent was the catalogue from their latest show. That particular show was run a little differently. There was not an actual contest. What they did was they had artists submit ten slides to show a body of work and from that they chose fifty quilters to make a quilt for the exhibit. There was no specific theme. So I had made "Spirit Flight". And Michael told me that he was flipping through the catalogue and he just, and this is a direct quote, 'I just fell in love with your quilt. It really spoke to me,' which is the highest compliment I've ever had for a quilt. And I was particularly pleased because that quilt was very significant for me as well. This description gets a little lengthy but it's fascinating. After my mother died, I made several quilts that sort of helped me deal with her death. And the first one was "Tears, A Healing Quilt," and then this was the second. I had been to a workshop with a woman named Judith Cornell, who wrote a book called "Drawing the Light from Within". In this workshop we did drawings on black paper with a white pencil. It was very quilt-like because we were to create shapes on the paper and fill each of those shapes with a gray scale that went from white to black using the white pencil and then you put color on top of that. Hence, the double entendre on the title of the class. There were all kinds of people in this class, non-artistic, or working artists. For me it was just the most marvelous experience because I was the recipient of all this good energy instead of being the giver as I usually am, and it was exactly what I needed at the time. We did a lot of visualization and meditation and then sort of warm up exercises, but the main project for the weekend was to make a personal symbol. I had a black piece of paper, and I drew a circle on it. In the circle was this figure that had little stubbly round things and wings, floaty wings, and it was multi colored, and I just loved it. I thought it was the most gorgeous thing I'd ever created, and I brought it home and my best friend and my husband both said to me, 'That's really weird, [laughs.] and I thought, 'I don't think it's weird. I think it's wonderful.' So about nine months later I decided to put it on a quilt, and when I was sewing it, it suddenly dawned on me what it was. The night my mother died, she died at 8 o'clock in the morning, and my sister and I spent all night with her, and we took turns cat napping in one of those reclining chairs.

[announcement over the loudspeaker.]

JD: I was sort of dozing in my chair, and my sister was sitting with my mother, and I woke up and there was this thing floating right in front of my face. I'm the last person to expect this. My sister is quite "new agey" and was waiting for some wondrous happening, and I was thinking, 'Please, God, just let us get through this.' And, it was, I can't describe this thing. It was obviously a spirit of some sort. It was about the size of a basketball, all gold and fluttery, like it had wings and it was just sort of floating in the air. It hovered right above me for a few seconds and then it drifted off into the corner of the room and sort of went poof and went away. I didn't tell anybody about this for a long time because I thought, oh, this is really strange. I thought, 'I've been under a lot of stress,' and I was, you know, sleeping and maybe it was just one of those dreams that continues--It was seven days between her actual death and the memorial service. After the service I came home from Vermont back to New Jersey, and it was the first time practically in my whole life that I've ever been alone in a house because my son, my last son had gone off to college, my husband was on a business trip, and I came home just for the night and then I had to leave for a conference the next day. For the first time, I just kind of threw myself on the bed and sobbed my eyes out, and the figure came back again. I saw it a second time. It makes me tear up even talking about it. And so when I was sewing the figure on the quilt, I suddenly realized that that was what I had created. It had been drawn and then it was being translated into fabric. So that figure is in the upper left-hand corner of the quilt, and the main ground of the quilt is eight pointed stars with irregular size points, light on a dark background, and now on the right side there are tears cascading down the side! The spirit figure represents hope because I'm sure having watched a person actually die that the energy, the spirit, the soul, whatever you want to call it, goes on to something else, I don't know what. I mean it's, well, it's life great mystery. But nature is set up to never waste energy. I mean, flowers die and become compost and grow again. And I'm sure that we do the same thing, and so that represents a positive part of people dying. It's a passage into something. The tears represent the mourning of the people who are left behind. And then on a lighter note, the stars represent heaven because surely heaven will be full of eight pointed stars. [laughs.] So you can imagine how pleased I was when Michael said that he had such a positive response to the quilt because the quilt must carry all those things in it. And that's what makes a quilt truly great, when the artist's heart is in it. You know, there are some wonderful quilts out there that are mechanically perfect, but they don't have that personal touch. I think that I'm, in a way, a very blessed person because I'm very open. I don't mind sharing my feelings, my thoughts, my experiences. I have nothing to hide, and I think my quilts reflect that. I think people look at them and they can see the kind of person I am, and, you know, good or bad, I'm in them, so there's something to respond to. I think that's what makes quilts really, really great. That's what give them that extra something.

LR: Is quilting an art or a craft?

JD: It's both. I was just talking on the bus this morning with one of the prize winners. I judged the Houston show two years ago and I judged the art category. And I belong to the art quilt list, and there's a lot of chat back and forth. One of the sentiments I hear repeated quite often on the art list disturbs me a lot. I've heard a lot of complaints about 'Well, I put my quilt in this show and the judge complained about the binding. They just don't get it. This is an art quilt.' And to me that implies that just because it's an art quilt it doesn't technically have to be good. And I don't believe that for a minute. I mean, I don't mind if a quilt has wavy edges or unfinished edges or, you know, all that weird kind of stuff. That's part of the process, but it has to be intentional. If it's supposed to be flat, it should be flat whether it's an art quilt or not. So I think that the craft supports the art. I think the worst thing that can happen is a person who has something to say who has an artistic way of saying it and then it's not supported by excellent craftsmanship. The two are, as far as I'm concerned, inseparable. But I think it also goes back to what I was talking about with soul. There are some quilts that are in the craft arena that are perfect, but they don't have the personal touch that makes them art. That's a subject that people have discussed endlessly and I think that's what makes art so fascinating; it's very elusive. It's hard to define what makes something art and something else craft. I have a friend, a quilt friend, whose name will remain [laughs.] unmentioned, who I think is a craftsman. She makes beautiful quilts, but I don't think she's an artist. Don't ask me why. [laughs.] You can see it, you can tell it when you see it, you can't describe it or explain it.

LR: What do you think is the future of quilting in America?

JD: Hmm, I've been involved in quilting for almost thirty years, and for twenty-five of those there have been rumors going around that quilting's dying. I don't think that quilting is going to die any time soon. I do think that I see a trend which disturbs me a little bit. [The quilt world is diverging.] There's a certain layer of quilters who are more and more dedicated, who are making more and more wonderful quilts. I think you see the result of that here in Houston and in all the big shows. These are the people who have dedicated their lives to quilting. They've spent a lot of money buying fabric; it's their primary, I mean, even though they may have a day job, this is what they do. And then I see the general population of the quilt world--not moving forward in a positive way. I think that they are wanting more things done for them. They want to buy patterns. They want someone to do the hard work for them, to think. I don't like that trend--I don't like the fact that we're getting two separate factions. I don't like the fact that, people are unwilling to draft their own patterns or learn the nuts and bolts. And I think that's because many quilters don't get a good basic beginners course. They go and learn one specific technique, like "make this quilt today." They don't have a six week course that teaches them how to hand quilt, how to machine quilt, how to put on a binding, how to make a miter, all that basic stuff which we used to learn back in the olden days. You know, if it wasn't made by hand, it wasn't a real quilt. So that concerns me a little bit. I think that the influx of the inexpensive, accessible quilts from China that you can buy at a department store for ninety-nine dollars has had a very detrimental effect on quilting because we got our new quilters mostly because they wanted to quilt. They couldn't afford to buy one, so they thought, "Oh, I'll make one." Now they don't have to make it. They can go down to any department store and buy one, and they're not educated enough to know the difference. So those two issues concern me a great deal. I don't think that quilt making is going to die, and I'm hoping that perhaps the dedicated art quilters are going to find themselves more and more accepted in the greater art world. I think that we are on the brink of that. I think we're working very hard. Michael James just having a teaching position offered to him in a college situation, I think it's wonderful. Once again Michael's opening another door for us which he has been doing for many years. I think that there are so many of us who are serious and treat this as a life's work and a career. I think it's the most exciting field. Fiber art as a whole is the most exciting art venue or, not venue that's not the right word, but it's the most exciting avenue for any artist to take today, I think. I think painters are sort of not doing anything terribly noteworthy right now. It's the fiber artists, and I think it's women's turn. And, I know that I'm just ranting on here, but [laughs.] one of the things I absolutely love about quilt making is that the profound influence it has on the people who are dedicated to it, and I am the perfect example. I was raised [announcement over the public address system.] I was raised to be very typical of women my age. My mother was unusual in that she insisted I get a college degree because she had the unfortunate experience of being left with two children and had to support herself. But it was never expected that I was going to have to do that. I mean, my generation of women thought they were going to get married and they were going to be housekeepers and mothers and that was it. I was in many ways very naive when I was first married. [announcement over the public address system.] Growing up in the country in a very kind of sheltered environment, there were a lot of things that terrified me, driving in traffic, or you know, doing anything on my own. And then I discovered quilt making and I was so passionate about it, that I learned to conquer those fears. I learned to drive in New York City because that's where the good fabric was. I learned to fly by myself and make hotel reservations and it's given me the confidence to do the things I've done. And it's just had such a profound difference; I can't even describe it to you. And the one thing that is so precious to me is the community that we have created. For the most part, it's a woman's world, which I think is important. It's a user friendly kind of activity because many women come to quilting...with their family's blessing, you know. Most women if they said, 'Oh, I'm going to take an art course down at the university,' they would be laughed out of the room by their children and their husbands. But when they innocently say, 'I'm going to take up quilting,' the family says, 'Oh, yea, that's good, dear,' not knowing what they're in for. The women get to a point where they realize, boy, there's so much more than just picking up a needle and thread. And that whole artistic world opens up to them and before they're know it, they're doing, or aspiring to do things that they never thought they could. We've created a nurturing, wonderful environment where women can come and feel safe. They can do something creative. They have other people who will understand. This is a unique world that we have here and I guard it very carefully. And I don't want to be on record for a thousand years as making a sexist remark but it does rather worry me that more and more men are getting involved, particularly on the business side. I hope that, for the most part, men who are involved in the quilting world have a lot of respect for what we've created and they behave that way. So it's okay. It's very fragile what we have, and outsiders don't understand. I try to explain to people and they just sort of glaze over. But I know that I can go anywhere in the U.S. and be accepted. All I have to do is find a local quilter and say, 'Help, I need help.' I've used quilters to network. My son needed to buy a diamond for an engagement ring in San Francisco. I called the quilters. They told him where to go, you know, that kind of thing. So it's a real special unique thing. I can't remember what your original question is, and I think I've wandered off the answer.

LR: It was wonderful.

JD: Okay.

LR: Just wonderful and our time is just about up, I think, even with the stops. So, I'd like to thank you, Judy Dales, for allowing me to interview you as part of our 1999 Quilt S.O.S.-Save Our Stories Project. Our interview was concluded at 9:53, 9:53 a.m., October 22, 1999.

Quilting trends

Quilting competitions

Quilt culture

Professional quilters

Women’s empowerment

Quilts as art

Quilts as crafts

Artistry

Craftsmanship

The White House Collection of American Crafts

Quilting practices

Quilt arts

Domestic crafts

Quilt collections

Personal difficulties