History Meets Quilting - How Red Sky at Night Quilt Came to Be

I finished my Bachelor of Arts in Modern History in 2010 and gave birth to my second child three weeks later. I completely expected that I would take a year or two to focus on the chaos and joy of two small children, and then return to university to complete my Honours and then my PHD so that I could spend my days teaching history to university students and writing about women and the Cold War. 

Six months into my ‘break’ from study (I remember thinking it would be a break. How naive was I?!), I learned to sew. I started following blogs, collecting fabric, making my first quilts, and soon, so thoroughly besotted with this beautiful craft, and also completely exhausted from the two small children, I hardly gave my degree a second thought. Quilting tapped into a creative longing I’d felt my whole life, a creativity I used to some extent in my history writing, but extended further into colour and shape and physical form. I couldn’t really grasp why this hobby, so undervalued in my culture, had taken hold of me so completely. I wrestled with justifications and reasons, but still, I sewed, regardless.

A few years later, while staying at my parents’ house, I had one of those uncomfortable nights’ sleep where it’s too hot for a doona but too cold for just sheets. The next morning I told my mum she really needed a quilt on her bed for the cooler summer nights and she asked me if I would make one for her. Excitedly, I opened up Pinterest and showed her ideas to get a sense of what she might like. Over and over, Mum kept pointing out the two colour sampler quilts. “In red!” she asserted. 

I had never successfully finished a sampler quilt before. I like getting into a rhythm, cutting or sewing the same thing over and over, rather than stopping to work out quilt maths for every.single.block, but I determined to give it another try. Looking more into various blocks, I discovered some were at least 150 years old! I read snippets of interesting stories of blocks: slaves rescued, quilts donated, stories of war and weddings. And, my history-loving brain saw a way to combine both my passions: history and quilts by sharing the stories of women past, and the quilts they made. I decided to make a blog series where I would research the blocks, share their stories, and write a tutorial for each block I made for Mum’s quilt. I called it Red Sky at Night.

It's hard to find many resources on American quilt history in Australian libraries or book shops, but I was optimistic that I could find a ton of resources on the internet. The more I searched, however, I discovered that just like we ordinary women make quilts in the present, as a gift, or for the sake of design, without much thought as to how it fits into a wider narrative, or what future generations will want to know about us, the million old quilts out there are often silent. 

Modern history is usually men's history - men at war, in politics, in the arts, in scientific research and discovery, in colonising far away lands. Of course there were prominent women too, but the history of women at home or in regular jobs - women like me - and the stories of what drove them, what scared them, what filled them with longing or gave them joy, what expectations crushed them, or kept them going, are the histories locked silently inside old quilts. Learning what they were like is more like archaeology. We dig around and make inferences based on the tools they used, the magazines they read, and the quilts they made.

I learned so much in my year of quilt history study, but it wasn't the learning I expected. I thought that because there were blocks called “Underground Railroad” and “Oregon Trail” and “Wedding Ring” that I'd find a sweet little story behind each block. But it wasn't like that at all. These women were just like us, finding pretty and interesting names for our pretty and interesting blocks. And they were also unlike me, at least in the way they made up names and histories for the blocks to appeal to the fashions and interests of the day. I discovered that the 'quilt codes' of the underground railroad were a myth, and that the "log cabin" was renamed such in the 1860s to honor Abraham Lincoln, and was originally inspired by the patterns woven into Egyptian mummies!

I also learned, though, about canny and creative entrepreneurial women, mail-order quilt pattern businesses that thrived, even in the depression, and an inspiring commitment to beauty and discovery even though life around them was so difficult. I learned to be proud of our quilt making tradition, to cherish the space it held in my life and our home, to be grateful for my creative longings rather than feel the need to squash or justify them.

It's been 10 years since I started making Red Sky at Night! Since then, I've started a business, switched to English paper piecing, and upgraded my website and so all the old links between the posts, the tutorials for the blocks, the quilt histories, are broken! I'd always thought I'd like to go back into my old website and tidy it all up, but it wasn't until someone asked me about it earlier this year, that I actually went back and started reading over the blocks and stories again. And in reading and remembering, I didn't just want to fix the links, I wanted to remake it, tell the stories again, see what else I could learn with 10 years under my belt, and more available on the net.