Quilting Stats from Why Quilts Matter

I have spent the day watching the expensive weekend rate plumber guys (two of them now) take my bathroom apart, drag yucky equipment through the house and dig holes in my back yard.  Oh, my house is such a mess of mud and footprints and muck.

It was useless to clean while they were here, so I found a documentary called Why Quilts Matter on Create Network.  Shelly Zegard hosts the 9 part documentary.  She is a quilt historian, curator, collector and seller.

Amazing stuff if you can find it either on your cable or TV programming or on the internet.  I have not looked for it so I am not sure what format it would come in on the internet.

There is a great and wide range of genres of quilting; from old antique, vintage, traditional, contemporary and art quilts.  They had a large portion of several programs talking about the Gee's Bend quilts and how that has affected quilting today.

Oh and they all pronounced it as "G's" Bend rather than what I have heard lately as "Gheez" Bend (with a hard 'kee" as in geese, that is so hard to write!)

Here is one of the things that really shocked me, when Zegard gave some statistics.  Are you surprised by these numbers?

There are over 20,000,000 quilters in the US
14% of households in America do some form of quilting
Quilting is a $3.58 billion impact on the economy
The average family income is $91,600
72% of quilters have a college degree
On average, a quilter has about $8542 worth of equipment and supplies
On average, a quilter has about $3677 worth of fabric in home
85% of quilters have a dedicated room for quilting.

And the current program about Romanticizing the Quilt they are talking about separating fact from fallacy as Quilting becomes more accepted as an art, specifically the Underground Railroad Myth.  There has never been any evidence that the slaves would quilt messages into quilts and hang them out.  There are no examples of these messages.  The myth was propagated from a 1990 book that contained a story that is unsubstantiated.  Even record searches from WPA interviews of African Americans finds no mention of any codes or stories of directions for escaping slavery.

The last program was about Art Quilts. What Is Art? is a huge question.  Quilters have long fought for recognition of their work as an art form rather than just a "woman's craft".  Collectors like Gerald Roy, William Ferris and Bernie Herman along with quilters like Ricky Tims and Caryl Bryer Fallert have worked to gain recognition for quilting outside of the "craft" designation.

Here is another provoking thought:

Carol Ely, quilt historian, says if quilts had been made by men, the genre would be considered as more important than it has been.  Quilt scholarship is not yet where other art scholarships like painting or even photography stands.