while I'm on the subject, YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!

[truepenny]

I really don't want to pick on Bruce Seeds, because the fact that he came to my attention under inauspicious circumstances is no fault of his, but there's this thing in his FAQ:

Do you really make these yourself? Yes, the cutting, the piecing, the sewing and the ironing are all done by me, with one exception: the stitching process that binds the top, the batting and the back together requires special equipment. So I pay a service provider to do that step for me, in a pattern and thread color of my choosing. For most of my quilts, that service is provided by Patched Works of Elm Grove, Wisconsin.

Now, if you go to Patched Works' site, they do in fact have a special machine called a long arm, so what Mr. Seeds says here is not wrong. On the other hand, and the thing that's bugging me, "the stitching process that binds the top, the batting, and the back together" is called quilting. It's what makes something, you know, a quilt. The fact that he chooses to outsource this part of the process--while a totally legitimate choice with which I have no beef (although I'd prefer it if he'd phrased it slightly differently, so as not to give the impression that quilts cannot be made without special machinery)--really does reinforce the already somewhat more than subliminal impression that a divide has been created here between The Artist (design) and The Craftsperson (mere manual labor), and again makes the Milwaukee Art Museum's choice to showcase his work with their early American quilt exhibit--especially given the number of superb whitework quilts they had--almost painfully ironic.

Again, I think Mr. Seeds' quilts are lovely, and I do not think there's anything wrong with having one's quilts machine-quilted by a third party. (I love Rose Wilder Lane's comment in The Woman's Day Book of American Needlework about what nonsense it is to romanticize the non-technological past: her mother and aunts and grandmothers would have leaped at the chance to use a sewing machine.) My gripe is about semantics and self-presentation. And the valuation or devaluation of artforms created and practiced by women.

And now I really am going to shut up about this.

Comments

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

Yes, a lot of quilt artists do that. My friend cmerun12 does, and she regularly enters her quilts in competitions. In that world, it's not considered illegitimate to have the quilting outsourced, although you'd better be able to work with your topstitcher on a good design that flows with the colors and patterns, because you are judged on that as well.