Imagine living in a tiny stone cottage on a windswept island. It’s freezing cold even through the short summer months. You have little money to spare and use it all only for necessities like the few clothes you and your family wear. Otherwise, you live off the land.
You know the value of your possessions and don’t let anything go to waste. Therefore, when your clothes wear out, you keep the remaining scraps and use them for making things like curtains and bed covers. The bed coverings made from those scraps are called quilts. The first quilt sets were laboriously hand sewn from small scraps of worn out clothes.
In order to make your quilts cozy and warm, you learn from your geese and ducks, who fluff their feathers to keep warm. You collect and save all the feathers and separate the coarse larger feathers from the fluffy white down. Little by little, you fill your quilt with them until it is filled with down and warm as toast. Oh, what a luxurious feeling!
Winters are long where you live and you have a lot of time on your hands, because you are indoors so much. To pass the time, you start making more decorative quilts from the brightest and best swatches of material you have. You fill these with your finest down. Because money is short, you take them to the market to sell.
One spring day, a wealthy matron notices your handiwork and compliments you on it. She asks you if you would make a quilt for her. She will supply you with the materials, because yours are too coarse for her. You are thrilled, because she offers to pay you well for your work.
While this may not be exactly the way the first luxury quilt set was sold, the story is probably not too far off the mark. Today, even though you can buy luxurious quilts in any department store, there is still a mystique about handmade quilts. In the United States, there is one quilt artist who learned her skills just as it is described above, in a tiny stone cottage in the remote Orkney Islands of Scotland.
Today, that woman lives on a larger farm in the Kentucky hills. She no longer makes patchwork quilts for her family. She makes works of art that hang in some of the best galleries in America. Her husband doesn’t have to cut firewood with a handsaw, but he still cuts his own, using husqvarna chainsaws. She and her large family still live modestly, even though she is a well known artist.
Is there a moral to this story? Maybe not, but it’s true. Sometimes, the most humble craft can evolve into high art.