Lincoln Modern Quilt Guild is Featured in the Lincoln Journal Star, March 12

The following is from an article published in our local newspaper:

http://journalstar.com/lifestyles/modern-quilting-features-no-rules-anything-goes-approach/article_378be7df-a02a-5b7c-9b36-652ff1ca0c90.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share

Modern quilting features 

'no rules, anything goes' approach 

Mary Dittenber with a few of her modern quilts in progress. 

(Photo by Gwyneth Roberts/Journal Star)

Mary Dittenber walked into a Lincoln quilt shop hoping to find a quilt for her bed.

Coming face-to-face with bolts of colorful cotton fabrics, batting and an infinite palette of threads, Dittenber knew instantly “it wasn’t that kind of quilt store,” she recalled with a smile.

“I didn’t know how to sew,” she said.

In fact, she had never, ever sat at a sewing machine.

But, in a matter of minutes back in 1999, the store’s proprietor changed all that. Grabbing four fabric squares, she demonstrated just how easy it was to make a “four-patch block.”

“Huh. Maybe I could do that,” Dittenber told the clerk. “And I forgot all about the quilt for the bed.”

Returning home with fabric and thread, Dittenber commandeered her daughter's $200 sewing machine and began to cut, sew, iron and sew some more until she had created a bath-towel size patchwork. Then she added batting and a backing and proceeded to maneuver the three layers through the machine’s pumping needle.

“The machine was a dog,” Dittenber recalled.

But the work was thrilling.

And in the back of her mind, she knew her parents would be proud. Ever since she was a child they had preached: Mary, you need to get a hobby.

Boy, did she find a hobby!

In the 17 years since, Dittenber estimates she’s made hundreds upon hundreds of quilts, comforters, wall-hangings, table runners and more. Her home is filled with her artistic creations, which hang from the walls on frames, racks and rods, which adorn table tops, sofa backs, and which fill closets, cabinets and shelves to overflowing.

Husband Richard Dittenber transformed the basement into a “Lady Cave,” complete with floor-to-ceiling shelving filled with:

* color coordinated fabrics

* storage boxes with supplies and scraps

* a sandblasting cabinet in which she can dye fabrics in her own colors

* plastic containers filled with sequins, beads, textured yarns and fine gauge jewelry wire

* and her own creations -- one-of-a-kind fabric beads made from her scraps.

The cinder block walls are covered in layer upon layer of quilts in progress -- more lay atop the 14-foot frame for her long-arm quilting machine.

If Dittenber’s not quilting, she’s thinking about quilting -- 24 hours a day, she said.

Modern quilting movement

 

 

 (Photo by Gwyneth Roberts/Journal Star)

Quilting is enjoying a resurgence -- to the tune of $3.76 billion a year, according to the 2014 Quilting in America survey.

Traditional quilting -- like that of our great grandmothers and her ancestors -- is still popular, and often what most people think of when they hear the word quilt: precise cuts, uniform designs and small perfectly aligned stitches.

But within that traditionalism is a growing movement -- modern quilting -- which bends, tweaks and outright ignores nearly every quilting commandment.

Modern quilts are bright, bold, high-contrast, asymmetrical, minimalist and improvisational. They relish “negative space” -- large unoccupied spaces surrounding shapes, objects or forms. Quilting lines are not necessarily straight nor uniformly spaced; corners are not always crisp or even. The quilts are as much without, as they are with, repetitive patterns.

Modern quilts are designed to be functional, used and machine washed until they disintegrate into tatters, said Sheila Green, a quilting guru, educator and accomplished quilter.

Although hallmarks of modern quilting cropped up nearly a half-century ago, it is only since 1998 that the movement has gained momentum. And only in the past decade has it taken America -- and now Lincoln -- by storm.

This past October, the one-year-old Lincoln Modern Quilters Guild, officially joined the national Modern Quilt Guild.

At its first official guild meeting in January, the group had 20 members.

By the second meeting last month, membership had more than doubled.

Rather than persnickety perfection of traditional handwork, modern quilting is more anything goes.

It’s like a giant salad bar, Green said.

There are lots of options, “but you don’t want to throw everything on your salad,” she said.

Modern quilting is designed to be accessible to all, said Kristie Jarchow, who joined Omaha’s Modern Quilters Guild in 2014, and helped rejuvenate an inactive Lincoln Modern Quilters Guild in 2015.

In modern quilting there are no rules.

“You just cut and sew," Jarchow said "There is no right or wrong. How you determine what to sew next is determined by what makes you happy and what brings you joy. You just let go.

“It’s about the journey, rather than how you get there. It respects the dogma of traditional quilting, but doesn’t always follow it."

The national Modern Quilt Guild explains modern quilting this way:

“Modern quilting has its roots in rebellion, in our desire to do something different, but simultaneously its feet are firmly planted in the field of tradition. …

“... Each of us feels the need to differentiate ourselves as modern quilters by how we work, the fabrics we choose and aesthetic of our quilts. We create in a way that supports our individual creative needs and our lifestyle preferences.”

And, if that explanation leaves you a bit fuzzy -- consider another modern quilt guild definition: “Modern quilting is like porn -- hard to define, but you know it when you see it.”

A brief history of quilting

 

Quilting dates back to the 35th century B.C., according to a timeline published by the International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The earliest surviving quilted object -- a linen carpet -- was found in a first century B.C. or second century A.D. Mongolian cave tomb. In the late 1500s, knights wore quilts under their armor for protection, said Green, a longtime quilter, quilt educator and docent with the Quilt Study Center.

“Quilting crosses cultures and crosses timelines,” she said.

It is a common thread in the fabric of nearly all human history. It tells the stories of people who lived long before us and carries them forward to the generations yet to come.

Which is why Green is so passionate about preserving, continuing and appreciating the quilt culture through her Discover Nebraska quilting program for fourth-graders.


 

Sheila Green with her quilts in progress and inspiration pieces.

(Photo by Gwyneth Roberts/Journal Star)

She belongs to three local quilting groups as well as national organizations. Just last month, she spent four days in Pasadena, Calif., at QuiltCon -- the third international quilting conference hosted by the Modern Quilters Guild.

Modern quilting might provide just the momentum needed to give the age-old tradition a contemporary boost, Green said.

Although aspects of modern quilting can be found as early as the 1970s, the idea of this break-the-rules quilting didn’t gain a foothold until 1998, when Martha Stewart Living magazine published a photograph of a quilt created by Denyse Schmidt.

Schmidt called her quilts “chic, modernist aesthetic.”

In the remote Alabama community of Gee’s Bend, a group of African-American quilters became known for their Gee’s Bend quilts -- made of re-purposed clothes, crudely cut fabric remnants and feed sacks, all pieced together in free-flowing individual artistry. Their work is revered much like the artistic works of Picasso, Matisse and Jackson Pollock, but it is their philosophy of do what makes you happy, rather that follow a specific pattern or format that struck a chord with the modern movement.

Enter the era of affordable digital cameras, Facebook, Flickr, Pinterest and Instagram -- the modern quilt idea took off faster than a sewing machine needle at full throttle.

Today there are more than 100 modern quilt guilds worldwide, with more than 100,000 members, Green said.

Nebraska nice

 

(Photo by Gwyneth Roberts/Journal Star)

The No. 1 rule in the Lincoln Modern Quilt Guild is: Be nice.

Every creation is a take on personal expression, Jarchow said.

Dittenber’s quilting often is more art than cozy cover. Truly, it has unleashed a creative side that surprises even her.

But it has dismayed the “quilt police” -- traditionalists who struggle with non-uniform pieces, crooked edges, colorful threads and freehand quilting motifs with unevenly spaced stitches and looping lines.

“I don’t use a ruler," Dittenber said. "I cut, slash and put the fabric in the machine. It’s really freeing."

She doesn’t use patterns -- never has. Instead she creates the looks she desires simply by replicating what she sees in pictures, and letting her spirit carry her forward.

Not everyone is impressed with her work -- as she discovered in 2005 when her one and only entry to the Nebraska State Fair yielded stinging criticism.

“I got a ribbon,” Dittenber said. But the critique said her squares “should be squared off.” The judges missed the entire point of her modern piece.

Stories like that sadden Jarchow -- who cannot begin to contain her enthusiasm for the modern quilting movement.

The youngest of 10 children, Jarchow learned to sew at the age of 6. Sewing was an economic necessity, she said.

“I did not have a store-bought dress until the mid-1980s when I moved to Lincoln and was a bridesmaid in a wedding,” Jarchow said.

She made her first quilt in high school -- learning at the side of her mother, Caroline Mueller. Quilting by hand, they stitched together a mother/daughter bond. Together they cut, pieced and quilted more quilts than they could gift to family and friends. So they donated their quilts to Project Linus, a Colorado-based charity that provides handmade blankets and quilts to traumatized and sick children.

“She made hundreds of small crib quilts,” Jarchow said. “Her love was fully in quilting.”

Even as she got older, Mueller kept quilting. But Jarchow, fearing what lie ahead, held on to the quilts, rather than donate them. And just like her mother, she held on to every scrap -- knowing one day she would find the perfect use for it.


 

Kristie Jarchow created this pixelated quilt she calls "So Blue" in memory of her mother, 

Caroline Mueller. 

(Photo by Ted Kirk/Journal Star)

Mueller died in the fall of 2012, just before her 94th birthday. Overcome by grief, Jarchow quit quilting for a time. Then she discovered Quilts for Kids, a Pennsylvania based nonprofit that provided quilting kits, with the pieces already cut, to quilters who loved to sew. Finished quilts were then returned to Quilts for Kids which donated them to hospitalized children.

Quilts for Kids eased her back into quilting.

Once started, Jarchow found she could not stop.

“Now I have a need to quilt and carry on in her memory,” Jarchow said of her mother.

The camaraderie of sewing

 

 

 (Photo by Gwyneth Roberts/Journal Star)

Like Mueller and Jarchow, many quilters quilt for the love of it -- and the camaraderie of sewing together. They give their creations away as gifts for babies, birthdays, graduations and weddings. They donate quilts to Habitat for Humanity, Quilts for Kids in Nebraska and other organizations helping those in need.

They quilt for fun. Gathering together for “sew days” at the quilt museum, a quilt shop or one another's homes. They quilt for contests and challenges -- practicing angles, closure, negative space, improvisation, finding use for “a wrong color,” or shedding light on a social issue. They hold round robins and mystery quilt-alongs.

They quilt for creativity, healing, emotional satisfaction and for love.

“I find it cathartic to make things happen,” Jarchow said. “I’m trying to carry on what my mom would do.”

Social media fuels the fire -- offering a plethora of ideas, causes and conversations. Jarchow blogs. She posts pictures on Pinterest and Instagram, and discovered the works of others -- some even in her own neighborhood. She visits countless quilting sites, each offering patterns, tutorials and “challenges” to which continues to expand her community of quilters.

“Modern quilting is really a movement,” Jarchow said.

“We want to blanket the world in quilts.”

Reach the writer at 402-473-7217 or eandersen@journalstar.com. On Twitter @LJSerinandersen.

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