Quilts and History….

The most exciting event of last week was a quilt guild meeting IN PERSON!!!! Yes, we had to wear masks, but we had a business meeting, a speaker, and show-and-tell. Maybe life is slowly returning to normal.

Our speaker for the night was Tara Miller of The Quilt District.

She has actively studied quilts and their place in history and her talk was entitled “Graphic Quilts of the 20th Century”.

I loved listening to her talk about the events of the 20th century, showing quilts that typified the period.

One of the most interesting things that she told us about was the fact, that prior to “Rural Free Delivery” (RFD for you Mayberry fans), certain patterns were only found in certain areas. The only way to share a pattern was to physically hand it over. Once mail delivery was expanded into rural areas, patterns could be mailed and, even more importantly, magazines and newspapers could be received all over the country. This meant that a person from Oregon could be making the same “new” design as the person from Georgia!!

She also talked about the Whitney Museum of Art’s display of quilts in 1971. The importance of this exhibit was that the quilts were not shown as “craft” but as ART!! Check out this website for more about the exhibit.

I loved listening to Tara’s observations about the 20th-century quilts and thinking about the quilts that are in my possession, created by my Great-Grandmother, Grandmother, and Mother.

She showed many quilts that I liked, but this exploded pineapple log cabin quilt stood out as a favorite…..

Interestingly, it looks very much like a “modern quilt” of today!!

They say that there is nothing new under the sun!!!