When a new neighour took me along to the local guild, ACQ, one night early in 1988, I was immediately hooked, and my interest in fabric and stitch turned from creative embroidery to traditional American patchwork and quilting. I took some construction classes, joined a bee, and made one Flying Geese pattern wall quilt. This southwestern (US) colour palette for home decor was in vogue at the time 🙂
Within the year, though, I’d begun making my own original design art quilts:
The bee I joined called themselves the Friday Morning Block Party, which was, at the name suggests, quite traditional, but it soon became clear they were a very creative group, and some were just starting to explore non-traditional quiltmaking. By the time I left Denver six years later to return to Australia (1994) we’d renamed ourselves The Over The Edge Quilters; Sherry and Barb had written and published a fun book on quilting bees; lawyer Janet Jo had a nice number lecturing groups on copyright issues, and had began selling her hand dyed fabrics; two more of the group had become accredited quilt judges, and another helped start a critique and ideas group for several of us seriously exploring art quilts andgetting into art quilt sections of quilt guild shows – I made Quilt National’03. They were the hardest group I’ve ever had to leave anywhere.
But of course, when change happens there are always several diehards who resist changing anything. I remember back in the late 90s at a West Australian Quilt Guild meeting, a traditional quilter sniffily informed me that her quilts were always totally hand pieced and quilted, and always used only 100% cotton fabric and thread… as if this made her work somehow better. The other side of that coin is, though, that I’ve also heard barely concealed disdain in an art quilt maker’s comment about those who take great pleasure in carefully following published patterns.
Tradition is a two sided coin. One side of that is the very human wish to preserve the skills and knowledge from the past for future generations, and I’m quite sure quilt making skills and traditions are being well preserved by traditional quilt guilds today. When I became hooked, the rotary cutter and cutting mat were still pretty new, and hand piecing was being largely replaced by machine sewing. Other tools had appeared, too – including a variety of plastic rulers and templates, curved safety pins, and of course long arm quilting machines.
In my field of quilted textile art, techniques have also seen a lot of change, including foundation piecing, stack and whack©, image transfer technology, and online workshops of all kinds, both paid and free. We can shop for fabrics, notions and books on-line, and traditionalists can still get the books with traditional patterns and instructions in magazines and books from shops and libraries. But the biggest change is how much informational material is available online, much of it free of cost through YouTube, Pinterest, artists’, teachers’ and groups’ websites, digital newsletters and blogs. Another important thing about techniques in contemporary fibreart is that previously clearly defined textile areas like beading, knitting, crochet, surface embroidery, lace making, quilting, patchwork and more, are all now being freely borrowed by creative fibreart people and used in combinations not previously imagined.
As long as modern fibreartists continue to tinker with the traditional crafts, the overlapping fuzziness at the edges of individual textile arts will continue to further stimulate creativity.