"Meadow Lily," begun in 1973 and finished in 1974, was sewn entirely by hand. It's not a boast I make casually. Thanks to inexperience, I'd chosen a 100% cotton percale for the "background," a fabric so tightly woven that it resisted every single stitch that I forced through it. It was very, very slow going. The quilt measures 84" x 84", was made to be used, and indeed, we did use it. Today its outer edges are tattered and fraying, it is yellowed and stained in places, but it's something of a time capsule of memories, and so, does what old quilts are supposed to do.

In the early 1970s, the library of books on quilts and patchwork was much slimmer than it is today. There were just a handful, including Ruby Short McKim's "One Hundred and One Patchwork Patterns" published in 1931, and Marguerite Ickis's "The Standard Book of Quilt Making and Collecting," which was originally published in 1949, the year of my birth. By the time I discovered them they'd both been reissued by Dover Publications in softcover, and were pretty widely appreciated by enthusiasts. [Years later, I'd follow McKim and Ickis into the Quilters' Hall of Fame in Marion, Indiana, an honor all the more humbling for their being on that roster.]

For myself, I figured that if I were going to do this, I would do it "right," that is, I'd learn how it had been done in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and I'd build my skill sets using those techniques. For the first couple of years, I mostly eschewed use of the sewing machine in favor of hand-stitching, convinced before I really had much experience that "real" quilts were made by hand. The eventual need to make a living would disabuse me of that bias, but at least initially, in the context of patchwork and quilting, I gave the term "Luddite" new meaning.

A ca. 1978 view of "Meadow Lily" in use in the small four-room apartment that served as home and studio from 1974 through 1979, on Euclid Avenue in Somerset, Massachusetts. The fluorescent green bumper sticker on the drawing table at far left reads "Quilters Make Better Lovers."

I purchased this first quilting frame commercially at the time, ordered, as I recall, through a vendor in The Whole Earth Catalogue. It proved insufficiently solid, and was soon replaced by a muscular two-by-four number made for me by my father-in-law. Sitting solo at one of these things for hours on end (in our Rochester, NY, graduate student apartment where this photo was taken, I didn't even have a pastoral view out the window, as you can see) was a prescription for making UFOs (UnFinishedObjects). Once a large 24" quilting hoop came into my life, the frames were knocked down and unceremoniously and permanently stored away.

The article above appeared in the Providence Journal ca. 1974, not long after we'd relocated from upstate New York to southeastern Massachusetts. "Meadow Lily" wasn't quite finished–its outer edge looks here to be not-yet-bound. The "Lone Star" quilt below it (and shown at the top of this post) was then, and remains today, unfinished, fault of a too-ambitious maker's inexperience, and the choice of a polyester blend background color, a sort of Lenten reddish purple, that announces too loudly "Wrong!!"

These small pillow projects from 1972 and 1973 owe their inspiration to patterns in the Ruby McKim and Marguerite Ickis books. The poppy pattern at bottom left is classic McKim. While making these things I was also reading widely in the areas of Americana, colonial-era American history, the growth of non-mainstream 19th century religious movements like the Shakers and the Amish, and the rise of the textile industry in the US of the 19th century. All while finishing my master's thesis work and being a dutiful husband and father. A busy beaver...