Spreads Not Just for Beds Anymore : From Church Parlors to Art Galleries, Quilting Craze Covers America

Readily and steadily every Wednesday, the ladies of Grace Lutheran Church gather with their thimbles and shears to share neighborhood news, brag about the grandchildren and--oh yes--to quilt.

It is quintessential quilting, a throwback to simpler times and a bittersweet reminder of America’s homespun heritage. It is also a springboard to a proud, new age for women and a flash of the up-and-coming in avant-garde art.

From the church halls of southwestern Pennsylvania to the galleries of New York and the museums of Los Angeles, quilts are making a comeback. Whether traditional or contemporary in design, they’re in and they’re hot.

“A lot of it is nostalgia, and the fact that people understand and can relate to quilts,” says Michael Kile, publisher of The Quilt Digest Press in San Francisco. “A lot of it is that it’s women’s art, and a lot of women have been longing--and quite rightfully so--for women’s art to be shown.

“And, I think, there’s just something about quilts. They’re just wonderful objects, probably because they were made with so much love.”

‘Most Tender Artifact’

“To me, they’re the most tender, the most endearing artifact one can have,” said Sandi Fox, who directs the American Quilt Research Center at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, scheduled to open in 1988. “It is in many ways a trying, somehow, to come to grips with the consequences of a plastic-oriented society.”

Sentiment aside, quilt collecting also has become widespread, and it can be lucrative. An 1840 Baltimore Album quilt fetched the most ever paid for a quilt--$176,000--at Sotheby’s auction house in New York in January.

“It’s more interesting to collect quilts than to be in the stock market,” says Ardis James, an ardent collector who lives in the New York suburbs. She’s paid as much as $7,000 for a quilt.

James and her husband, Robert, are adding a room to their home, with display platforms and controlled humidity and temperature, to house their collection of about 250 quilts.

“We don’t have a microwave, we don’t have lots of things,” James said. “We don’t want them. We live simply, but we buy quilts.”

Tradition From England

Quilting, the technique of stitching together two layers of fabric with stuffing in between, was a functional craft among America’s colonists, most of whom brought the tradition with them from Britain. Quilting went west with the pioneer women, as portrayed in the 1984 Broadway musical “Quilters.”

It wasn’t until 1971, when quilts were displayed on the walls of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, that quilts finally were accepted by curators and critics as full-fledged objets d’art. That, combined with a renewed interest in the nation’s past as a result of the Bicentennial celebration, helped whet the new appetite for quilts.

The revival, worldwide in scope, encompasses everything from the standard cotton patchwork quilt to the more evolutionary, revolutionary variety combining fabric, paint, beads, metallic thread, even taxidermically stuffed birds and chipmunks.

The newfangled works bear titles such as “Mexican Graveyard,” “Neighborhood With Comet Scar” and “. . . but there was a faulty joint in the right rocket booster.”

More than 160,000 people currently subscribe to the monthly Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine, considered a leader in the quilt publishing field since 1969.

Many Quilting Guilds

There are now more than 1,500 quilting guilds in North America, according to Kile. With an average membership of 150 people per guild, that’s 225,000 quilters.

“And that’s just skimming the surface,” Kile said. “Multiply that by 10 in order to get all the active quilt makers.”

The Grace Lutheran quilters in Monongahela, for example, do not belong to any guild. Fourteen strong, they have stitched more than 130 quilts and innumerable pillows for customers around the world since the group was formed in 1976, and they have enough orders to keep them busy into the 1990s.

“I like to quilt and I like to be with the quilters. I miss it so much when I can’t come,” said Iva Huffman, 83, the oldest member of the group.

“We’re together. We’re satisfied,” said Louise Harper, 77, whose home is used for the quilting bees.

Down the road in Charleroi, church ladies have been meeting for weekly quilting bees for 36 years. They, too, are not affiliated with a guild.

Just ‘a Good Time’

“There’s nothing in it for us except a good time,” said Lois Snyder, 87, who heads the quilting circle at the Presbyterian Church of Charleroi.

The modern, hilltop church has a special room behind the sanctuary for its five regular quilters. Their efforts, like those of their counterparts in Monongahela, have paid for church improvements.

Three long, narrow quilting frames, each wrapped with a nearly finished quilt, waited on a recent summer’s day. A small sign, “Blessed are the Quilters, for they are the Piecemakers,” hung from a metal filing cabinet stuffed with bags of batting.

While most of the church women’s works are meant for beds rather than walls, their motivation is much the same as their more innovative colleagues, many of whom have formal art training.

“The real common denominator is just a love of working with fabric,” says Penny McMorris, an art consultant from Bowling Green, Ohio, who has produced a public television series on quilting and written four books on the subject.

At Quilt National ‘87, a biennial international exhibit in Athens, Ohio, the 89 works displayed in June included an inflatable quilted sphere seven feet in diameter. One rectangular quilt, made of vinyl and canvas as well as fabric, depicted a man sitting in a bathtub. One of three quilts from Japan showed two women in bathing suits walking along a beach.

Show to Tour U.S.

The monthlong show, part of which will tour the United States and Japan over the next 2 1/2 years, attracted about 5,400 people from as far away as Alaska and South Africa.

“Some people came in and looked around and said, ‘This doesn’t look like it goes on a bed. These aren’t quilts. These are wall hangings,’ ” said Hilary Fletcher, the show’s coordinator, chuckling.

“The contemporary, innovative quilt maker is not saying ‘What I do is better,’ ” she said. “What this artist is saying is, ‘I appreciate what the traditional quilt maker did. I understand the medium. Now I want to use the medium to express something different.’ ”

For Faith Ringgold, a New York City artist whose contemporary quilts adorn a gallery wall in Soho, it is an intensely personal, sometimes painful process. She chronicled her struggle to lose weight last year in “Change: Faith Ringgold’s Over 100 Pounds Weight Loss Story Quilt.” It is a collage of photo etchings and paragraphs describing her eating habits from the time she was born in 1930 to the present.

She received a Guggenheim fellowship for visual art this year as a result of her narrative quilts.