Reflections on Quilting

My maternal grandmother was a sewist – she made quilts, she fixed things with her sewing machine and she was always using fabrics she had on hand, whether they were clothing or sheets.  She would sometimes buy fabrics but most of her sewing projects used items destined for the scrap bag.  I learned to sew clothes for my dolls, fix clothing, I even got patterns and made clothes for myself when I was in my 20s.  I started my first big bed size quilt when I was 19 and have made many quilts since.  I bought and received cotton fabrics for quilting when I was in college.  People often say “Oh, you sew – I brought you some fabric.”  So, for many, many years – I didn’t have to go buy more fabric.  

It wasn’t unit about five years ago that I started going into fabric stores again for the first time since college. My return to the commercial world of fabric and crafting was rocky: unbleached muslin rocketed from 99 cents to $9.99 per yard.  

Around the same time, in 2019, I learned about long-arm quilting from my manager at work, who mentioned that his neighbors ran a long-arm quilting business after finding out I made quilts. I had never heard of this before and was excited by the possibility of machines that facilitated top quilting to make it less of a neck-breaking chore.  A shop in San Mateo offered training and rents time on long arm machines – so I headed across the Bay to learn.  

That first shop visit in early 2022 was eye-opening. I discovered a massive wave of commodification and co-optation of the practice of quilting. Everything was “curated.” People bought designer fabrics packaged into “jelly rolls” and “layer cakes” (I’m still not sure what those are). “Fat quarters” came in coordinated collections blessed by some supposed color genius. When I showed a quilt I was working on—a gift for a friend—the shop workers (all elderly and white) sucked their teeth and said, “Tsk tsk – well, your friend will like it because you made it for her.” At the time, I didn’t realize this was a sales technique: make me feel insecure so I’d buy their curated kits and sign up for their “expert” classes.

That same commodified mindset shows up in quilt shows I’ve attended from 2022 through 2025. My first quilt show experience, back in 2011 on a cross-country motorcycle trip, was different—county fairs, small-town shows, quilts that varied in style, skill, and purpose. In contrast, competitive quilt shows today carry the same push toward conformity I first felt in that San Mateo shop. Perfectionism rules: precision piecing, perfectly straight quilting, designer-only fabrics (nothing from JoAnn’s, of course). Many quilts look like they rolled off a computer printer. Most seem to be sent to professional long-arm shops and quilted to within an inch of their lives. At a Fort Bragg show earlier this summer, quilts hung in front of windows, and I realized how much this over-quilting can damage the work—some looked like postage stamps, with daylight bleeding through the stitches.

Together, these experiences—both in the shop and at the shows—made clear how quilting has been broken into commodified specializations: designing the fabrics, picking out the “right” colors, pre-cutting the pieces, even outsourcing the assembly and quilting. It’s the capitalist drive to monetize what was once a legacy, family, community, and personal practice.

Today, I went to a talk at BAMPFA “Artists Conversation: Quilts as Legacy and Living Practice” (https://bampfa.org/event/quilts-legacy-and-living-practice) featuring Adia Millet, Basil Kincaid, and Diedrick Brackens.

Among the topics that the artists touched upon while presenting their work and responding to audience questions was the idea of liberation through creation.  Both Basil and Adia talked about incorporating materials from family, friends, and old clothing.  Adia featured a Dresden Plate block made by her grandmother at the center of a piece she embellished with found wild bird feathers.  Basil said that most of the quilts he makes, he keeps because they have family materials and are personal.  Basil said that he won’t commercialize black pain or family memories.  I also liked the idea that Diedrick raised about animism in his small fleet of looms – they all have a personality and creating something is a conversation.  He said “I might think that something is going to curve a certain way but the loom says – ‘try it like this instead’” and he might not do a certain type of subject matter on a certain loom.  

Listening to these artists inspired a reflection on what I value in the practice of quilting.  I find liberation in the imperfection, pushing the limits of all parts of the process:  my skill, the machine, the textiles, even how I’m feeling or the colors of the fabric.  It’s a story at a point in time – there are fabrics from my grandmother’s stash, or that I bought over 30 years ago in college, or which came to me through other surrendered caches.  

That visit to the San Mateo quilt shop in 2022 when the old white ladies (and one man) “tsk tsk’d” my quilt and showed me their curated, pre-cut jelly rolls and layer cakes – that was a sales technique.  The co-optation of quilting and commodification of quilting into separate areas of specialization -- designing the fabrics, picking out the colors that "go together," even cutting the pieces and providing assembly and top quilting services have really stood out to me, perhaps more because of my hiatus from fabric stores and quilting social media.  

These are typical outcomes of the capitalist drive to monetize what is a legacy, family, community and personal practice.  The result is to create insecurity and to foster a consumerist mentality:  many people end up acquiring so much material and tools that there's even a semi-humorous acronym:  "SABLE" stands for "Stash Beyond Life Expectancy." People spend more time acquiring, organizing and managing their sewing spaces than actually creating items.  This commodity fetishim creates alienation from the creative process and hyperindividualization that is, quite frankly, wasteful and not fun. The pefectionism results in quilts that are boring and don't really reflect anything personal which was part of the practice of quilting for many generations of quilters. 

After the BAMPFA artists left the stage, another attendee struck up conversation with me.  She emphasized the consumerist nature of people who form the target demographic for the commodified quilt world: “A lot of those people aren’t making art – they are just doing paint-by-numbers.”  The process of picking fabrics, choosing your colors, learning techniques and developing a vision are not part of what they are doing.  “And,” she said, “That’s okay.” 

That reminder of liberation in imperfection also brought to mind the final chapter of Patrick Bringley’s book, “All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me” which focuses on the exhibition of the quilts of Gee’s Bend.  One quilter, Loretta Pettway (b. 1942), told Bringley she didn’t even like sewing—she made quilts because no one else could supply enough to keep her family warm. That honesty, that necessity, reminded me that art isn’t always about inspiration. Sometimes it’s about survival.

We live in a time of massive wealth and success, as well as increasing socioeconomic disparity and dysfunction around the distribution of that wealth.  I've read that there is so much clothing already manufactured that we can clothe the next 6 to 7 generations without creating one more item of new clothing.  The amounts of textiles that are dumped in developing countries is galling.  Why should anyone buy new fabric or clothing?  

Part of my creative practice is to avoid buying new fabric - while I do have some "purchased as new" fabrics in my stash, I spend a lot of time going to thrift stores and scanning online ads for people selling or surrendering their stashes.  I save some for quilting and other fabrics for kennel quilts. 

One of the artists in today's BAMPFA discussion, Basil Kincaid, works in Ghana to recover fabrics that he uses for his large commercial projects, and also to upcycle into quilted clothing.  This is one small step in the right direction.