Antique quilts

Although it has always been much more difficult for women to find acceptance as artists than men, it is even tougher when the medium is not paint, charcoal, watercolour or clay, but simple fabric. It wasn't until the Louvre mounted a spectacular collection of antique American quilts back in 1974 that the international art world admitted that their sophistication, craftsmanship and beauty forced acceptance of their anonymous creators as artists of the highest order. And what is so magical about old quilts is that many of the finest ones are just made of scraps, while ones from new, specially bought fabrics, for a bride's quilt, say, can be pallid and uninteresting.

A long time ago, I joined a quilting group at the local church in Keene, Ontario, a little village just a few miles from the farm we'd just bought. The women were welcoming, but made it clear that the minimum requirement for their members was eight stitches per inch, a generous concession given that the best quilters insist on 12 to 18 stitches per inch. The group, made up mainly of farmers' wives, would refuse to quilt a top that had any visible machine stitching. Inspired by their examples, I later went off on a Paris sabbatical with my family, carting with me a bag of carefully cut pieces for a brown and cream Bear's Paw pattern. Once there, however, I spent all my time at cooking school and to this day those pieces sit in forlorn little bags in a trunk, waiting to be put together for the Keene women to quilt.

But I have finished lots of quilts in my day, most of them baby quilts, almost all out of old Liberty lawn blouses I wore long ago. The prettiest were often simple squares in rows with no discernible pattern; if the fabrics are wonderful, and wonderfully matched, these can be amazing.

I also buy quilts. I get them at auctions or from dealers and some of the best were only $50 or so. Some are frayed and I mend them; others are faded and torn and may only have a few good corners; these I fold gently and use to decorate the arm of a sofa at the cottage. Whatever the condition, I think of the woman who pieced it and the church group that quilted it; I think of the gossip around the quilting frame, the squares and cookies passed at tea time, the friendship that is woven into every tiny stitch, the humble good works done in the community with the few dollars the groups would charge to do the quilting.

My two best quilts were handed down through the family. From my husband's family, made by David's grandmother in Treherne, Manitoba, about 80 years ago, comes an exquisite Wedding Ring pattern in pastels with a scalloped edge; from my father's side in Illinois there is an appliquéd Rose of Sharon wedding quilt, made by my great-great-grandmother at least 130 years ago. The story goes that she made cottage cheese and used to ride her horse around the countryside selling it to make the money to pay for the materials to make the quilt. My mother, never interested in quilts, used to say she would have preferred the recipe for the cottage cheese. The worst mistake I ever made with a textile was to hang this beautiful quilt on a wall in the old farm's playroom. I knew enough to keep it out of the light, but in those days many of my friends still smoked and that, along with the depredations of an old wood stove, caused the white cotton backing to yellow. I've taken it to various textile experts for a fix and they just shake their heads.