Believe it or not, there are – and always have been – a good many men who make quilts, and who make money making them.
There was an article in our local paper, the San Diego Union Tribune, about a retired engineer designing and making genuinely unusual quilts, almost three-dimensional in appearance. That engineering background shows in the work, which is a pattern you notice once you start looking.
Some names worth knowing
Michael James has been around for years. I took a class from him in the mid 1980s, and he is now a professor of art and fabric arts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His work sits firmly on the art side of the craft.
Ricky Tims is a sort of cowboy quilter who took up sewing as a broke adult after inheriting his grandmother’s sewing machine. He travels the guild circuit giving workshops and talks, and he is one of the better-known teachers working today.
Quilts made by men hang at local shows all the time, once you start noticing the labels.
A show worth remembering
The Museum of the American Quilter’s Society in Paducah, Kentucky sponsored a travelling exhibition featuring the work of twenty-two men – twenty-six quilts in all. A fair number of the makers were as unreconstructedly masculine as you could ask for, which was rather the point of the exhibition.
Why the assumption persists
Quilting reads as a women’s craft largely because of how it was organised rather than who was capable of it. Quilting bees were social gatherings of women, and that image is what stuck.
But the underlying skills – geometry, precision cutting, colour planning, working to a tolerance of an eighth of an inch – have never belonged to one sex. The engineer with the three-dimensional quilts is doing what engineers do, in fabric.
If you are a man thinking about taking it up
Guilds are more welcoming than their reputation suggests, and most are actively glad of new members of any description.
Start the way everyone starts: a simple pieced block, a rotary cutter, and a quarter-inch seam you can hit consistently. The craft does not care who is holding the needle.
