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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If a bee is like a weekly poker game, going to Houston is like going to Vegas. “We cemented our friendships in Houston,” Mary said (the Raleigh bee has been coming here for five years). There’s something about leaving your families behind and traveling to a giant festival full of people like you. One of the journal quilts pictured five women standing, their arms around one another, and the words “The joy of reuniting with my quilting friends in Houston.”
“Women come here and feel like they belong,” Karey Bresenhan told me. A fifth-generation Texas quilter, she has been running quilt festivals in Houston for more than thirty years. With a full shock of graying black hair and a rich East Texas accent, she’s become something of a matriarch to the quilting world, especially in Texas. “People understand the women here. People don’t think they’re weird because they fondle someone’s shirt. These women at the Quilt Festival understand when they need a new sewing machine, even though they already have three. They understand when they want more fabric, even though they have no business buying more.”
Ah, fabric: the addiction, the dirty little secret of quilting. Women come to Houston for the camaraderie and they come to see the winning quilts. But they also come for the fabric, dropping hundreds of dollars (at about $9 a yard) on cloth they can’t get at home. I asked the Busy Bees if they were going to buy fabric at the fest, and they all started laughing loudly, as if I’d asked if they were wearing underwear. “There’s this idea,” one of them said, “that you can’t buy more fabric until you do something with the fabric you already have—produce something.” This idea is universally ignored. At one point I was standing with my mom when a woman I work with named Marilyn Carter walked up with her mother. They had just come from the vendors’ booths, and my co-worker’s bags were full of cloth. She began whipping it out—cloth decorated with grackles, witches, and lipstick tubes. “I have no idea what I’m going to do with all this,” she said. “None.”
Almost every single woman walking up and down the aisles of the thousand-plus booths had a bag full of fabric—hand-dyed, shimmery, African, Thai, Japanese. But they weren’t just after the cloth. They cruised booths that sold frames, cordless electric scissors, beads, buttons, thimbles, stencils, bobbins, bobbin winders, bobbin drawers, books, magazines. You could buy a quilt-making kit with bass, baby bears, or Native American folk art (for example, a young Indian maiden sewing) or kits called My Vision of Miro or Krismas Kats. You could buy software programs to design patterns or $37,000 computerized long-arm machines that can stitch a whole quilt in a day. I walked past several computerized sewing machines that were stitching flowers all by themselves. There were also a number of antique-quilt vendors, and unlike on the other side of the convention center, here you could actually touch the quilts. My mom took me to a couple. “This is where my heart lies,” she said, running her hands over the top of an ancient white quilt with simple green, red, and orange flowers. “It was made by somebody doing what I teach today. Who was she? Where did she do this?” She turned it over and showed me a tight path of thread. “Who did these little stitches?”
After three days of walking back and forth through mobs of middle-class women, I did something I had been putting off since I’d arrived Thursday morning: I went to the Learn to Quilt booth. I was exhausted, mentally and physically, tired of hearing women tell me about the joy of quilting. The volunteer teacher, Dolores Rieger, helped me pick out a little kit with 4 three-inch squares, plus six-inch batting and backing. I chose a kit with two little yellow squares and two red ones decorated with sneakers. I threaded the needle and tied the knot—skills learned in the Boy Scouts—lined up a yellow and a red square, and started sewing. In and out, up and down. Dolores said to make the stitches as small as I could, and I did. Up and down, in and out.
Dolores, in her seventies, told me how both her grandmother and her husband’s great-grandmother had quilted; she had been doing it for ten years and had made ten quilts. There was a young family there, the Stevenses: Brian, Alesia, and their eight-year-old daughter, Bria. Alesia told me that she quilted some with her church group, and Bria liked doing anything with arts and crafts. Brian was there, he admitted, because of “the power of pillow talk.”
I finished piecing the first two squares, and Bria showed me a better way to do the next two, holding them together with a thin piece of tape, which also gave me a line to stitch along. When I was done with the top, Dolores showed me how to finger-press the seams down, as if I was ironing, and put the sandwich together. She gave me a choice of stencils to use to trace the design for the quilting: a heart or a star. I picked the heart, though as Bria told me, “You can actually put on any design you want.” I penciled the heart on the yellow fabric, and Bria showed me how to stitch, starting at the top, where the curves met. In and out, up and down. The downs were easy; on the ups I had to aim for the line, push the needle through, re-aim, push it through again. Sometimes the stitch was too big and I’d redo it; sometimes it was too big and I’d keep going. I talked with Bria about school. I talked with Brian about the L.A. Lakers. Up and down, in and out. I poked myself in the finger. I put on a thimble. Dolores invited Bria and her mom to her quilt group. Bria mocked my stitches. I poked myself in the finger again. I lost the needle. I found it stuck in my boot. “You have to be a patient person to do this,” I said aloud at one point.
By the time I was done, the Stevenses were gone, and Dolores was getting off duty. It had taken an hour and a half to produce a sad little orphan of a block with printed purple tennis shoes and two little hearts with pencil marks showing underneath them. Dolores inspected my quilting. “Those stitches are real good,” she said, “for a man.”
I didn’t realize until after I had left the convention center and sat down in a hotel bar how great I felt—the stress and fatigue were gone. I was completely relaxed and wide awake. I honestly didn’t care about my six-inch block. Was it art? Of course not. Was it a quilt? No. Was I one of the 27 million? I’m afraid so.
That night I went to the Silver Star Salute banquet and sat at a table with seven women—a pair of elderly twins from Minnesota and five women from Texas. Two were from Pottsboro, one from Denison, and two from Grand Prairie. In no time they were sharing war stories about the convention—fabric bought, appliqué techniques learned, cotton versus polyester batting (“Warm and Natural is best with a machine,” said one of the women from Pottsboro). Mary Lynn Cuevas, from Grand Prairie, sat to my immediate right. The best thing she’d bought, she said, was a gizmo to make yo-yos, little old-fashioned flower-like fabric circles. “I bought three from a Japanese woman who didn’t speak any English,” she told me. She then pointed out that one of the twins wore an exquisite hand-quilted yellow jacket with black piping and delicate puffy designs.
I told Mary Lynn that I had spent the past three days following my mother around, watching her teach and listening to her talk about quilts. I said how I’d never appreciated what she did until now. “My son laughs at me when I tell him I’m coming here,” she said. “He says, ‘What are you going to do all day—look at quilts?’” I told her I didn’t think that men really understood. When she asked if I thought that I got quilting now, I found myself reaching into my bag and pulling out my pathetic little red-and-yellow block. “It’s okay,” I assured her. “You can laugh.”
“No, no,” she insisted. “You did a real nice job. Your stitching is really good.” Yeah, I knew. For a man. More than anything, it seemed, Mary Lynn, like Dolores, was pleased that a man had entered a woman’s world and tried playing with their toys by their rules.
Two nights after returning home, I took my block to my weekly poker game. It was obvious what was coming; I longed for it. Six friends were sitting around the table shuffling decks and counting chips when I walked in. I opened a beer, sat down, and tossed my square on the felt. “Check it out,” I said. “I’m a quilter now.”
The host looked at my little piece of cloth. “That’s great,” he said. “Now cut the f—ing cards.” When I called my mom later and told her the story, she laughed and laughed. She’s been going back and forth between the two worlds for a long time. She knows how men are.
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