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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Some of the women were dressed as vividly as the quilts, wearing bright floral prints and solid colors. There was a lot of purple. I saw embroidered flowers, elephants, pumpkins, stars, and, of course, Elvis. Most women wore comfortable footwear for the constant walking. They would stand in front of quilts and sometimes stare for minutes. For a devotee, the true test of a quilt is not the top but the back—the size of the stitches, the creativity of the stitching, how the whole thing meshes with the design on the front. Many of the women would ask white-gloved volunteers to flip the quilt over. The convention center’s halogen lighting had been dimmed, and twelve-foot posts with incandescent lights had been installed, so everything felt close, warm, and well lit, like a gallery.
Mom took me by each of the seven top award winners, most of which were art quilts. The best of show, which won $10,000, was Hope for Our World, a striking scene by Hollis Chatelain with a purple Desmond Tutu surrounded by a group of purple children. Chatelain had painted the entire scene on fabric, but most of the color came from the hand-dyed threads she had machine quilted. The work had a crowd of twenty people in front of it, taking pictures, talking in hushed tones. Gloria Hansen’s Squared Illusions 6 hung nearby, an almost completely machine-made work of art (circles, stripes, and right angles), designed in Photoshop, printed by a color inkjet onto fabric, and machine quilted. I asked Mom if all of these newfangled techniques bothered her. “No,” she insisted, “it’s good art. I like it.” She accepts the artier work, as most in the quilting world now do. This wasn’t the case in 2004, when Chatelain won best of show for another painted quilt, Precious Water, leading to a lot of grumbling along the lines of “That’s a painting, not a quilt.” This year, when her award was announced, she got a standing ovation.
Mom does plenty of nontraditional things, with color mostly, and she’ll play around, up to a point. For example, she’s part of an art-quilt critique group, and a few years ago she quilted a humu humu nuku nuku apua’a, the state fish of Hawaii. “I put netting on it, used beads all over, like bubbles, had loose threads hanging off, did some of the freehand machine stitching that Hollis Chatelain does. I loved it. It was fun. I try to be open about a lot of the modern stuff, but I do what I like.”
Mom remembers a famous art quilter giving a lecture years ago. “He stood up and said, ‘Just because you put little hearts on your quilt, don’t think you’re an artist. You can’t be an artist until you’ve had the proper training.’ One quarter of the women got up and left.” The artist was arrogant, Mom says, and she was on the side of those who walked out. But she also knew that he had a point. Self-expression is not necessarily art, and neither is following the directions in a kit. Mom knows the difference between art and craft. “I’m not Van Gogh,” she said. “I’m working with patterns. I don’t know if it’s art, but it’s artful.” As much pleasure as she gets out of color and design, I think she gets more out of teaching, even if her students aren’t necessarily going to become Chatelains. “There’s an urge in everybody to make something beautiful,” she told me, “to do something creative. Maybe it’s been squelched since kindergarten, hidden under child-rearing or a job or life, and it just needs to be encouraged. I spend ninety percent of my time teaching ordinary people who are fretting whether the blue in the fabric will match the blue in the bird in their bedroom curtains. Usually their creativity blossoms, even if it’s very simplistic: doing something nice with color or just following a pattern. When you make a certain number of patterns, maybe you begin to fiddle with fabric or thread or design, and then maybe you break with tradition, go abstract. Quilting provides a way for ordinary people to do all this. It’s not necessarily art, but it’s very, very freeing.”
I watched her teach three classes and give a lecture, on Hawaiian quilts, pineapples, the mariner’s compass, and foundations. “There is no right way to do a quilt,” she had told me beforehand. “One of the joys of quilting is that you are in charge. Some ways are better than others, but it’s up to you. This appeals to women, who have had so many ‘shoulds’ and ‘ought tos’ their whole lives.” In the classes, each of which had 20 to 25 women, she cajoled, pushed, and praised. “Oh, guys,” she said to her Hawaiian-quilt students about the eighteen green, red, blue, and turquoise snowflakes laid out on the floor, “is this not wonderful?” In the class on the mariner’s compass, Mom held up a wedge of paper while she gave tips, and I watched the women hold theirs up too at arm’s length, squinting, eyebrows up in confusion, trying to visualize what my mom was talking about. I watched a sixty-year-old woman at the back of the class, with curly, faded brown-and-gray hair; her face and mannerisms, though, were those of a nervous first-grader. When Mom went around the room inspecting patterns and got back to her, she said, “Are you okay back here? You are! You paid attention!” The woman smiled with pure satisfaction.
Mom’s mantra was “Just remember, you’re in charge.” In her pineapple class, she walked around and asked each student, “What would you like to do next?” Some of the women were visibly nervous. “I’m totally confused,” cried a woman, panicking. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Yes, you do,” my mother answered. “I saw you do it.”
A fortysomething woman from League City had never sewn on a foundation before. “I can’t do it,” she cried melodramatically. “It’s too hard!”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” my mom answered. “I told you, you can do it. You just have to mess around with it.”
I remember that tone. I remember fifth-grade math, which I was absolutely incapable of getting, and how my mom sat with me at the dinner table every night for a month, forcing me to do the exercises over and over until I finally understood it enough to pass the big test. “She’s good,” the totally confused woman said to me, loud enough for Mom to hear.
“I have five children,” my mom replied. “I have a lot of patience.”
Packs of women roamed the floor, some dressed alike in T-shirts printed with names like “Misfit Quilters.” I saw a group of six women wearing white sailor’s caps and yellow T-shirts with black bumblebees stenciled on the front. They were the Busy Bees quilting bee from Waterloo, Iowa, and they had saved up their money to come to Houston for the weekend, sleeping two to a bed in a hotel room. Almost every quilter I met was part of a local guild or bee, getting together once a week, month, or year to quilt and hang out, to “stitch and bitch.” One night I went out to dinner with my mom, her old friend Nancy Brenan Daniel, and four members of Mom’s Raleigh guild, all women in their forties and fifties, married with children. They get together twice a month. Members bring their own projects, something they can work on while they talk. “People bring quilts to show, for feedback,” Mary Corcoran, a former social worker, told me. “We do show-and-tell,” said Janice Pope, with a loud laugh. “We stop and listen, say ‘ooh’ and ‘aah.’” Janice, who works part-time in a quilt shop, said sometimes they rent a two-bedroom condo and have a bee. “Sew together, take walks together, eat together, encourage each other.”
Mary laughed. “We clap for each other. Mostly we talk about our families, children, grandchildren. When someone is going through something hard, we talk to her.”
Nancy said, “Quilting is a bonding situation. Even a fast quilt is really slow.”
“I don’t think husbands understand it,” said my mom.
“I don’t think men understand how important the group is to women,” replied Nancy.
“Women need other women,” my mom said. “They need to talk to each other.”
This is not news to me; men do too. I have a weekly poker game. I’m a terrible player. I lose more than half the time, but I don’t go for the cards. I go to be with friends, most of whom I’ve known for more than twenty years, to talk about our children and our jobs, to complain about the Astros and getting old and the new Wilco album. There’s not a lot of encouragement. Indeed, we clap only when someone loses a lot of money.
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