Matt Squirrel, quilter, shop owner, long arm specialist
Five unique male views on quilting:
- Fine Cell Work charity in the UK, which teaches prison inmates how to create the soft furnishings that it sells online at finecellwork.co.uk, includes an all-male team of quilters. “Belonging to a quilting group can certainly have a great psychological impact on people,” says Fine Cell director Mairi Duthie. She reports that the men say, and often for the first time in their lives, that they develop a sense of pride and achievement in the beautiful work that they do, and they say they have a sense of belonging to something ‘shared’ that gives a different perspective on life and living a better life.
- Moncton, New Brunswick resident Lawrence McPhee is one of the growing number of men who quilt and he is 85 years young. “I’ve been quilting for 10 years. I got started because my wife was doing it, so I decided to quilt, too and got my own sewing machine. It’s something to do. I have to keep busy.”
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- “Some men are drawn to quilting by the complex long-arm quilting machines they get to use”, says Matt Sparrow, (shown above in banner), owner of Sparrow Studioz in Edmonton, Canada, and the father of nine kids. “My daughters’ friends’ fathers come over and they’re right down on their knees looking at how it all works. Men see it as pretty much just a big power tool.”
Before he got into quilting, Sparrow was a website developer. But within weeks of purchasing his own long-arm, he quit his Web job because he had so many requests from female quilters to help them finish the stitching on their pieces. His romance with the craft started one day when his wife was struggling to stitch together a multi-layered quilt. “I wasn’t confident she was doing it the right way, so I looked it up on the Internet,” he says. “She wasn’t.”
He wasn’t afraid to tell her. That’s one of the biggest differences between male and female quilters, according to Sparrow. “Women will look at each other’s projects and tell them how fabulous it is, even when it’s not”. he says. “But I’ve noticed that men can take one look at something you’ve been working on for years and they’ll tell you the truth right away.”
- Many men are fascinated by the geometry involved in quilt making. Al Heslop of Airdrie, Alberta Canada is a proud quilter. And no, it was not his wife’s idea. It was the other way around. Heslop dragged his spouse to the quilt shop to pick out their very first patterns, one day about 5 years ago. Heslop enjoys the math connection. Apparently he can find trigonometry in a Star of Bethlehem pattern.
Woolooware Australia quilter Robert James
Somr people buys magazines but Robert James, age 69 quilts them. The colourful, machine-sewn paper artwork looks just like a real quilt until you get up close and see it’s actually magazine pages along with a range of “found” paper.
But quilting paper was fiddly, time-consuming work and James is happy to return to “real quilting” which he started doing 10 years ago. He became addicted immediately. “My family calls it ‘rug rage’. I get an idea and I have to put it down on fabric,” he said.
Until he retired two years ago Mr James used to quilt between 8.30pm and 10.30pm. Now, with a home studio and tons of fabric, he spends most of his day cutting, sewing and hand quilting to make glorious heirloom pieces. His latest is an art quilt project requiring 12,500 pieces and is expected to take six months to complete. All his quilts, large and small, representing untold hours of precise work, will be donated.
Some websites created by male quilters:
http://community.webshots.com/user/scottmurkin
http://www.windriverquilting.com
http://africanamericanquilts-bostick.com
http://tristanrobinblakeman.com
