ON THE AMERICAN QUILT

Image Gallery Left: Golden Path of Light, 1998. Machine-pieced, hand-quilted. Right: Maine landscape with quilt.

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CRAFTS

By Daphne Taylor

I came to quilting five years ago. As a painter, I saw scraps of cloth as another set of materials to cut, tear, compose, and create with. As a child, I grew up within a dynamic circle of women whose work with the needle and thread helped shape my creative vision. I always sewed. I always painted. If I didn't do one. I did the other.

Each season I would allow myself a week to sew to my heart's content, creating one-of-a-kind clothes with tucks that celebrated shadow, a bit of embroidery, and handmade buttons crafted from the local clay. My wedding dress was made with the spirit of a sculptress, the chosen silk bending, easing in under my fingers to create form in fabric. Well into my thirties, I knew very well that composing with fabric was no less a creative experience than the hours I spent painting the landscape.

One summer I picked up a $5 bag of cloth scraps at a yard sale along Route 3 in Maine. It was a bag of prints and domestic aesthetics that I would never have sought out, yet when spilled onto the floor, the scraps showed a maze of design possibilities. I enjoyed this moment visualizing the potential of these printed fabrics just as I have always valued a limited palette in painting. I started to cut and sew, creating a "collage" of cloth, in other words, a quilt. Those next few days, I would paint outside until the sun was too high, then rush back to the studio to cut and compose some more with the fabrics. These bits of cloth were one woman's life stash, and I remember bartering with her, her lip moving slightly as she gave up this bag of memories. Textiles do tell stories; they refresh our memories.

Two summers later, I enjoyed thinking of these moments as I was finishing one of my first quilt tops. I remember feeling that something visual was lacking, that some flick of color to pull the eye across the quilt was needed. My eye rested on a pale yellow satin that lay nearby in a bag, a gift from my mother's best woman friend, who had sent me her life's favorite remnants. It seemed to have been the hem of some party dress, perhaps a luxurious slip. It was such a quilter's moment (for me) to weave some of Mary's yellow fabric into my quilt! I felt I was honoring some part of the special women in my life, and it had happened so spontaneously. So it is with the quiet powers of quilt making. Such times remind me of a passage from Patricia Cooper and Norma Bradley Allen's book, The Quilters: Women and Domestic Art - An Oral History (Anchor Press, 1977):

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