Houblog

Sew, are you a quilter? You should bee at the quilting festival! But the Chronicle should have quilt while it was ahead instead of darning up this tangled skein. Stitched together like a ball of yarn, its article online today is another of those “look-through-the-eye-of-the-needle-to see-all� type things. I’m not going to hem (or haw) about it: Don’t waste your time trying to stitch together a coherent tapestry on the subject out of this patch of light embroidery.

Ok, all puns aside, if you were to read the article on the quilt festival, you’d think it was all old women moping about their dead mothers. How the hell is this article informative? A news article on this festival should have, you know, information. What is a quilt? What are the historical roots of quilting? Who quilts today? Who is holding the festival and why? What makes a quilt a quilt instead of, say, a blanket? How did the quilting festival get so big? How many people quilt in the country today? What can you buy a quilt for, and are any on sale at the convention?

None of this is addressed. Instead, we’re treated to a soap opera description of the director’s quilt memorializing her mother, plus a couple of others. Now that’s nice, but staffer Dai Huynh (apparently senior enough to get her name on the article instead of just “Staff�), failed to mention a few critical things about the festival. Small details, like the above, plus:

What are the hours the convention is open?
What is the admission cost?
Besides three mopey, soap-opera, cathartic quilts that sound more like therapy than art, what the hell is an attendee going to see?
It’s stated that 55,000 people are expected to attend. Why? Are they going to see three quilts and a book? (One of those quilts better be the Shroud of Turin in that case!)

Quilting has a long history in rural America, with roots going back to Europe. It’s a part of us, of Americana before it got commercialized, trademarked, Hollywood-ized, and exported to death. In other words, it’s really us—part of our soul. It’s not the fake, shallow, glitzy “us� that the media and Hollywood portray.

I remember driving through the Arkansas Ozarks and seeing quilts on sale by the roadside every few miles. We stopped and bought one 25 years ago; I still have it. If I had time, I’d Google up some of the information on it to show you. For free–I don’t make money from this site.* But then, other people still pay the Chronicle to not do it for them.

Whatever.

*Honesty compels me to add: “yet.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 27th, 2005 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Random Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.