Why We Love Quilts

Put a quilt in an 80-year-old woman's lap and you'll unlock a treasure chest of memories: collecting "flowerdy feedsacks," tracing around a teacup to mark a quilt top, feeding fried apple pies to children on the porch while neighbor women and relatives quilted away around a frame hung from pulleys in the ceiling. "Quiltings" really happened--and still go on today. In fact, as the 20th century ends and a new one begins, we continue to be fascinated by and drawn to quilts, the stories they tell and the painstaking process by which they're made.

Quiltmaking almost died out in the early 1900s, until a concern for preserving America's own crafts led the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to open its American Wing in 1924. This prompted the first revival of collecting and making quilts.

I walked into that store, handed over $100 and walked out with a quilt under my arm. What have I done? I wondered. I'd spent a lot of money for a quilt that wasn't even meant for my bed. I planned to hang it on the wall above my loom.

Without intending to, I had started a quilt collection that would soon grow and grow. I had also made a life discovery: I was so inspired by quilts, their makers and their stories, that I soon quit my job to research and write about quilts and quilting.

Quilt guilds formed, including the American Quilt Study Group in Mill Valley, Calif., a network of quilt historians who exchange and publish their quilt findings. A nationwide grassroots campaign soon launched to record stories and photograph quilts.

The late-20th-century resurgence of interest in quilting prompted a plethora of books by academics and enthusiasts, exhibits across the country and documentary films chronicling quilting's history, artisans, designs and their meanings, and techniques.

Maybe it is all of those things.

Author Merikay Waldvogel, a nationally known author, curator and lecturer on quilt history, lives in Knoxville, Tenn.