New England Quilt Museum

A few weeks ago, I went to Boston to visit friends and see what had changed around my old stomping grounds.  You know how when you live somewhere, you never get around to doing certain things that visitors and tourists make a point of doing?  Like how when I lived in New York I never got around to visiting the Statue of Liberty even though I really did want to.  When I lived in Boston I always meant to go to the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, and this time I finally went.

the New England Quilt Museum

It’s a small but wonderful collection of American quilts 18th century-present.  Most of what was on display when I was there was 19th century.  It just reminds you how simple, classic designs can look wonderful over and over, reinterpreted in many different fabrics.  And best of all, you can get really close to the quilts and see the stitching.

Going to the museum really shifted my perspective.  Last winter, I became kind of obsessed with Elizabeth Hartman’s The Practical Guide to Patchwork, which I still think is an absolutely brilliant book.  But something I’ve noticed about that book and most of the quilts I’ve been looking at online lately is that they’re all machine-quilted in a meander stitch.  ALL of them.  Every single one.  It’s like no other quilting design exists anymore.  I will say that it keeps that batting in place well and adds visual interest to any quilt, especially a blocky, square-based one, but meander stitch requires either a fancy machine that can do it for you or pretty intense physical exertion.

I also recently had a realization that I just dislike machine quilting (at least with the basic equipment I have on hand).  I don’t mind rotary cutting.  I love piecing.  Putting the quilt sandwich together is pretty fun.  And I even like binding quilts.  But the machine-quilting part is just awful, especially when you’re making a really big quilt.  I did two demo quilts this winter/spring, one for each section of my quilting class.  The small Moda one (about 45″ square) got finished, no problem.  But the king-size feedsack repro quilt is still languishing in a half-finished state at the Studio.  I had machine-quilted about a third of it, in a rectangle pattern 1/4″ inside the seamlines.  But it was boring, tedious, painful…shoving that massive amount of fabric through the machine, easing in the inevitable air bubbles from the linen sashing, rolling and re-rolling the edges to fit through my machine.  Ugh.  So I put it aside for a long time.  But it’s almost quilt weather and I really love the fabrics and want to see them on my bed, so I’ve been brainstorming about what to do and I somehow knew that the quilt museum could help.

The answer turned out to be HAND-quilting.  Once, I tried hand-quilting…for about five minutes and then jumped ship for machine-quilting.  I read a book about it and tried to follow it to the letter–I put the quilt in a huge hoop and tried to rock the needle back and forth for perfect, tiny stitches.  It was a huge drag.  But looking at those antique quilts in the museum convinced me that maybe the stitches don’t need to be tiny and perfect.  Maybe they can just be running stitches and I can quilt it without a frame on my lap while watching movies all winter.  In fact, that’s exactly what Jane Brocket recommends in all of her books, including The Gentle Art of Domesticity and The Gentle Art of Quiltmaking.  It sounds so lovely, old-fashioned, relaxing, and warm and toasty.  (Remind me of this if I get bored halfway through! )

So anyway, I un-machine-quilted my feedsack quilt as soon as I got home (by which I mean I painstakingly seam-ripped all the work I had done) and now it’s all ready for my hand-quilting experiment.  I’m planning to do a Baptist Fan pattern.  I was debating the best way to transfer a fan design onto the quilt and I was shocked to find out that lots of quilters freehand the fan design!  But then I realized that the makers of those 19th-century quilts must have been freehanding too.  So I’m going to try it and see what happens.  Here is the tutorial that made me think it would work.  (Also, from the same quilter–isn’t this Lego ugly quilt awesome?  You use ugly fabrics but since the pieces are so small, they look good.)

My feedsack repro quilt so far.

The only sad thing at the Quilt Museum is that you can’t take any photos (even without a flash) and their gift shop does not have photo postcards of many of the quilts.  There was this amazing potholder quilt that I want to make my own version of.  A potholder quilt (also known as an album quilt or quilt-as-you-go) is one where each block is individually bound and then all the bound pieces (resembling potholders) are hand-stitched together.  For an album quilt, usually the blocks are all made by different people as a gift to someone or for charity.  The potholder quilt I admired was made all by one person with a variety of lightweight twill, home-decorating-sort of fabrics in beautiful floral prints.  There were teals, yellow-creams, rose colors, and jade greens and the binding on each piece was a Chinese red.  The best part is, the blocks were hexagons, not squares.  And each was tied in the middle with wool thread instead of a quilting design.  I wish I had a picture!  Here’s an example of a more traditional potholder quilt.

In my quest to find a photo of the hexagon quilt, I stumbled across this amazing thing called the Quilt Index.  I could browse it all day.  They have photos and descriptions of a lot of the NE Quilt Museum’s collection as well as other collections (such as The International Quilt Study Center & Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska–I totally need to go there!).

So, hand-quilting is my new thing.  What do you think?  How do you feel about machine quilting?  What design do you typically do on your quilts and why?  I’m fascinated by the variety of options out there.

ALSO, has a museum visit or travel sparked a new sewing or craft idea in you recently?  I just love it when that happens.

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