How Quilts Evolved From Necessities To Art
Try to imagine what it’s like to grow up on a remote property in a cold climate. Every day is a struggle for survival. You can’t afford to waste a thing. What little money that comes in through your labors is spent on necessities like clothing for your family. You wear those clothes until they are almost completely worn out.
You know the value of your possessions and don’t let anything go to waste. Therefore, when your clothes wear out, you keep the remaining scraps and use them for making things like curtains and bed covers. The bed coverings made from those scraps are called quilts. The first quilt sets were laboriously hand sewn from small scraps of worn out clothes.
Since the winters are bitterly cold, you need to create insulation in your quilts. You have noticed that your geese and your ducks fluff up their feathers when they are cold. You take a cue from them and save all the feathers and down for filling your quilts. After awhile, you’ve got a fluffy quilt that keeps you warm on even the coldest nights. Ah, luxury!
You have plenty of time to kill through the long winter days and nights. With nothing else to divert your attention, you devote your time to making a special quilt and pillow cases from the best bits of cloth in your collection. You fill this quilt and those pillows with the best goose down you have. Instead of keeping them for your own use, you sell them in the local market.
On one random day at the market, a wealthy woman from town notices your handiwork. She is so impressed that she commissions you to make a down quilt for her. She will supply you with the cloth, because yours is far too coarse for her. You gratefully accept her offer.
No one can say for sure who made the first luxury quilt set, but it’s a good bet its origin was something like that described above. Even though modern quilts are rarely hand-stitched, there is still a mystique about patchwork quilts. As a matter of fact, a famous quilt artist learned her craft by stitching together quilts in a tiny stone dwelling in her freezing Orkney island home.
Today, that woman lives on a larger farm in the Kentucky hills. She no longer makes patchwork quilts for her family. She makes works of art that hang in some of the best galleries in America. Her husband doesn’t have to cut firewood with a handsaw, but he still cuts his own, using husqvarna chainsaws. She and her large family still live modestly, even though she is a well known artist.
What is the moral to this story? There may not be one, but it’s interesting, isn’t it, how a humble craft learned from necessity can be transformed into art.
Making Foam Masks for Kid’s Crafts : Adding Feathers to Chickadee Mask
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Wilton 14 Inch Featherweight Piping Bag $3.04 A 14″ featherweight decorating bag. Premium quality polyester is strong flexible and durable for years of decorating fun, specially coated so grease will not seep through. Contains 1 white bag…. |
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Wilton 10 Inch Featherweight Piping Bag $2.00 A 10″ featherweight decorating bag. Premium quality polyester is strong flexible and durable for years of decorating fun, specially coated so grease will not seep through. Contains 1 white bag…. |
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Wilton 8-Inch Featherweight Decorating Bag $1.30 This pastry bag’s small size makes it a handy tool for detail work in decorating. The grease repellent coating means your hands won’t slip in the middle of delicate piping, giving you better control. And it withstands boiling or dishwasher treatment–your icing won’t come out tasting like the paté you prepared last week. Use again and again. –Otts Bolisay… |
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Feather Craft $29.99 … |
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Milescraft 1407 D/TFeatherBoard Dual or Tandem FeatherBoards for Router Tables and Table or Band Saws $21.28 The Milescraft Model 1407 D/TFeatherBoard has the dual slide motion and unique pre-load tension design features of the 1406 FeatherBoard and includes a sturdy spacer for tall stock cutting operations. The D/TFeatherBoard includes two 3/4-Inch and two 5/8-Inch miter bars as well as four T-Slot bolts allowing it to be used as either dual OR tandem feather boards in nearly any application on router t… |
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Easy Instant Decoration Wall Sticker Decal – Hope Bicycle $8.21 Become an interior decorator and transform your living space from ordinary to extraordinary with this unique Hope Bicycle wall decal sticker! With this sticker you’ll be sure to add plenty of fun, depth, and individuality apart from the average home. You can adorn the interior walls and windows of your home, bathroom, office, nursery, dorm, or store. Get creative and apply them to furniture, such … |
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Tablesaw Seven Pack: Downloadable Woodworking Plan $4.95 Precision Miter Stop: Make it in minutes, use it as a lifetime addition to your shop. Tablesaw Hold-Down System: Birds of feather work wonders together. In this case, we’re talking about a feather board system, including a fence anti-lift mechanism that gives you additional stock control and safety. Zero-Clearance Crosscut Sled: Ditch the miter gauge to increase the accuracy of your bencht… |
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Free Motion…Fun with Feathers! Volume 3 $26.49 For intermediate and advanced free motion machine quilters. If you are captivated by the gracious curves of a flowing feather and looking for innovative feather spine designs, then this DVD is for you! This third volume of feather motifs explores the feather spine as a new focus for design work. Whether you make traditional quilts or contemporary quilts, there are feather spine designs to enhance … |
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Free Motion…Fun with Feathers! Volume 4 $36.95 Skill level: Intermediate to Advanced. If you’re looking for easy ways to add interest and innovative design ideas to your feather borders, then this 2-disc DVD set is for you. Feathered borders will never be the same! From the basic continuous feather border, to different types of centered feather border designs, to a series of feather wave borders, to feathered swag borders, this DVD will cover … |
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Frank Russell’s Power Carving Fur, Feathers, & Fins: How to Carve with Foredom Power Tools and Accessories $25.34 With more than three hours of instructional material, this DVD details the steps involved in transforming blocks of tupelo wood into carvings of the cottontail rabbit, mallard drake duck, and smallmouth bass. Viewers will learn everything needed for these projects, from power carving basics, such as roughing out a blank, to making finishing touches, including detailed segments on expertl… |
