I don’t know how many of us eventually found time last weekend for the big Thanksgiving payoff after hunting and gathering and then gathering again: gettin’ down like a raccoon in your favorite socks with some groovy new books. I begged for, borrowed, and stole the time. Rain was welcome.
It seemed appropriate for a holiday so steeped in family memories that my first choice was Texas Quilts and Quilters: A Lone Star Legacy by Marcia Kaylakie (Texas Tech University Press, $39.95). A gorgeous monster of a book, it is so well-organized that after wading into what appeared to be a simple coffee-table affair one realizes that it is in fact a lengthy and important resource for Texas historians. Kaylakie has been turning a shiny needle on the national quilt scene for more than fifteen years, and conducts a wide array of lectures and workshops. It was also interesting to note that she is a curator of next month’s art quilt exhibit, Eye of the Needle, at the Quattro Gallery here in Austin.
This book is beautifully designed around stunning photographs taken at such close range that you can almost smell cotton flour sacks and goodness. The type is large as well (note to self for gifting), lending even more immediacy to the material, which includes painstaking documentation for thirty-four Texas quilts created from 1870 to 2003, biographies of their creators, and the family photographs whose memories are surely found deep in the batting.
Credited in Marian Ann J. Montgomery’s foreword for updating quilt scholarship for the last twenty years, Kaylakie spent a decade rummaging and researching across the state. The time and volume of subjects allowed her to choose pieces that are not only visually arresting, but whose stories have survived to give them context and to give their creators a legacy of achievement. The documentation for these and others from Kaylakie’s quest will be available to other researchers in the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech.
Realizing that it will take until next Christmas to sample all of Texas Quilts, but still feeling a bit needle-crazy, I turned to Spike Gillespie‘s quilting memoir, Quilty as Charged (University of Texas Press, $19.95). Introduced to the colorful world of fat quarters and three-layer sewing while researching an article for the Dallas Morning News, Gillespie subsequently decided to chronicle her own experiences as she learned to quilt, encountering many eccentric personalities and stories along the way. Included here are tales of bleach vandalism, pathos at Houston’s annual International Quilt Festival, the Caveman Quilter’s subversive Primitive Patchwork, and others, as well as many smaller, jewel-box anecdotes. This trade paperback also features twelve color plates.
This article appears in November 23 • 2007.