Quilting Reflects Creative Culture

Quilting inspiration is all around Deb Heatherly’s home studio just off the Blue Ridge Parkway in Western North Carolina. 

Deep windows frame a view of the mountains on the horizon, over treetops and the roofs of houses in the valley below. The monochromatic transition from white clouds to blue sky to nearly lavender mountains evokes the current rage for ombre quilt designs that play with shades of a single color. 

The ever-changing seasonal landscape sparks Heatherly’s latest interpretations of patchwork designs that replicate maple leaves and spring flowers. 

On a long shelf above the bank of windows in her studio, a row of antique toy sewing machines is lined up like preschoolers out for a walk. Folded quilts peek from the glass doors of antique cabinets. Heatherly’s sewing machines, computer workstation and product samples are as organized as one might expect from someone who has built a national following for simplifying complex quilting geometry into easy-to-use rulers and techniques. 

Quilts are everywhere in the Smoky Mountains, so much a part of the landscape that it’s easy to overlook them unless you’re purposefully looking. 

Stores in downtown Franklin, North Carolina, use red-and-white patchwork as a backdrop for Scottish kilts and as prime examples of local handcrafts. The Macon County, North Carolina, Historical Society and Museum integrates quilts into seasonal window displays. Quilt shops carrying fabric and tools and offering classes and quilting services draw locals and tourists alike, and provide a steady stream of income to instructors and people who provide specialty quilting services. 

Woven into the creative culture as a thrifty, practical and aesthetically satisfying craft, quilting is also a powerful economic force in Smoky Mountain communities. Making and selling quilts is the least of it. The Smokies are home to a community of women—they’re nearly always women—who design quilt patterns and tools, who teach, and who host quilt retreats and events that draw free-spending quilters from around the country. 

Cozy, creative, cash flow

“I get to play with all the crayons,” says Heatherly, pointing to the bolts of green, gray, pink and blue fabrics standing like oversized books on a shelf in her studio. She designed the fabrics—just the latest step in her evolving career and national reputation. 

She learned sewing, but not quilting, from her mother, an accomplished home seamstress. When Heatherly became intrigued by quilting—she fell in love with a now-fading trend of reproduction Civil War fabrics—she found the perfect application for her aptitude for math. One challenge for today’s quilters, who have an abundance of fabrics and designs, is how to continually sharpen their technical skills to produce precisely stitched patchwork while still having fun playing with color and design. 

Many dread calculating the mathematical formulas required to confirm that cut and stitched patchwork pieces will fit correctly. A few years ago, as Heatherly was working the formulas for a project, she was struck with the notion of creating a clear acrylic ruler printed with outlines of finished pieces. The ruler would enable a quilter to stitch a piece as accurately as she could, then trim off bothersome wavy edges that would add up, over dozens of tiny seams, to a mismatched patchwork that failed to deliver the envisioned product. 

“I don’t have an engineering degree, so the fact that the cat’s cradle ruler worked for me—well, I knew it would work for others, too,” Heatherly said, referring to the ruler she invented for a classic arrangement of triangles. The new tool was—and is—an instant best-seller and opened a new career for Heatherly as a designer, instructor and innovator, both at workshops she hosts and online. 

Waynesville resident Kim Polson is all in on quilting: She represents a major fabric brand to shop owners in the Southeast, and in 2009 converted a rental property to a quilt retreat destination. Having added a second, larger house as another retreat venue where quilters can rendezvous to sew and socialize, she has now hosted over 450 events. 

Quilters come from all over for small-group classes or to meet with like-minded friends at retreats hosted by Polson, Heatherly and others. Those quilters bring more than ambitions for their projects: they also bring money that they expect to spend at quilt shops, local events, restaurants and activities. “It helps our economy, which is great,” said Polson, who reports that the 180 shop owners she serves as a manufacturer’s rep count on a steady stream of traveling quilters to complement sales to local quilters.

Enthusiastic quilters don’t hesitate to spend on fabric, supplies and services. Quilts, Inc., the Houston-based company that puts on international quilt shows for the industry and for the public, found in its most recent survey of quilters that those who are most into the craft spend an average of $3,363 annually on fabric, supplies, classes and gear. About a quarter of “avid” quilters attend shows. With an estimated 6 million to 8.3 million households including a quilter, that translates into a lot of women traveling to exhibits, shows, classes and workshops, all with the express intent of spending money, time and camaraderie on their projects and with other quilters. 

Retreats, classes and shows are ever more important as quilters use digital media for daily sharing and troubleshooting, said Abby Glassenberg, president of the Craft Industry Alliance, a national guild of professional crafters and artisans. “After they connect online and follow specific designers and quilt makers, they want to meet those people and be taught by them in person,” Glassenberg said. “They want the experience of being creative together.” 

But unlike the old-fashioned quilting bee, comprised of women who gathered for a day to side-by-side stitch together the layers of patchwork, cotton fill, and fabric backing, today’s quilters work on their own projects. They typically want to learn from an accomplished teacher or designer, In days past, women learned the basics as children and came to a bee knowing what to do and how to do it. Jamie Starbuck Plant, who lives and runs a quilt retreat destination near Franklin, picked up quilting in earnest when she needed a project to occupy herself while caring for her father-in-law at the end of his life. That was back in the mid-1980s, just as new tools and techniques were infusing quilting with efficiencies that enable acolytes to produce more, better, faster. “I try to provide a peaceful place for quilters, because a lot of them are caretaking, and they need a respite,” says Plant. “It’s a zen place. “

Mountain culture, re-invented 

American’s collective perception that quilting is a craft of thrift, making something beautiful out of leftover materials, has only been true for the last couple of generations, says Diana Bell-Kite, curator of cultural history at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, and one of the curators who created the current “QuiltSpeak” exhibit. 

In the Victorian period, mass production of inexpensive cotton fabrics resulted in plenty of fabric scraps that housewives would repurpose into quilts by trimming them into shapes that could be stitched together to form designs. Throughout the two World Wars and the Great Depression, mill ends, dressmaking scraps and found fabrics from seed bags and other sources provided enough bits and pieces for quilters to create new things from byproducts. In the 1920s, a first flush of appreciation for Colonial and frontier crafts helped elevate quilts to collectible status, she said. 

All that changed in the post-war boom, says Bell-Kite. Machine-made blankets and coverlets were inexpensive and plentiful, undermining the practical value of quilts. And in the 1960s and 1970s, synthetic fabrics incompatible with quilting replaced cotton fabrics for home sewing. 

The bicentennial changed all that as historians—professional and amateur—searched for clues to women’s experiences of the American Revolution. Suddenly, quilts were not only practical, and artistic, but also a feminist statement. That interest in re-creating antique quilts sparked enough interest in the craft to support the development of new tools. New tools required classes to teach home sewists how to apply their garment-making skills to quilting, and the industry was reborn. 

In the past two decades, three distinct styles of quilting have emerged. Modern quilters take their cues from midcentury abstract design, often working with wide planes of flat color and sharp geometry. Art quilters consider fabric their medium for pretty-not-practical wall hangings that frequently incorporate buttons, embroidery and other surface decoration. Traditional quilters love to recreate and reinterpret classic designs. Quilts, Inc., reports that 85 percent of quilters say they prefer the traditional style; 20 percent, art quilting; and 37 percent, modern, with some listing two or more styles as their favorites.

Now, says, Bell-Kite, quilting has come full circle in that many pursue it for self and artistic expression. Before the Civil War, quilting was largely the provenance of “wealthy women, and by enslaved women owned by wealthy women, who made appliqué quilts not because someone was cold, but as showpieces, to show they could afford expensive fabrics and to showcase their needlework,” she said. 

Many of today’s quilters aim to warm both body and soul, Heatherly said. While many of the quilters who come to Smoky Mountain retreats intend to fulfill their artistic goals, “some quilts are mainly labors of love,” she said. “They are gifts to someone, and that’s the value of them.”