Quotations by Leading Quilters to refuel your inspiration

Helen Kelley

Helen Kelley on being inducted into the Quilter’s Hall of  Fame, July 2008,
“These are the life lessons you and quilting have taught me:
Love your craft.  Be proud of tiny stitches.  Respect tradition.  But learn something new, try something hard, make a new tradition.  Then pass it on the next generation.
See things with different eyes.  Look for the small treasures.   Find the happiness and solace in your work.
Share your passion. Quilt with a friend, or friends, or many friends.  Be generous  with your time, your advice, your praise, your ideas, your fabric.   There is joy in giving something from your heart.  It comes back to you many-fold. Don’t obsess over the stuff that doesn’t matter. Tell your story.  Embellish it a little.”

Mary Emma Allen, quilt historian and author of children’s books,

“Quilting is one of those arts which forms a common bond among quilt makers around the world and, once in the blood, is an activity a quilter can never give up.”

Jean Ray Laury

Jean Ray Laury, quilter inducted to Quilters Hall of Fame, 1982,

“Quilt makers today are recapturing the spirit and the essence of early American quilts. Creativity and inventiveness make it possible to modify and rejuvenate the old approaches and techniques. If we can retain the structural integrity of the traditional quilt, (strong, durable and beautiful) and add to it a contemporary approach in color and design, we will achieve a quilt which merges past and present.”

Patricia Mainardi, author of Quilts: The Great American Art, 1987,

“Women have always made art. But for most women, the arts valued highest by male society have been closed to them for just that reason. They have put their creativity instead into the needlework arts, which exist in fantastic variety wherever there are women, and which in fact are a universal female art, transcending race, class and national borders. Needlework is the one art in which women controlled the education of their daughters, the production of the art, and were also the audience and critics… The contrast between the utilitarian necessity of patching and quilting and the beautiful works of art which women made of it and the contrasts between the traditions of patchwork and quilting as brought to America and the quilts made here from colonial times to the present, give ample evidence that quilts are The Great American Art.”