Originally Posted by
Quiltbugger
For me, it has been a reach back to the past and my silly belief that life was simpler then. It really was not, but the women seemed calmer when they quilted and I wanted to feel tied to our creative history. They were "green" and their quilts were utility, but they seemed beautiful to me. Of course we can buy quilts cheaper, but quilting, piecing and making a stash is truly relaxing, though I need to stop buying!
Now that I'm a quiltmaker, I think often of my maternal grandmother, who had eight children (seven of them girls including a set of twins!) to cook for and sew for every day in an era with no modern conveniences and not a lot of money. I no longer have one of her quilts but I remember a Dutch girl quilt that I slept under as a child; I can still remember the fabric pattern and color (and that's been a LONG time ago!). I'd give anything to have even a corner of it left. I believe quilting was her outlet from all the hard, backbreaking, unceasing work she did every day of her life, that it was a creative art that fulfilled and calmed her when she had a few minutes at the end of the day to sit and sew something besides children's clothes or household goods. And, although I think she had a sewing machine later in her life, I'm sure she hand pieced all her quilts and I know she handquilted them. My mother, who was a tomboy, an outdoor girl, and an adventurer (she loved photography and in another era might have been a professional) did not inherit her mother's domestic skills. She could sew but didn't like it, and she never learned to crochet. She made one quilt in her life (obligatory for a family of girls, I think), a string quilt, which I do have. She used to say that I got the genes that had skipped her. In a world that was both practical and with more work and fewer entertainments than today, quilting was a necessity, a pastime, a creative art, and an outlet. I suppose the same is true today!