A Patchwork History of the Amish : Exhibits: Laguna Art Museum displays colorful quilts made by members of the religious sect between 1860 and 1950.

Julie Silber had no taste for collecting anything until she lost her heart to a bedspread.

“It was falling apart, but it was just gorgeous ,” Silber said of the junk-store discovery that changed her life three decades ago. “I instantly fell in love, and I started collecting for the first time. They hold lives in them. They hold the stories of the women who made them and the people who used them, slept under them.”

Silber’s focus these days are southeastern Pennsylvania Amish quilts made between 1860 and 1950. Thirty of them make up the Laguna Art Museum show she has guest-curated.

One reason for booking “Lit From Within: Amish Quilts of Lancaster County,” said museum acting director Susan M. Anderson, is to learn what quilts can tell us about the Amish.

“We’re looking at them as art, or as a means of expression,” Anderson said, “but also within their social context. It’s part of the new (approach to) art history, to look at art within its own context and at the achievements of artists normally kept out of the mainstream.”

The quilts produced in Lancaster County--the longest continuously occupied Amish community (about 200 years)--between 1860 and 1950 are distinguished by large pieces of vibrant, solid-colored fabrics sewn together in a half-dozen sharply angular patterns, such as “diamond in the square.” Curvaceous designs, such as wreaths created with masterfully minute stitches, adorn the basic patterns.

The radiant handicrafts “burn” with the creative passion of the women who made them, said Silber, explaining the name she gave the exhibit. In a more literal vein, most often the brightest section of a quilt is its center.

But why such vivid hues? Why solid colors rather than printed fabrics? Why such limited pattern variation?

We can only surmise, Silber said during a recent gallery tour. Curator of the private San Francisco quilt collection of Doug Tompkins (co-founder of the Esprit de Corp. clothing company), from which the exhibit was drawn, she explained that the Amish (Germans who came to North America in the 18th Century seeking religious freedom) have a written code, or Ordnung, specifying such cardinal values as simplicity, modesty, practicality and community cohesion.

But rules governing daily activities, such as quilting, are passed on verbally, typically from mother to daughter, Silber said.

“When a young girl is taught how to make a quilt, she is not just learning her sewing or design or color skills, but her social values: persistence, thrift, organization, clarity, what it means to be a woman in a society.”

Outsiders’ understanding of such things is further complicated by the way Amish answer questions, the curator said.

“They are a traditional people, so no matter what you ask them, the answer is ‘because we always have; because Mother always did; because we just don’t do it.’ ”

Silber surmises that the vivid cobalt blues, deep crimsons, eggplant purples and olive greens are colors these agrarians saw everywhere around them.

“Amish men and women are great farmers, and their vegetable and flower gardens are unbelievable,” she said. “Lancaster County is this fertile area, the black soil, it’s just incredible. I think that influenced them tremendously.”

Solid-colored fabric was preferred during this period, she said, “because printed fabric was considered worldly and frivolous. Humility is a real cornerstone of their lives.”

Embellishing the large pieces of fabric with tiny designs gave the pieces visual balance.

“An important part of Amish life is harmony and balance, and to me, the sharp angles and the soft lines balance each other out.”

In Silber’s view, the quilts dispel common, widely held misconceptions, including the one that says any expression of personal flair, creativity or individuality is anathema to the Amish. Though quilters worked with the six basic designs and only twice that many colors, each expressed her own personality in her choice of colors, or by combining two designs in one quilt.

“We wouldn’t even think (twice) about taking two traditional things that we do and putting them together,” she said, “but for the Amish it’s like this major, major step. There are very, very few quilts that combine two designs.”

The fact that the Amish used sewing machines for parts of their quilts proves that they did not categorically shun modern conveniences, Silber said.

Televisions and radios are taboo because they may erode community cohesion by bringing in the “corrupting outside world,” she said. But Amish women, practical and efficient, glommed onto sewing machines and drip-dry fabrics.

“They just make life easier,” she said, “they don’t really change the way people relate.”

Money isn’t perceived as innately evil either. To these farmers, “soil is God,” Silber said, so while they were in fact against the idea of hoarding money for money’s sake, they gladly sold their quilts.

“They are very smart business people. They are anti-materialistic, but they are not anti-money because, what does money do? It buys land.”

Today, Amish women of Lancaster County are producing pastel colored quilts that were in vogue in mainstream society 50 years ago. This, Silber said, perhaps ironically reinforces the truism that the Amish strive to be different.

“The outside world has always had influence, but they are very proud that they don’t pick up any fad when it’s in. One of the basic things about the Amish is that they are educated, implored to be different, to be separate, to be in the world but not of it.”

* “Lit From Within: Amish Quilts of Lancaster County” runs through Feb. 26 at Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $4-$5. On Wednesday at 7 p.m., quilt maker Jonathan Shannon will discuss the role of the contemporary quilt in today’s art world . $12. (714) 494-8971.