Quilts & Heritage

For some reason, when I started doing posts about crafting and charity, I thought I might run out quickly. Ha! Crafters are one of the more charitable groups of people I’ve ever seen, there’s always someone wanting to get involved and use his/her skills for someone else. Knitting/crocheting and quilting alone gives me an endless supply of possibilities, not to mention the folks who sell their goods for charity.

My recent rediscovery of my Amish-inspired quilts prompted me to take a look at heritage quilts and heritage projects about quilts. Quilts are a very versatile medium, capable of depicting almost anything in fabric and thread (and other mediums, too). They are also a very practical medium. Everybody needs a blanket, so in tough times when other sorts of means of expression were out of the question due to resource and time constraints, quilts were often the method by which people’s creativity shined through. Quilts were a way to make something beautiful, to tell women’s stories, to record and commemorate important events like weddings, to bring together varied groups for social interaction, and of course to use up scraps that couldn’t be wasted to boot.

As a once-frontier nation, American has a huge quilt history. In fact, quilting was really quite altered when it traveled here, and became something it hadn’t been before.

I’ve discovered there are some organizations dedicated to preserving the history of quilting. There are a lot of resources available through these organizations for learning about quilting.  Today I’m highlighting the national Alliance for American Quilts.  This is a treasure trove of information about quilts and quilters.  The Alliance is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving quilt heritage.  They run a variety of efforts designed to foster knowledge and preserve history.  The operate in partnership with others, including museums, educational institutions and local quilt organizations.

The Alliance has A LOT of projects going, and has partnered with a number of organizations to bring this effort to life.  I’m impressed at the variety of efforts and the real effort toward preservation and information outreach.

1. The Center for The Quilt Online is the Alliance’s home for outreach and education.
2. Quilters’ S.O.S. - Save Our Stories is a project to get and save the stories of contemporary quilters.  Operated with the Center For The Quilt at the Center for American Material Culture Studies, University of Delaware.
3. Quilt Treasures: is an oral history project about 1960s and 1970s quilters. Operated with the Center For The Quilt at the Michigan State University Museum and the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.
4. Boxes Under the Bed™: is an archival effort targeting quilt ephemera - patterns, letters, and other related items.  Pending partnership with the Center for American History, University of Texas.
5. The Quilt Index is the educational effort of the Alliance, and operates alongside MATRIX, the Center for Humane Arts and Letters OnLine and the MSU Museum based at Michigan State University, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Illinois State Museum, the University of Louisville Archives and Records Center, the Tennessee State Library, the Library of Congress American Folklife Center, The Kentucky Quilt Project, Inc., and Quilts of Tennessee are all Index partners.
6. H-Quilts is the forum of the Alliance for sharing information about the Alliance’s ongoing work.  This effort is conducted with the American Quilt Study Group and MATRIX, the Center for Humane Arts and Letters OnLine.