But, please remember how these are made....often in slave labor camps overseas. The fabrics are knockoffs, the patterns are knockoffs. ALL of this imported quilts business started in the very early 1990s when the Smithsonian Institution SOLD patterns of our heritage quilts - including those of renowned slave quilter Harriette Powers - to an import company who then started mass producing them in very poor quality and selling at ridiculously low prices. Our American heritage art, on the import market, devalued and mass produced!
Karey Bresenham who started the Houston International Quilt Festival, started a petition against this (Oh I can't even think of a word for it!) disaster, demanding that no more such items be sold by the Institute, and took it to Congress, where the heinous action was stopped.
From that point, the overseas manufacturer had to develop their own patterns and print more of their own fabric designs, no longer copying Jinny Beyer's and others designs. Also from that point, slowly the laborers began to improve their quilting skills. But the quality was still not comparable to quilts being produced by individual artists, and their sale continued to devalue to work our quilters are doing in the public's eye.
If we continue to support this particular importing of quilts by buying them or failing to advise others of this travesty of production, then we can not complain when we find it difficult to sell our own work for a fair price.
Jan in VA