ROUSES POINT — The warmth of a quilt doesn't come only from its layers.
Women learned that long ago.
"Quilts became a symbol of friendship," said Carole Prevost-Meier. "They were a way for women to get together."
At quilting bees or maybe just piecing quilt blocks by hand in a farmhouse kitchen, they talked about their families, their trials and tribulations, drew comfort from common experience. They discussed politics, the news of the day. They supported each other, encouraged one another.
EMPOWERMENT
That was then — and it's now, too.
It seemed health issues would curtail Cheryl Patch's plans to sew a quilt for an Order of the Eastern Star fundraiser.
"Then my friends all volunteered to do the blocks," she said, eyeing a choice of fabrics at Fibre Junction quilt shop.
Quilters, seasoned and novice, met at Patch's Rouses Point home to deliberate over block styles and a variety of fabrics in both color and pattern. Each block, including the Carpenter's Wheel and Bethlehem Rose, is biblical in message, a good choice, Patch said, for an Eastern Star project.
Prevost-Meier will machine-quilt the project once it's assembled at no charge — that's her contribution to the fundraiser.
A quilt shop isn't just a business, she and partner Jennifer Taffner say.
"We want it to be a place that is comfortable, where someone can come in and show us what she's (or he's) been working on," Prevost-Meier said. "We want to inspire people to create — when you start creating, it's very empowering."
Prevost-Meier, who left a management position in a bank to earn a master's degree in philosophy and religious thought, finds herself inspired by the pioneer spirit of early quilters, by African American women in slavery who used imagination and thrift to make quilts.
"Fabric was scarce," she said. "Cloth making was not easy. You didn't leave any scrap behind — it was so precious."
Those women, Taffner said, "would be amazed at what we have now, all this yardage, when they were sewing all their scraps together."
A specialty of the shop, which Prevost-Meier and Taffner aim to complement other quilt retailers in the area, is reproduction fabric. At Fibre Junction, quilters can learn to reproduce a Civil War-era quilt using fabric that imitates the kinds available then. They can buy patterns replicating quilts made by prairie children, join a group that makes wall hangings in a folk-art design.
Just now, Prevost-Meier is leading a six-class project reproducing a quilt made in 1862 by a group of women in Ohio for circuit rider George Warvel.
"When I look at that quilt I get a sense of women working together for a cause, and in this case, it was to honor this minister they felt very attached to," she said.
The reproduction fabric, she said, "provides me with a link to the past. Fiber is where we can find a lot of women's history. A lot of times, women would quilt in relation to battles, politics. They would quilt their opinions."
NEXT GENERATION
When Patch and some other Eastern Star quilters visited one recent Saturday, they needed another set of eyes to help choose a fabric for their quilt top's set-in triangles. Prevost-Meier hung up a length of a brown print fabric and one of a solid-color in similar shade, then pinned a row of finished quilt blocks on top.
After some deliberation, they rejected the plain fabric.
"This just seemed to tie it together," said Trudy Burger of Chazy, who has quilted for three decades now.
Taffner, who took her first quilting class when she was in sixth grade, represents the more-contemporary side of the shop. She's teaching classes in bag making, simple and more complicated.
Fibre Junction gives her more time to enjoy quilting, though never quite enough. There's a jewel-toned quilt top in the Cheese and Crackers pattern in her sewing room at home that she's making for her daughter Dolores.
"She keeps asking me when I'm going to quilt it so she can have it on her bed," Taffner said.
Her five children already offer proof that another generation of quilters is in the making. Dolores, 8, sits with her mom and sews rows of blocks together; Rose, 12, will actually be the one to machine-quilt Dolores's bedcover. Mary Cate, 14, loves choosing colors for projects; and Elizabeth, 5, is quick to tell her mother what quilt she'd like made for her.
As for Joseph, who's 10, "he always admires my finished project," Taffner said, her laughter as warm as a cozy quilt. "He's actually seeing it, not just looking at it.
"He's going to make somebody a good husband someday."
E-mail Suzanne Moore
smoore@pressrepublican.com
