Philosophy

I think that quiltmaking is valuable hobby-calling-life’s work. It is valuable, because there are many ways to keep it fresh, continuously learn and improve. There is also an element of community, which is valuable.

Making a sampler quilt is a good way to learn at any point in your quiltmaking career.

Quiltmaking is a good way to support small, women owned businesses.

In Spike Gillespie’s book Quilting Art (Voyageur Press, 2009), she writes

“One question I put to many of the artists was this: How do you feel about the word ‘quilt’? I brought this topic up because I’d learned along the way that some consider the term a death knell when it comes to being taken serious in the art world, while others had no trouble with it.

I purposefully posed the question carefully. I didn’t do this to tiptoe around the topic-the artists I interviewed clearly weren’t interested in kid-glove treament. But over the years at the Internal Quilt Festival, I noted what felt like a trend. Folks would look at a quilt, and if it was not the sort of work typically associated with quilts (read: reminiscent of grandmother’s house), arguments over its merits ensued – Is it a quilt or not? ….he deemed a work “not a quilt”  because, he observed, it was nothing he could put on his bed.

The way I see it, an article like that is setting up a false argument. Why ask an uninformed bystander to define a quilt? Why not ask a more pertinent question like, How do you feel about the way quilts have progressed and moved into the art world? Is it important to see controversy – even, especially, if that controversy feel contrived?” (pg.10-11)

This is followed by a transcription of Joan Dreyer comment “I’m less concerned with putting a label on it. I almost don’t care in a way. I don’t feel other artists have to make the same choice. For me I just need to make it for the reasons I need to make it.”