Quilting

Quilting is a sewing method done either by hand, sewing machine, or longarm quilting system. The process uses a needle and thread to join two or more layers of material together to make a quilt. Typical quilting is done with three layers, the top fabric or quilt top, batting or insulating material, and backing material. Quilting is done on bed spreads, art quilt wall hangings, clothing, and a variety of textile products.

In their most rudimentary form, quilting and piecing (patchwork) are as old as humankind itself: Hunters put together animal hides to make clothing and bedding, and in every corner of the world and every era, sewing together painstakingly collected pieces of fabric or other materials was a response to pressing practical and economic needs. Furthermore, various ancient peoples, including the Chinese, believed that one's spirit dwells in one's attire, which is why fragments of worn out clothing were recycled and put to new uses, preferably in the family home. Necessity, thrift, and superstition permeate the global history of quilting. Since the 19th century, the craft has acquired associations with good housewifery, feminine creativity, and the celebration of matrilineal family traditions. In the 1960s and 1970s, quilting was rediscovered by the civil rights and women's movements as a popular domestic art form that expressed and validated marginalized identities and experiences. Nowadays, it is widely recognized and respected as an art form with a rich tradition integral to social history and folk culture, and an exciting future.

It has been argued that quilting first developed into an art in North America. With no embroidery silks or water colors available, pioneer women channeled their creativity into designing quilt patterns inspired by European traditions but also shaped by the landscape [Page 696]of the new country, as is indicated by certain pattern names (e.g., “Rocky Road to California”). Whereas traditional English and Welsh quilts consisted of three layers of textile sandwiched together, with the stitched quilting making up the sole design, American quilts were usually patched together out of small blocks of fabric, which were easier to handle and allowed women to make the most out of scarce fabric supplies by using up remainders or recycling fragments. Quilts were made to be passed on from mother to daughter and often evoked historical events and community and family histories. Wedding quilts were made from blocks individually sewn by the friends and female relatives of the bride-to-be, with the traditional love-themed designs often supplemented with personal dedications. Blocks would then be sewn together at quilting bees, woman-only social events that would normally last all day long.

Women and especially feminist artists who have used quilting in their practice have a particularly complex relationship with the medium, which is negotiated within—and thus forms part of—their artwork. The use of traditional domestic craft skills has been deemed simultaneously empowering, because it relies on a woman-to-woman intergenerational apprenticeship and validates female culture, but also compromising, because it perpetuates the gendered and implicitly hierarchical division between the public and the private/domestic spheres, handicrafts, and the fine arts. Feminist quilts express ambivalence toward the domestic associations of quilting because, in feminist analysis, the home no longer merely stands for comfort and intimacy but can also represent drudgery, confinement, and victimization. Denise Mucci Furnish's Friendship Quilt (1991) is made with dryer lint collected by the artist's friends over a decade: This is simultaneously a humorous protest against women's unpaid labor in the home and a tender tribute to female friendship.

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