International Quilt Museum, QUILTS episode

[Music] this is national quilting day we get around 700 people come through I brought an Ohio star it's pieced and machine quilted I used to hand quilt everything I did but I got older and wiser that controls the speed it actually works with a receiver it's not a quote until it's three pieces it's got to be the top the batting and the back it's a sandwich clothing is huge there are six to ten million quilters in the US alone it's a three point seven billion dollar industry people who love to do it love it with a passion I just love the textiles all the different colors and the way it feels in my hands there's something about working with your hands and that accomplishment of creating something the International Quilt Museum has the world's largest publicly held collection almost 6,000 quilts and related textiles this is early 1700s about 1710 to 1750 made to be put over the wedding bed on the wedding night we use quilts to mark significant events in our lives quilts are the embodiment of the maker a quilt reflects that person was important to them quilts can tell us the makers socioeconomic status their time period quilts can teach us math quilts can teach us design and color they can teach us history they can teach us politics they can teach us about the human struggle we often times to say quilts are the textile pages of our shared history and that's kind of a big sentence but it's really true it just makes you smile doesn't it what we've pulled out here today is our most famous crazy quilt I think one of the most famous in the world it's actually titled my crazy dream the maker Moses Ricard embroidered that on the quote with her name we also have this fabulous image of mrs. Ricard I think I've seen that on one other quilt in all my time that I've worked with quilts crazy quilts arose in the last quarter of the 19th century crazy quilts represented this big shift in quilt making where quilts came out of the bedroom and into the parlor they became decorative objects that were intended to be looked at more than used it's hard to overstate what a phenomenon crazy quilts were people would write letters to the editor angry about women and their insatiable lust for fabric and how it needed to be stopped tailors had to stop giving out samples because women would never come back to buy actual fabric there were poems and songs written about crazy quilts I don't think anything like that has happened in quilting since it's dated over a 35 year span the real irony is that it's not finished it's actually not backed when we talk about you know you're you're high in typical crazy quilt elements this has it you see the fans in the four corners this spiderweb with the full spider and the fly three-dimensional forms on there all of the different imagery and then every single piece of fabric she went back and added more stitching to it it's like she just couldn't quit the crazy quilt phenomenon was really huge because it was the first that was really promoted in women's magazines and they would show quilts and inspire people those styles that we see became much more widespread early on what we saw were regional styles so you would make something like you saw your neighbor make that you loved people were learning by seeing each other's quilts what we see here in the Midwest especially with the Ogallala Sioux or Lakota tribe is this adaptation of what we would have called a blazing star or star Bethlehem pattern that star quilt has become a hugely important part of the Lakota giveaway ceremonies Native Americans found a way to make that style of their own [Music] when quilts come back from exhibit they are isolated for a period of two weeks vacuuming is the only mechanical cleaning that we do here at the Museum it removes all dust it looks like a minor task but it's actually very important dust on a microscopic level will eventually cut and break the fibers and textiles we never wash a quilt ever if it comes in with the stain the stain remains on the quilt when you volunteer here you get to see everything you get to touch everything every quilt has to be refold at at least once every two years so every year we've got to refold over 3,000 quilts this is a special quilt it came into the museum just as a top they've dated it back to about the 1880s they wanted to quilt it up so it can go on exhibit in places it's not a collector's quilt there are stains that were on the shirts before the quilter cut them up and used them and it is just basic shirting February but to me it's an iconic quilt it represents probably 95% of the quilts made west of the Missouri in the last half the nineteenth century the quilters were in places where they couldn't buy fabric they could only use what they had and they didn't have a lot but when she sat down to make this she couldn't help herself she had that creativity and she poured it into this thing these non Blues are not placed randomly she puts them so when you step back from it they disappear and what you get is a depth of blue and white you wouldn't get if it was just blue and white and when she cut him up she made sure that the ayane's in the fabric she marked him and cut him so they were right they were pleasing all the way around so you take only what you've got and you put that creativity into it even though it's just a utility quilt and you get something that is just absolutely remarkable when a quilter puts themselves into this somehow that quilt still holds on to their spirit their mojo it's still in here [Music] every year the quilts of Valor Foundation has a national so day the International Quilt Museum here in Lincoln provide the space for us to be a part of this day we here in Lincoln award most of our quilts of Valor at our local Vet Center and we have awarded two hundred and twelve thousand books of Valor across the country our goal this year is to reach 300 thousand things I myself have made sixty quilts it's always a special moment because it means I'm going to tear up but it's a special moment because it means so much to our vets it's a way of honoring our vets and the service that they have provided to our country the gift of a quilt is an amazing thing I it is a transcendent thing it's not like an object it's it's about giving something much more than that and it's art of course but it's also memory and history and so much work so many hundreds if not thousands of hours have gone into the making of a quilt that it has a kind of to me priceless nature to it most collectors tend to collect quilts in specific genres Ken Burns chooses quilts for his collection on the basis of whether or not they speak to him so it's his personality it's his interests it's his love of America and history you can see all of those passions reflected back in his collection I spend my entire professional life trying to wrestle complex stories to the ground there's something incredibly liberating about being drawn to a quilt just for its business but I'm not collecting them because they speak particularly to a historical period or particular fads or styles and quilt-making but because the quilt that was completed is a work of art to me the collector is hugely important they really are generous with their collections because what they want is to see those quilts preserve and save because they know that that's such an important record of our history I hate to say owned I don't feel like I'm owning them as much as I am sort of protecting them I found myself really drawn to the historical nature of them to the hidden stories that they seemed to suggest an almost anonymous art form and that it's women's work we tend to marginalize the work of women and I find that a completely foolish loss we miss out on a huge part of our citizens expressions of themselves their lives their interests their art I think that in textiles is a kind of DNA of a culture and I certainly feel that in the case of American quilts that it is a kind of wonderful mix of styles and designs and colors and peoples who are negotiating sometimes you know hard lives in mostly rural America and the byproduct is to me so joyous I think that this is the record of a country is written not just in the sequence of presidential administrations punctuated by wars but in fact in the bottom up story of so-called ordinary people for me a quilt is very much that expression of who we are in the best kind of way [Music] most ESCO no see those is the traveling exhibit of the migrant quilt project this project represents an artistic archival of the loss of lives in the desert the quilts of the migrant quilt project tell the story or the border crossers who lost their lives out there in the desert we periodically find migrant clothing where they've loved many many items behind it occurred to me maybe these fabrics could speak to the migration of people seeking a better way of life I started collecting materials from taking them home and washing them and I thought of memorializing all these people who have died crossing the desert by creating a quilt I made one quilt and then I wanted to do another year so I found quilters to make another quilt now we get people from all over the country wishing to make a quilt since 2000 the migrant quilt project has grown to 18 quilts one for every year that the medical examiner has been keeping track of the people who've been dying I asked the quilters to incorporate as much of the clothing as possible into their design they have to put somewhere on the face the quilt Tucson sector and the calendar year and then I supply them with the list of the people who died we identify who they are if we can or put the word des conocido which means unknown and we honor their lives the quilters know that these quilts need to go back to the migrant quill project so we can continue with these of it as a collection [Music] [Music] I think this is the crowd favorite without a doubt I love this piece yes so much this is just so unique on every level every level yes I think everybody had a button box at home she just had an amazing way to use them the way she chose her buttons hmm the way she placed the red buttons the large green buttons it's just so beautifully thought out she's attached it to seersucker we believe it might be a tablecloth I find the back really charming even though you can hardly see it she's added just sweet little crochet border I love the attention to detail do we know how much this quilt weighs about 45 pounds it looks like it was all made as one piece the construction itself is just amazing to me I cannot comprehend somebody putting that many buttons on anything [Music] when I would first go into our storage room where we have thousands of quilts and you'd walk in there and there was just something so powerful about all those lives that were represented by those quilts every stitch you're it's meditative you're thinking about what happened you're thinking about who you're making it for and I would feel that presence of all those lives in that room and it was really magical it's just so wonderful to be studying and working with quilts you

Channel: Craft in America

Views: 29,914

Keywords: craft, craft in america, pbs, crafting, craftsman, craftsmanship, hand, handmade, handwork, handcraft

Id: teu6wUfP6ao

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 27 2019