This sermon was given at Stevens Chapel on March 14, 2004 by Rev. Judith Campbell.

The Patches of Our Lives: Patchwork Quilting as Memoir

My own love affair with fabric is life long. My mother was theatrical costume designer, my grandmother did all kinds of handiwork, including a few quilts, and my great grandmother supported herself and my grandmother by taking in sewing, and running a rooming house. I sewed my first garment at the age of nine, and I have never been very far from a needle and thread since. That time. Part of it was necessity. I could have a new dress and matching hat for three or four dollars but part of it was, and still is, sheer joy. The joy of creation, the sensual joy of playing with fabrics and colors and textures, the joy of making something beautiful with my own hands whether for myself or as a gift, and the less manifest joy of the deep creative quiet that is mine when I sit with my needle and thread making the thousands of tiny stitches that are the heart and soul of a quilt. That is the contemplative part;that is the prayerful part. That is the part of handwork that women over the centuries have called their own, and through I where woman have found a peace, a voice and place of contentment and that the world could not give.

People have been sewing layers of cloth together for warmth and protection for at least three thousand years. Quilted fragments survive from Ancient China. And in the Middle Ages, “Knights of Old” used a kind of quilted armor underwear to protect themselves from being rubbed raw by those heavy metal uniforms.

In our own history, frugal and chilly Colonial New Englanders sewed the last vestiges of articles of clothing into coverlets and filled them with corn husks when they couldn’t get their hands on anything else. Already worn out to begin with, these didn’t last long; but women kept making them, often in their “spare” time, sometimes after dark. The inherent human need for beauty asserted itself, and what was still a necessity – the ongoing need for warm blankets - slowly developed into an art form, an art form that would not be fully recognized and appreciated here in the United States until the flowering of the Women’s Movement in the 1970’s.

It was then that women, looking to name and claim an artistic expression for themselves that was not defined by dead white men and dictates of the French academy, began looking at the quilts that their grandmothers and great grandmothers and their great grandmothers’ slaves had made with new eyes.

To be sure there were and are men quilters. But, by and large, it and remains a women’s art. Women of the seventies dug around in closets and attics and garages. They found these quilts heaped in corners, mildewing in garages, and soaking up oil under cars. And they took them out, and they held them up to the light, and they began to see them with new eyes. What had been a craft of necessity was recognized and elevated to the status of fine craft and even fine art. And of course some people began collecting them and their value skyrocketed.

And some people began making them, and their value skyrocketed. I will say we are still fighting the value battle. The general public is loathe to pay anything near the same price for a quilt as they would pay for a painting of similar size. For some people, quilts are still blankets. But for me and increasing numbers of us, quilts are living history. I’m sure anyone here can tell us a quilt story about a quilt they have known and loved, and who made it and what was in it and what it was used for and where it is now. That is for another morning.

I made my first quilt in the 1960’s, and I didn’t make another one until the beginning of the last decade. For a while, in the early 1990’s my painting and my quilt making vied for top billing. But for the last ten years or so, quilting has been my artform of choice and convenience, mainly because it is portable. I can keep making art wherever I am; and art making is as vital to me as is my ministry. Indeed, one is in a way a reflection of the other. And of course, they are both…. cut out of the some cloth.

There is a pattern to everything we do, and there is a reason, even though we are not always consciously aware of it. I have asked three women to join me today with their work and their words about their work: why they do what they do. (Speakers come forward)

Myra Stark

Jeanne Hewett

Ann Maley

When I took my first art history course, my text book did not mention any women artists. There were many many fine women artists throughout the history of art, but men wrote the books and few, if any women, got into the club. An interesting side note of the place of women in art history is that, when women were finally admitted to art schools in the mid 1800’s in France, they were not permitted into life classes, that is classes with a live and, of course, nude, female model. Women had to draw draped and fig-leaved statues in another studio!

We have moved beyond that, but not with out a struggle. Women artists and women art historians in that struggle have redefined and ultimately transformed the making of art. Art and galleries today have a very different look and feel to them as a result of women’s work and vision.

Today, quilt making has achieved its rightful place in the world of art appreciation; and at the same time, it can be practiced by anyone who wants to give it a try.

Those of us who do it, do it out of love; and we do it out of necessity. Not because we need blankets or wall hangings or pillows. But because we need beauty around us, we need quiet around us in a chaotic world, and we need the many layered comforts that quilts and quilting offer. Remember the song we sang in Carol’s music service: beauty before me, above me and below me, may I walk in beauty. The “beautiful way” in the native American tradition is the harmonious way, the right way, the way that is in balance with your own nature and the natural world.

Working with our hands with fabric or with wood or with the soil in your garden, or in cooking a beautiful meal or soothing a troubled brow is humble work, it is holy work and it is not restricted to women. Remembering my meditation this morning, the blessings and the peace and the contentment and the sense of fulfillment that comes from working with our hands is universal.

Women throughout the centuries have stitched and kneaded and stirred and written and painted and voted and marched and mothered and loved and died, often in service to someone or something other than themselves. Many of us enjoy freedoms today that were not even remote possibilities to our great grandmothers. But our work’s not done. The patchwork of our lives is not finished as long as the edges of someone else’s are ragged. That is what is Unitarian Universalist about all of this, and not just a quilt show.

We are pieces of a larger whole, deeply committed to making a difference. And we are one little scrap at a time, one little stitch at a time putting it together, holding it together, making it better together!

Blessed be.

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The Patches of Our Lives: Patchwork Quilting as Memoir