Page 65 - The Hunt - Fall 2022

Patchwork Legacy
Today’s quilters span past and future generations.
Karen Liska moves quickly from
one side of her Bernina long-arm iquilter to the other, explaining
the mechanics of the partially computerized machine that takes up much of her studio.
Its metallic, crane-like arm and sewing head look suspiciously like the top half of a sci-fi praying mantis about to gobble up the yards of colorful fabric stretched beneath it. “Right now, I’m working on making quilted table runners as gifts,” she says, illustrating how the machine allows her the freedom to move its sewing head across yards of flat quilting fabric.
Liska is one of a new generation of quilters who use advanced, computerized sewing machines that can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $40,000 and look nothing like their grandmothers’ Singers. Still, the connection between generations is obvious in the design and feel of the quilts themselves. Many of today’s quilters have ancestors for whom quilting by hand was a way of life. “I have
a quilt that was passed down through the family on my mother’s side by my third great- grandmother from Kentucky,” says Liska, who lives in Kennett Square. “I have other family quilts, as well.”
A few days later, in a windowless storage room at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, Laura Johnson opens a dozen boxes, each containing a carefully folded historic quilt. It’s just a small sample of the 300 or so in the museum’s vast collection. “They range from the 1600s to the 20th century,” says Johnson, Winterthur’s curator of textiles. “H. F. du Pont loved textiles, and he particularly liked the colors and textures of quilts. When a guest arrived, there’d be
a show quilt on the bed—but the staff would quickly replace it with a regular quilt.”
Johnson further explains that du Pont, whose home and collections make up the facility’s historic core, was resourceful in how he used quilted material. He’d cut up quilts
to use as upholstery, sometimes displaying the more mundane back because the color matched the rest of the room’s décor. “Think of a quilt as a fabric sandwich, with a top, filling and backing,” Johnson says.
And think of the action of quilting as the process of putting together that sandwich. The elaborate stitching that holds the sandwich together is one of its defining elements. A quilt can have many purposes, functional or decorative. “Early quilts from ancient China and Mesoamerica were used as a type of body armor,” Johnson says. “Early American quilts were often used as clothing. This one was originally a petticoat.”
“Wasn’t that awfully heavy to wear?” I ask.
“Yes, but think of how warm it was,” notes Johnson.
Kathy Irvine grew up in Southern California, which one would hardly think of as quilting territory. “My grandmother was a piecer and a hand-quilter in the 1950s,” she
By RogeR MoRRis
TheHuntMagazine.com 63
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