International Quilting Convention 
The Fabric of Our Lives
Long gone are the days when quilting was relegated to little old ladies. Today it’s a billion-dollar industry with talented women of all ages creating vibrant, cutting-edge work. Many of them attended the world’s largest annual quilting convention, in Houston, so I tagged along with one of the art form’s biggest stars: my mom.
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My mother remembers when she finally began the actual quilting of her Hawaiian project: the day Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president, in January 1977. To Mom, the lifelong Democrat, this was a grand moment, and she sat in front of the TV and stitched as Jimmy and Rosalynn walked down Pennsylvania Avenue. The quilt was hard work, and at one point, Mom ripped out a three-foot square in the center because the stitches weren’t right. She finished it six months later, just in time to enter the Houston Quilt Show. “I drove over from San Antonio with a carload of women,” she told me. “We walked in, and there was a best of show ribbon on it.” By this time I was enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, learning about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I was only eighty miles away from San Antonio, but it might as well have been a million.
My parents moved to Nassau Bay, south of Houston, and Mom taught basic quilting classes at a recreation center. She took classes too, on design theory and art, and began piecing, both by hand and machine. In 1979 the family moved to Raleigh, and she started taking quilting even more seriously. Within a year, she turned the basement into her quilting room, and she would spend all morning and early afternoon working, until my two youngest siblings came home from school. She had started collecting old quilts and blocks, some from the early nineteenth century, and she would pull them out, run her fingers over them, and get ideas. The quilting industry was expanding, with companies making more fabric and more tools, like the rotary cutter (a rolling blade, similar to a pizza slicer), and publishing more books. National organizations were forming, and so were other conventions; the Houston one morphed into the IQF, and Mom—with her teaching certificate from the National Quilting Association—started teaching there. Most of the classes were for beginners, using easy patterns like the log cabin (a simple square surrounded by increasingly longer strips), but then a group asked her for something more challenging, and she showed them a variation called the pineapple. “A pineapple is a log cabin gone berserk,” my mom told me.
Back in Texas, I had other things on my mind. By 1986 I was touring with a rock group, and my bandmates and I would stay with my parents when we played in Raleigh or Chapel Hill. I had no idea what she was doing in her quilt room all day. Pineapples? I thought she was sewing pictures of fruit. Mom had always been about serving me and my siblings, and she was no different now, making my band dinner and buying us cases of Budweiser. I’d look at the quilt she was working on and say, “That’s great, Mom. When do we eat?”
In 1987 she and Dixie Haywood, a quilter from Pensacola, Florida, who also liked working with pineapples, began writing a book on the pattern. Two years later they published Perfect Pineapples, and Mom came to Austin to teach a workshop at a church and sell books. I drove her there, dropped her off, and went somewhere, probably to a rehearsal. At that moment, I was about as big a rock star as I was ever going to be, making albums and playing shows, after which, on a good night, I might sell a few records from the stage. When I returned three hours later, there was a line of middle-aged women standing along the walls of the classroom. I watched as Mom chatted with each of them, took their money, and autographed their books. She sold thirty copies that night at $20 apiece and walked out of the church with a wad of cash as big as a jelly roll. I was stunned. She was pleased, and not only because she could afford to buy more fabric. She knew she had made an impression on me. All I knew was that Mom was the rock star of the family.
She was getting teaching invitations from guilds and conventions all over the country, plus she was judging shows. She and Dixie started writing other books, all of which dealt with foundations, or sheets of paper used to stabilize the pieces of fabric being sewn together (when the block is done, you carefully pull out the paper). They started experimenting with new ways of foundation piecing. “I found my niche,” Mom told me. By this point, she and Dixie had become good friends. Indeed, Mom was making lasting friendships all over the country, something she had had a hard time doing when she was an itinerant Army wife. My dad seemed happy for her. She had been supportive of his career for so long, and now he returned the favor. Even better, when she retired to her quilting room, he had the whole house to himself.
Mom was getting deep satisfaction from being an artist and from being regarded as one. She was a traditionalist and used traditional piecing methods and patterns, like pineapples, but her sense of design and her use of color were, if I do say so now, stunning. Chroma VI: Nebula, with its brooding reds and blacks, looked like a Rothko. Hope looked like the sun seen from the bottom of a lake. The Ultimate Pineapple, which she did in 1997, won blue ribbons at every show she entered it in. Galaxy, the quilt with the twelve mariner’s compasses, won best of show at the 2003 North Carolina Quilt Symposium.
Like most quilters, she had been making quilts for her children and grandchildren, and I finally earned one when I got married, in 2000. It’s a dark masterpiece of red-and-gold concentric diamonds, each made from a dozen shades of red and gold cloth. She used a sewing machine to quilt parallel lines of straight stitches into the red, and she hand-stitched curves and swirls into the gold. It took three months to finish. She called it Austin Sunrise, a nod to the fact that her obtuse, self-involved eldest was finally marrying, at age 43, long after her other children. It’s been on the bed ever since.
When my mom is not on the road, she’s in her quilting room, a former garage, with several desks, a cutting table, a design wall where she can size up colors and fabric, a wall of thread, two tall shelves of books, two more of magazines, and others holding thousands of pieces of fabric, stacked by color and source, sometimes neatly, sometimes threatening to spill over onto the floor. The room itself looks like a crazy quilt. When Mom gets bored, she goes there and folds fabric. When she gets stressed out, she cuts it up and sews it together. “Something about the fabric,” she says. “It’s very tactile. It boosts your serotonin level or something. It’s a tranquilizing, soothing thing. It’s serenity-making.”
Mom took me around the convention center floor, where two thousand quilts hung. We went to the exhibit of Amish quilts, with their bright, simple designs. There was the Poos Collection of antique quilts: white backgrounds with austere appliquéd green vines and red flowers. Looking at them hanging on a wall, as if in a gallery, was different from seeing them draped on a bed or folded on a shelf. They had been elevated, and the colors leaped out from the white background, as if they were put there for art’s sake, not adornment’s. We stopped at a quilt that had either a photo or the name of all 3,600 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan through June 2007, and we saw others made for the children of soldiers still fighting, with pictures of their fathers on them. We walked through the Journal Quilt Project, a large area of the floor with hundreds of smaller quilts, most the size of notebook paper. They had the feel of free association—a lot of writing and photos, plenty of allegories of self-discovery, and plenty of naked self-absorption. “What Part of Me Will I Let You See?” asked one, portraying “the schism I often feel between how much of the real me I let the world see and who I truly am.” We walked past the Husband’s Lounge (half a dozen men inside were reading the paper and watching CNN) and through several exhibits of art quilts with dancing rectangles, singing pop stars, dreaming women. Words, swirls, clowns, slaves.
We walked past the 85 quilts that had won awards in this year’s contest, including one of Mom’s. Everywhere we went, someone congratulated her on her ribbon or her most recent book. Then that someone would inevitably say to me, “You must be Jane’s boy!” (The head of the IQF, Karey Bresenhan, had announced at the opening ceremony that a reporter from a Texas magazine, “who happens to be the son of our own Jane Hall,” would be following her around the festival.) Mom took me to her quilt Vinas Viejas, a green-and-purple minimalist homage to her and my dad’s love of the grape. It had a white third-place ribbon next to it. Dixie had won second, and though my Mom joked about it, I could tell it bugged her a little. Quilting may be full of well-mannered ladies, but they are competitive well-mannered ladies.
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