By PAUL CHAVEZ
Associated Press | Posted: Friday, April 25, 2008 12:00 am
There's a growing subculture out there, 27.7 million people strong, for an old-fashioned pursuit: quilting.
Much like knitting before it, quilting has thrown off its grandmotherly trappings to become a hipster hobby. Modern quilters might be as likely to design patterns online and meet in chat rooms as to start up an old-fashioned quilting bee.
Meg Cox, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and quilter, explores this new world in her recently published 600-page book, "The Quilter's Catalog." The comprehensive guide offers quilters suggestions on tools and techniques, and includes 12 step-by-step projects from celebrity teachers.
Cox shared her thoughts on quilting in this question-and-answer session:
What has contributed to this quilting revival?
There are several factors. It's fascinating to me that it's not so much that quilting has been revived, but that's it's been completely reinvented. My mother taught me 20 years ago and after the bicentennial - a lot of people were doing it partly for nostalgia and they were doing it in an old-fashioned way. Everything was by hand or you were cheating and it's completely, completely changed now. A big reason for that is technology and particularly computers. And not just that the sewing machines today are computerized, but there's an enormous use of the Internet for community, for commerce and even for learning how to quilt. …
There are a million Web sites and there's one huge one, sort of the Amazon.com for quilters, called eQuilter.com. There's all this information and on top of that people are using their home inkjet printers to print photographs onto fabric and then making quilts out of those.
Where the art comes in, I don't want to diss knitters or anything, but I think when people make a sweater they don't think in the back of their head that it's going to end up in a sweater museum. But quilts have been recognized for some time now as an art form. There's a growing art quilt movement. Even if you're making a basic quilt, you're realizing that it's very creative. Quilts do hang in museums.
Is the popularity of quilting part of a larger movement, perhaps a return to more traditional crafts?
I don't really know. Obviously knitting is enjoying a wonderful resurgence. There are some similarities in that knitting has been reinvented as well. It's hipper now, the patterns look different. It's not your grandmother's quilt world and it's not your grandmother's knitting. And that's given it life, it's taken it to a new audience. It's given people different imagery and they've taken it for themselves.
In the same way, in quilting, a 20th century phenomenon is the T-shirt quilt. That's a really wonderful thing, a lot of people are making those and it's a great thing to send your kid off to college with. …
It's partly, I think, that for women this is in our blood or something. Working with your hands and making a one-of-a-kind thing in a time where everything is mass produced and everything is so homogenized, it's incredibly satisfying. Whether you're quilting or knitting, that's one of the reasons why you're doing it.
The Quilter's Catalog has a 19-page index. How does a former Wall Street Journal reporter end up with a book like this?
When I was the Wall Street Journal I asked my mother to teach me, and that was 20 years ago. And it was like my little closet side activity. I didn't know anybody who quilted and it was just this thing between me and my mother. The whole quilt world was out there changing and I didn't know anything about it.
I had done two books on family traditions and was continuing to quilt and suddenly I realized there had been this amazing transformation and I found it very exciting. I sort of thought about it like a Wall Street Journal reporter and I sort of pretended that I was the Wall Street Journal's quilting reporter and I went out there to do what I would've done, which is to talk to the very top people in the quilt world and follow the money and figure out what the trends were.
I was just shocked by what I found, the level of entrepreneurship, the amount of money and energy and at the same time I was totally getting into it as a quilter, looking at these gorgeous fabrics. It took me more than six years. I have a rejection letter that dates back to the summer of 2001 and I had already been working on it for a while.
What did you find out about quilters that you didn't know before?
I actually surveyed over 300 quilters and asked them why they did it and why it meant so much to them. It was surprising the number of people who said they did it because they wanted to make something that would outlast them.
The other thing that surprised me was how many men were doing it. It's still a tiny percentage, but there are more of them than ever and they are more visible than ever. Some of them are formerly teachers and there's a brand new quilting magazine that's edited by a guy and he actually puts his face on the cover every month like Oprah. That surprised me, too.