New Quilter Sews Up Great American Contest : Moneca Calvert’s ‘Glorious Lady Freedom’ Earns Her $20,000 and ‘Makes an Impact’

Check your etiquette at the door.

Leave your hat on inside Moneca Calvert’s house. Take off your tie and jam it into an inside pocket, along with scarf and handkerchief. Hold onto your socks.

If somebody asks you to take a seat, decline politely, unless you’re into instant acupuncture.

“If it’s not moving, she’ll quilt it,” says Daye Calvert, Moneca’s husband. Well, Moneca’s husband now .

It used to be that Moneca was Daye’s wife. Homemaker, cook, mother of six. Until 1982.

In 1982, all that changed. Moneca began to quilt. Oh, did she quilt! Not just your cute little coverlets and patchwork and pillows. We’re talking serious quilting here. Wall hangings. Art. Museum-quality stuff.

“I’d done the mother bit, the wife bit,” she says now. “Like so many women, I was . . . I guess you’d call it a ‘closet person.’ I’m not a joiner, didn’t go out much. I mean with six children ?

“So four years ago, I decided to have a career. Yes, just like that. I told my husband, ‘I’m going to have a career.’ I didn’t ask him. It’s just the way it was.

“He was shocked. To tell you the truth, so was I.

“I wasn’t sure what kind of career I was going to have, but it wasn’t going to be clerking at the five and dime. Something professional, for sure. Something a little more artistic. Quilting sounded nice . . . “

Today in New York City--before a hundred critical media types, a dozen of the country’s most respected quilting mavens, a battery of TV cameras--a Calvert quilt, “Glorious Lady Freedom,” is being unveiled at the Museum of American Folk Art.

Chosen from among a thousand of the most colorful spreads since grandma got into the elderberry wine, “Lady” is the winner of the Great American Quilt Contest.

Winner, too, of $20,000, courtesy of Scotchgard, the sponsor. And just as sure as some bright young journalist will write “Moneca Calvert had us in stitches today,” some other bright young journalist, maybe the same one, will ask, “What’re you gonna do with the 20 grand?”

Calvert will smile--almost a redundancy these days--and answer, “Oh, it’ll come in handy.” That’s the way she is.

What Moneca Calvert isn’t is the stereotype of a quilter: little old lady sitting around a sewing circle with the girls, sipping weak tea and working over the preacher’s wife.

Calvert admits to using granny glasses, the result of four months of 10-hour days hunched over “Lady.” (“Some nights, Daye would have to peel me off the table . . . .”) The similarity ends there.

Calvert is trim, energetic, imaginative, and about as good-looking as you can get and still be 47.

She tackled the national contest (centered around the Statue of Liberty Centennial) for two reasons, one relatively selfish, the other unabashedly corny:

“I knew I had to get known , in some fashion, to make an impact, and from there to a career,” she says. “For me, it was to exhibit in contests, because that’s where the editors (of the quilting magazines) see you. That’s how you get published, get a reputation.

“In the last six or seven months, my quilts have made the covers of two magazines--the biggies--but this, the Centennial: This was something special.

“I’d missed the U.S. Bicentennial. It was six years before I’d even begun to quilt, and I hadn’t a clue. But I realize now it was one of the quilting treats of the century--the beginning of a renaissance of quilt making, really--and the whole thing passed me by.

“So I got involved, and then I really got involved. I can’t tell you the things I learned about myself while I was working on ‘Lady.’

“If I was a closet person, well I guess I was a closet patriot as well. I mean, I never trotted down the street waving the flag, but maybe it’s because nobody ever asked me to.

“So I’m sewing and stitching and it’s the Flag and Liberty and I have the radio on and there’s terrorists all over the place . . .

“I began to feel a strength, a pride, a dimension I’ve never felt before. A tie, a strong tie, to my country. It was extraordinary.

“I remember the day I thought, ‘This is what Betsy Ross must have felt like . . . ‘ “

Around the Calvert homestead--one is tempted to say bedspread--are quilted wall-hangings that would do justice to the Bayeux tapestries--product of a mere four years of quilting but an undeniable artistic afflatus.

A non-quilter is hard-pressed to describe, but quick to appraise: stunning.

In Calvert’s work room hangs a piece called “Tropical Reef Fish,” a many-splendored update of the “clamshell” motif, inspired by a stay on Kauai. In the hallway, an intricate six-foot-square quilt with Oriental overtones echoes the scrollwork of a Moroccan mosque. In the living room, a stylized landscape of the California coast is an oil painting in 3-D.

“Anything you want to recede, you put in a lot of stitches,” Calvert explains. “Anything you want to come forward--the cliff, the clouds--you leave the stitches out so it has more of that ‘puffy’ effect. It’s a glorious medium, tactile as well as visual . . . “

Glorious indeed, but does it have more than a tenuous relationship with the traditional quilts of yore?

“Listen,” says Calvert, “any night it gets cold around here, you can grab one of these off the wall and throw it over the bed.”

“I’m no historian,” Calvert says. “Hey, four years ago I didn’t even know there were quilting clubs . But I do know quilting’s been around forever. I think it came from the Chinese. Didn’t everything? Gunpowder, spaghetti . . .”

The patchwork, or piecework, quilt (“crazy quilt” when patches had to be added to patches) is an indigenous American art form, though.

“The first Pilgrims,” Calvert says, “had no textiles, no resources. There weren’t fields of cotton or flax lying about, or a lot of sheep just itching to be sheared.

“It was years before Good King Whoever-He-Was allowed exports from England, so they had to sew up every little scrap of thread they brought over, reprocess everything they had. Sister Sue’s old shift. Grandpa’s long johns.

“It was decades before quilting went beyond strict necessity to the point where women could express their artistry through their quilts. That was their only medium, really, and that’s when those wonderful old patterns were developed.

“There were special quilts, of course--not for everyday but for special guests, like the parson. If the parson ever slept over; that was before my time.

“And then there were the Victorian crazy quilts, kind of a status symbol to show off scraps of material from your finer dresses: velvets, satins, silks. Very fragile, and not too practical for bedding. They were thrown over the back of a sofa, on a piano--but I don’t think you ever saw one on a wall.

“Now it’s come all the way, and they’re actually talking about ‘quilt artists’! “

Somewhere along the line, around about World War II, there was a hiatus. Quilting nearly died out. Rosie went off to rivet. Blankets were easier to buy than make. Barbi, no longer in thrall to Benny, burned her bridges along with her bra.

Quilting was quaint.

Moneca Calvert, born to a more traditional generation, never learned to quilt, but never lost her knack with the needle either.

“Quilting skipped a generation,” she says. “At least a generation. I didn’t have grandmothers around who quilted, nor did my mother. They didn’t have to make quilts.”

Calvert didn’t have to sew, either. Only if she wanted dresses.

“My mother was widowed when I was 15,” she says. “We were almost among the ‘have-nots,’ and had I not sewn, I wouldn’t have had much to wear.

“I’d learned to sew at 7 or 8, and what I made in my teens wasn’t all that difficult. Fashions weren’t as glamorous as they are now, and being a native Californian, I didn’t need the heavy stuff.

“I chose to marry when I got out of high school, simply because I was told there was no way I could go to art college. It was so expensive, and I had no encouragement.

“I’ve always had a feel for art, and I would have loved to have taken college classes just to find which direction to take.

“But I married and got three children and then married my second husband, Daye, and got three more overnight. Mother of six, at 27!

“I put in my time with them, and him, and one day I just decided it was time to have my own career.”

Calvert exhibits now, and teaches and lectures on the fine art of quilting. “They pay my travel and expenses and a fee!” she exclaims, with undisguised glee. “And now this!”

“Glorious Lady Freedom” is an extraordinary blend of innovation and tradition. (“I have to do my own patterns,” Calvert says, “and I may break the ‘rules,’ but I make up my own. At the same time, I try to maintain that delicious feeling of an old, traditional quilt.”)

“America the Beautiful” hums through the prize-winning piece--purple mountains, amber waves of grain, fruited plains, even a snippet from the second verse: an “alabaster city,” a k a the Big Apple. Old Glory paints the landscape from sea to shining sea, and Lady Liberty looks you square in the eye, daring you to deny this handsome, liberated Californian her place among America’s best quilters, her $20,000.

Others have tried, and failed.

“When I told Daye four years ago that I had made this conscious decision to have a quilting career--I had no idea what I meant --he was threatened, totally against it,” says Calvert.

“It’s a generational thing. He’s 53 and was raised in a family where father was God and King and Head of the Table.

“The first two years were tough. He summed the whole thing up in one sentence: ‘This is a complete waste of your time and my money.’ ”

Things have changed. Daye, a contractor, started to cook, in self-defense. “He’s very competitive,” Moneca Calvert says fondly. “He’s a former race-car driver.”

“So what happens? He not only learns to bake, he enters his baked goods in the state fair and walks away with most of the prizes.”

Sure, but does he quilt? “You’ve gotta be kidding,” says Daye, who calls himself a “quilt widower” but sneaks a look of pure pride at his wife--when she’s not looking, of course.

Moneca Calvert, for her part, is not even thinking of looking back.

“They used to say,” she muses, “that what constitutes a good quilt maker is one who has made a quilt for each of her children and grandchildren.

“But life’s too short. Hey, I’m already 14 quilts behind . . . “