The fabric she chooses features a melange of blues, from sky to Carolina to navy. Pulling in swatches of yellow, gray and white, she snips each one into a shape. She selects shapes to sew to other shapes and to her blue base, the accents helping to form a square. Then she repeats the process, block after block. Their sizes vary, because this is a human creation, but the results fit together in uneven rows. Eventually, a perimeter of twisting leaves frames a border of squares surrounding a deep-blue field dotted with what look like little white tadpoles. A massive eight-point star of stunning complexity rules from the center of the quilt.
Laurie Robinson, an understated 62-year-old from Logan, Utah, is pleased. Behind the quilt’s face, she will fill it with batting — stringy fluffs of practical cotton, luxury wool or an economical polyester blend — which lends both insulation and structure to the finished piece. A quilt isn’t a quilt without that, but she is most particular about the backing, the side meant for human contact. Some use more scraps, cozy flannel, elegant voile or lightweight quilters’ linen, but she prefers a velvety microfiber called “minky.” She doesn’t make modern fine-art quilts, which can be intricate like tapestries and are best viewed on a gallery wall, from a safe distance. No, Robinson’s quilts are made to be snuggled in as much as they may bring spirit to a new home or comfort to a funeral.
Once the quilt is assembled, she sends it out to a machine quilter for finishing. Guided by a computer, this modern marvel can sew complex patterns into the quilt’s surface, like dragons or sailboats, or it can simply seal the edges and connect the three layers in precise harmony. Robinson admits this with a tinge of embarrassment, as if this makes her quilts not fully her own. Hand-finishing is more intricate but also more time-consuming, and technology has found a role in this space as in any other part of the modern world. Besides, she has other things to do.
When Americans think about quilts, they think of the quilts their mothers or grandmothers made. So why not use a quilt to tell a difficult story?
After all, quilting is often a social pursuit. Robinson has twice served as president of the Needles and Friends Quilt Guild, a local group with about 100 members, mostly women, ranging in age from their 20s to their 80s. They gather each Tuesday to work together, catch up on their projects and share a community born of a centuries-old practice that is still thriving, in sometimes innovative ways. This most American of folk arts has nestled itself comfortably into these new times, with a presence at trade shows, on social media and even in the finest art museums, where it is seen as a radical and unique medium for storytelling. But here, in Logan, quilting is still about making connections, one stitch at a time.
The history of quilting
Squint hard enough and you might see a pattern on this ancient chunk of ivory, carved around 3000 B.C. and worn by the elements across the intervening millennia. “The Ivory King,” a statuette now ensconced at The British Museum in London, portrays an aging ruler whose robe or garment bears a diamond pattern in columns with a decorative border. This relic is often cited as the earliest known evidence that humans made quilts. Even if this item would have been worn as a robe over the monarch’s shoulders, it speaks to the place quilting held in society.
One of the oldest surviving quilts hangs three miles away in South Kensington, in the Medieval & Renaissance Galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Crafted in Sicily in 1390, the “Tristan Quilt” depicts the tale of Tristan and Iseult — a Cornish hero and his Irish bride — in linen, beige-on-beige, through 14 graphic panels shaped with white and brown thread and cotton stuffing. In nearby halls, the museum’s quilting and patchwork collection displays a range of sumptuous 17th-century bedcovers and present-day art projects and fashions.
The patchwork quilts that are now so familiar across middle America didn’t emerge until early American colonists forged west. While their wealthier urban counterparts on the coast could import specialized fabric for “applique” quilts as status symbols, those living on the frontier had to use and reuse every scrap of fabric at their disposal. The skills they developed in so doing were later turned to a new, expressive dimension, when the industrial revolution made fabric more abundant and therefore affordable. Perhaps this was when quilting as a folk art was born, a creative form passed down through families and communities rather than institutional education or even apprenticeships.
That practice flourished in the Intermountain West, where pioneer women melded function, thrift and artistry to create their own tradition. Like their know-how, their quilts became treasured heirlooms — some passed down for over 160 years — and records of their times. Fabrics and patterns speak of their poverty and prosperity, while texts and motifs enshrine feelings, anxieties, beliefs and family histories. “The art of quilting can help us share stories of the relationships that make up our individual and communal identities,” observed an archived bulletin for a 2012 exhibit at the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City. “Seemingly commonplace quilts can illustrate the complex nature of human ties.”
In a time when women’s voices were not always welcome in mainstream society, quilts offered an outlet for expression and even solidarity. In 1836, abolitionists in Massachusetts sold the first known “Abolition quilt” at a fundraising event. Sized for a crib, it features a grid of eight-point stars in burgundy, slate blue, olive green and more colors, with a poem by Quaker author Elizabeth Margaret Chandler transcribed in its center block, reminding readers to think of enslaved mothers whose children had been taken. Over the next century, women made quilts to support temperance, women’s suffrage and patriotic loyalty during the Great War.
Quilting became its own frontier when the modern art movement expanded the boundaries of what could be defined as art.
Quilting became its own frontier in the 20th century with the arrival of the modern art movement, which expanded the boundaries of what could be defined as art. Alongside schools like impressionism or Dadaism arose smaller ideas like “found art” — when artists highlight the beauty in neglected or ordinary objects. Emelie Gevalt, deputy director of the American Folk Art Museum, explains that artists used quilts to package found art objects, turning shreds of the past into raw materials that let them explore budding ideas of “Americanness.”
Immigrants have always formed part of that patchwork. In 1933, Anni Albers came to the United States from Germany, a trained artist who chose to work in textiles. She taught weaving at the respected Bauhaus school until she fled Nazi persecution of the Jews in her country. Bringing her expertise stateside, she worked to blur the traditional line between craft and fine art, elevating quilts from county fairs to eminent museums. Today, fine art quilts are not old blankets but a modern medium, analogous in a way to oil paintings or marble sculptures.
Still, the heart of quilting is among the people, a way to communicate feelings, whether welcoming a newborn or mourning a loss — sometimes on a grand scale. Launched in 1987, the AIDS Memorial Quilt eventually became history’s largest community art project, piecing together 54 tons of patchwork, each piece weighed down with grief and memory. Similarly, the United in Memory 9/11 Victims Memorial Quilt consists of more than 140 panels, each remembering 25 victims of the 2001 terrorist attack, enough to cover five football fields.
And quilting is still about people. This October, more than 40,000 will descend on the International Quilt Festival in Houston, hoping to learn, source supplies or simply to glimpse something beautiful that has meaning to them. It’s the largest trade show in a roughly $5 billion industry, hosting workshops, guest speakers and more than 1,200 quilts. But it’s just one of many such events around the world, from Amsterdam to Nairobi, Santiago to Yokohama, each devoted to a craft that seems as persistent as the tough survivors who created it.
Quilting comes to YouTube
Picture a table runner, longer than it is wide. What looks like a simple checkerboard — alternating black, white and deep red squares against a red background with black borders — becomes more intricate on closer inspection. Each red square features a smaller grid of red and black; each white square is dotted with silvery spirals. It’s a decorative piece, displayed mostly for its instructional value in a 2009 YouTube video meant to teach viewers how to assemble a standard “four patch” pattern. It was also the first quilt Jenny Doan ever shared on the platform.
She didn’t expect her new tutorial business to go too far. “Nobody my age is ever gonna go to the computer to learn anything,” she told her internet-savvy kids. Lucky for her, they insisted. At 51, she needed to replace the retirement savings she and her husband had lost in the financial crisis of 2008, and while she was a relative newcomer to quilting — a hobby she’d picked up after moving to Hamilton, Missouri, 11 years before — she had a knack for it. She also had the kind, patient demeanor of an aunt who brings pies and scrapbooks to a family reunion.
Doan couldn’t have been more wrong. Her content resonated far and wide — and fast. She launched the Missouri Star Quilt Company, which today has more than 970,000 subscribers on YouTube, and counting. Her matter-of-fact videos have been viewed nearly 350 million times. Now 68, she has become the biggest quilting influencer in the world. Forbes even dubbed this Latter-day Saint grandmother the “Oprah of quilting” and listed her in its 50-over-50 list in 2022. There are now 27 quilt shops in Hamilton, making it a “Disneyland for middle-aged women,” in her words.
Her approach was always simple: to make quilting accessible. Maybe that makes her more like Bob Ross, the iconic, frizzy-haired host of “The Joy of Painting,” which aired on PBS until his death in 1995. Like Ross, Doan emphasizes happy accidents over perfect quilts. “Mine are not so perfect and fine,” she admits, “but they’re mine.” She wants to see her creations “loved and worn out,” not stored away.
While Doan has made art quilts, she refuses to judge competitions, because that would go against her guiding principles. “I love blessing the lives of the people around me with something that will keep them warm and feels like a hug around them,” she says.
From bedrooms to museums
A story jumps from the cloth in striking black-on-white, with leafy green highlights. A Black family is on a road trip, with suitcases piled atop what looks like a 1940s Buick. Dad wears a suit and carries bags while Mom flaunts a hat over her Sunday dress and kids eyeball a picnic basket freighted with fruit and drinks. Compasses anchor each corner, but one image looms over the scene: “The Negro Motorist Green-Book.” It’s left for the viewer to discover that this was a safety-minded travel guide for an era when it wasn’t always safe for Black folks to be “just passing through.”
Quilts connote warmth and comfort, while this story is anything but. That contrast is an intentional theme in Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi’s work. “When (Americans) think about quilts, they think about the quilts their mothers made, their grandmothers made,” says the 77-year-old Louisiana native. “So why not use a quilt to tell a difficult story?” Mazloomi specializes in “narrative quilts” that often depict the experience of Black Americans, from tragedies like the 1921 massacre that decimated Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” to triumphs like Marian Anderson singing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, after she was shunned for her race by the city’s cultural venues.
In a time when women’s voices were not always welcome in mainstream society, quilts offered an outlet for expression and even solidarity.
The widely acclaimed artist first came to quilting almost 50 years ago when she encountered a “mesmerizing” piece from the Kentucky Appalachians, with patchwork in the center and appliquéd eagles in each corner. Ignoring the “no touching” sign, she ran her hand over the stitching and felt something that “touched my spirit, my soul,” she says. Later, her own first quilt came out of the wash looking like “a three-dimensional fried egg.” Still, she persisted, eventually finding her own hand and her own voice. Her quilts visually narrate the stories of renowned Black figures like Emmett Till, Rosa Parks and the Tuskegee Airmen, alongside intimate portrayals of a grandmother’s love, a gospel choir and little boys shooting marbles.
Longing for the company of a quilting circle, Mazloomi placed a magazine ad for fellow Black quilters in 1985, attracting nine responses. That started the Women of Color Quilters Network, a group that now has 1,500 members — with enough sway to replace the headstone of Harriet Powers, the freed slave who became the “Mother of African American Quilting” in the 1800s. The Network’s quilts were also featured recently at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “To know that those quilts are there forever for our descendants to come and look at those quilts in public,” Mazloomi says, “it’s important.”
She’s now in the Quilters Hall of Fame and has seen her work featured at major venues like the Smithsonian, the American Folk Art Museum and the Museum of Art and Design in New York City (she also has a doctorate in aerospace engineering). But her favorite quilts feature her grandchildren. “Each one has a quilt, and I plan to give them more,” she says. She has time. “Cloth is a cradle-to-grave affair. It’s the first thing we’re swaddled in at birth. It’s the last thing that touches our body upon our death.”
This story appears in the October 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.