The Wrld Page

Quilts more than old cloth scraps, feed sacks

You say quilting is just an isolated woman's hobby with boring fabric scraps of torn work clothes, feed sacks or old blankets - a necessary sewing project to help keep her family warm out on the prairie or in some lonesome West Virginia hollow.

Hardly.

Consider the community of Gee's Bend quilters creating abstract designs with only the colors of their fabrics in rural Alabama. Consider our own Elizabeth Barton here in Athens, who as an art quilter, exhibits her work all over the world. Consider the "Quilts of Africa" at Wesleyan College in Macon a few years ago. That exhibit showed us quilts with colors and motifs from the hearts and hands of the slaves in the rural South. Some of the motifs can be found in a specific region in Africa -- long before we had DNA technology to help trace their ancestors.

All these histories are swirling in my head as I walk from gallery to gallery at the Oconee Civic Center. No way could I walk through and enjoy this as just another art show. As I came around the corner to the last booth, I spied a quilt draped over a chair, not hung on the wall as hundreds of others in this show. This booth was dedicated to Woodie, a long-time member of the Cotton Patch Quilters, who'd spent her last year working on this particular quilt while undergoing chemotherapy. On the note pinned to the quilt was the story of which friend finished which section when Woodie's stitches got too errat

Comment on "Quilts more than old cloth scraps, feed sacks"