"Dedicated Quilters"

Recently I added a trip to the INTERNATIONAL QUILT FESTIVAL in Houston to my bucket list. No, it’s not skydiving out of a plane, or climbing Mt. Everest, or hiking to the South Pole, but for the "Dedicated Quilter" it’s like trekking to the Holy Land for Christians or Mecca for Muslims.  You really want to make the trip at least once in your life...before you die.

I’m not exactly sure why I’m drawn to IQF.  It’s huge, the largest show of its kind anywhere.  I can barely manage the AQS show Grand Rapids.  But we all know…..size matters.  I’d like to see all the quilters gathered under one roof, those of us that make up the annual $3.76 billion dollar industry.  I also love stats, and understanding what this means to the quilting and related industry fascinates me from a sales, marketing, and design perspective. What makes quilters tick, and what makes them buy the things they do?  Delving into the statistics and understanding the crowd taps into my left brain tendencies, methodical, detailed oriented and very analytical.  This left brain stuff messes with my right brain creative, spontaneous and subjective nature. Too much some time…..but that’s another post perhaps.

Coinciding with IQF the QUILTING IN AMERICA SURVEY 2014 was released. This is the 7^th since 1994, completed every 4 years.  Making up this dollar amount is 16 million active quilters in this country, or 1 in every 20 Americans quilt.  I confirmed this stat last Sunday in church, looking around the sanctuary and knowing who quilts.  For the record, the service hadn’t started so I was paying attention.

So who are these DQ's?  The survey reveals “Dedicated Quilters”:

·        Represent 12.2% of all quilting households

·        Account for 60.4% of the total industry expenditures

·        Spend more than $500 a year on related purchases (sewing machines, fabric, notions, tools, patterns, books, computer programs, threads, battings, classes etc…according to the survey the number is more like $3,296 average a year.....holy cow!) 

·        Are female

·        Are about 64

·        See our fiber art obsession as an essential part of our life, not a hobby.

·        Express our creativity thru textiles arts.

·        Reflect what is going on our lives and how we deal with it. 

·        Have quilted for 20.3 years

·        Are 81.3% are traditionalist, 38% embrace art quilting and 35% enjoy the modern styles

·        Are well educated (79% attended college)

·        Have a household income in excess of $100,000

·        Have (on average) $13,000 of tools and supplies and $6000 in a fabric stash

·        Have a dedicated studio or sewing room

Wow.  Where do you fit?  This information helps our local shops determine what they will offer us, along with their understanding of their local demographic and customer buying habits.  Fascinating, isn’t it?!?!

BIG WHITE.....come out of the closet!

For someone that loves color, lots of it…..it will be quite a surprise to see no color in the photos.  That’s because it’s about hand quilting, more specifically about hand quilting what friends heard me to refer to as “BIG WHITE” for years, roughly 7 if I’m truly honest about it.  Seven being the years it took me to complete, mentally running away from it each stitch I added.

BIG WHITE became my quilting nemesis.  I don’t recall a more painful quilting project.  Nothing gave me more angst than this did.  So how did it start, and why?

Quite early in my quilting career I became fascinated by the beautiful whole cloth quilt movement.  You know, white/off white solid background, printed design that washes out after hand quilting the entire motif in white.  Completed these beauties were exceptional.  The tiny stitches gave the entire surface it’s personality.  I was drawn to these miracles of needle and thread like a bee to a hive, or in my case like a mosquito to a high voltage bug zapper.

I started hand quilting with an enormous amount of enthusiasm.  About a quarter finished I couldn’t stand to look at it.  Oh, my stitching was just fine.  It took me quite a long time to figure out why I felt such disdain for this quilt.  I actually got to the point where I hoped I’d ‘accidentally’ spill water on it so the design went away.  I couldn’t finish it without the printed design now could I?  Any of you that remember this agonizing period in my life are sitting there laughing!

Weeks turned into months, then into years.  I’d ignore it in storage.  Maybe someone would find it after I’m in the big quilt studio in the sky.  Then it hit me like a ton of bricks…..I hated this quilt because it was, well……vanilla.  Don’t get me wrong, I love vanilla.  But as I started to say, for someone that loves colors, lots of it, I couldn’t stand working in the whiteness of this quilt.

But one thing kept nagging at me.  I really didn’t care if I ever finished it.  And that bothered me more than it being all white.  One day fed up with my attitude I pulled it from the bottom of the closet, and little by little I finished the hand quilting and added the binding.  It went through the wash cycle to remove the remaining faint blue lines.  It was folded and put in my quilt cupboard, never to see the light of day.  Years later it was finished, never shown or talked about, or given its proper due.  I was still running from it.

Then last night I watched PBS FINDING YOUR ROOTS featuring Sting’s quest for ancestry.  I love this show!  Anyway, Sting grew up in the massive shipyards in Liverpool, England.  He told how everyone hated the noisy and dangerous environment of red lead and asbestos.  He ran from it but most stayed.  But why?  “We could point to them (the ships) and say ‘we built them’.  It was a very unpleasant place to work yet there was an immense pride in it.  Today society sits all day at a computer, so where is the artifact that says we worked…. the ships were a massive example of that.” Sting said.

I ran from BIG WHITE like he did the ship yards.  Today I'm at least sharing my sense of pride in  finishing it.  Besides, this blog is about craft.  And that’s what this quilt is…….a hand crafted, tangible result of many years labor.  BIG WHITE…..take a bow!