Sew Big: A Revival of the Itch to Stitch

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Maybe your lake room has been taken over by a quilting table and piles of fabric.

Maybe there are tote bags of yarn and knitting needles sitting beside every chair in your home.

Or maybe you are a rarer breed, a weaver whose loom stands proudly in a back shed. Your neighbors and friends bring you bags of old clothes to be woven into rugs.

Looks like you’ve got the itch to stitch.

Even if you’ve never picked up a knitting needle in your life, and you don’t know knitting from crocheting from appliqué, chances are you’ve seen the signs that in the Lake Superior region – textile arts are booming.

From yarn shops popping up like lupines to highway signs announcing quilt stores, it’s clear that textiles are big around the Big Lake.

Duluthian Karen McTavish was living in Los Angeles when her mother, a contemporary art quilter, called with the idea to start a mother-daughter quilting business. Karen, who had no experience with sewing at all, took her up on the offer.

“She got me at a low point. I was completely burned out working in offices. She could have said ‘Let’s join the circus,’ and I would have done it.”

When Karen got to Duluth, however, she “got the vibe that it wasn’t OK to do anything but very traditional quilting.”

So she went to the Duluth Public Library to teach herself to quilt the old-fashioned way. Within a short period, this self-taught quilter was selling quilts through the Washington Studios Artist Cooperative on Lake Avenue. Customers began entering her work in competitions – and winning. (People are allowed to enter quilts in a competition. Even if someone else made it.)

Fourteen years later, Karen is a world-renowned quilter, presenting at conventions around the world and known for a unique style of performing traditional hand-quilting techniques on a machine.

“No one told me that hand-quilting and machine-quilting were two very different things. I was told I could easily finish one quilt in a day, but I was such a heavy machine quilter, faithfully following what a hand-quilter would do, that it would take me a full week of full-time quilting to finish one quilt.”

Today, she teaches traditional hand-quilting techniques, such as cross-hatching and feathering, on a machine. She works to stay true to the basics of traditional hand-quilting and teaches her students to do the same. “Do what a hand-quilter would do, never take a shortcut, and always do the hardest thing.”

She is also the author of five successful technique books, including Mastering the Art of McTavishing, at one point the eighth most popular hobby and crafts book on Amazon.com.

“McTavishing” is a freestyle quilting technique she originally called “Cartoon Wonder Woman Hair” for the way it mimics the 1970s hairstyles of Farrah Fawcett and Wonder Woman: the big, bouncy swirls created after sleeping with orange juice cans in your hair all night. She posted photos on her website, and it caught on. “A chat room dubbed it ‘McTavishing.’ Quilters are Internet savvy – they’re online and in chat rooms.”

She demonstrates her original technique, her recently cut dreadlocks held back, her tattooed arms steering the long-arm quilting machine.

Long-arm quilting machines are usually 10 to 14 feet in length, with a long arm for the needle and an attached table that can accommodate a large quilt. They significantly reduce the time required for making a quilt by hand, and many credit them for quilting’s recent popularity boom.

When she’s not teaching, Karen continues to quilt for customers, often on white wholecloth. “When I’m working on a white wholecloth, I’m really nice to everyone in Duluth. I have to keep my karma good; I’m working on a white quilt. I’ll stop and help change a tire even though I don’t know how. When I’m not working on a white quilt, I’ll just drive by and say see you later.”

She finds the Lake Superior region to be perfect for the art. “Our winters are long and we are freezing cold – this is a perfect combination for a quilter. We need nice long projects to get us through to spring and quilts to keep us warm. If I am making a quilt for someone, I can think of that person in every stitch I take until it’s completed. It is a way to show love, a way to show the person how important they are to us, a way to create a family heirloom and a way of keeping them safe and warm.”

Kelly Mattson, owner of Kelly J’s Sewing Center and Quilt Shop in Duluth, describes how the popularity of quilting has exploded since the mid-1990s. Some surveys say the hobby has grown as much as 75 percent since then.

“Why is hard to say,” says Kelly. “It happens with a lot of our customers who start out sewing. They see quilting is not difficult – there are straight seams. It doesn’t take long to see how creative quilting can be. Fabric is like the medium for a painter.”

Kelly J’s has been a mainstay in the sewing community for 21 years, with customers throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Canada. In addition to fabric and sewing machines, it offers a wide range of quilting classes in topics ranging from bed quilts to wall art, tote bags, home decorating and even garments.

The array of projects is part of the appeal, Kelly says. “The industry has created itself in many ways. The quilting industry has a strong focus on education, like quilt shows. The fabric sets they’re producing now are high quality. There are new lines coming out every three to four months – that helps keep people excited about it.”

One popular quilt show held annually in Duluth, “Quilting on the Waterfront – Machines in Motion,” recently attracted more than 100 quilters of all skill levels to the three-day event. Award-winning teachers will present workshops on creating pictorial art quilts and long-arm quilting.

Lac La Belle, Michigan, resident Helen Wills grew up sewing and became interested in quilting after her retirement in the late 1990s. “I just thought it would be a fun thing to do to occupy time. And it could be done way out in the sticks.”

She and a friend visited a Houghton fabric store and bought the popular Eleanor Burns’ Quilt in a Day books. “A beginner could follow them and quilt and have them come out right – they gave you enough information.”

Helen has given away many of her quilts, and now focuses on appliqué quilts, which she describes as nice but much more time-consuming than regular quilting.

Whenever she travels, whether winters in Texas or to see her son in Superior, she visits quilt shops to get ideas. She jokes that she knows all the quilt shops between Lac La Belle and Superior and names them off: “Ewen has one on the main road; Ironwood has one with billboards close to that; Ashland has one right along the main highway; there’s Country Schoolhouse in South Superior and Fabric Works on Tower Avenue.”

Because quilts are seen on beds or hanging on walls, their status as an art form is slightly higher than a nearby cousin: rag rugs. But rag rugs are becoming an appreciated art form, according to Yvonne Lockwood, curator emeritus of folklife at the Michigan State University Museum, and author of Finnish American Rag Rugs: Art, Tradition, and Ethnic Continuity.

Rag rugs are woven on a loom, six to eight at a time. They’re made of rags cut from old clothes. Yvonne describes how the tradition of recycling old cloth into woven rugs probably developed sometime in Europe in the middle 1800s, when wood pulp began to replace the use of cloth in making paper.

“Rags became worthless, and that’s when people in northern Europe started to weave rugs.”

Her book explores how the tradition of rag rug weaving stayed unusually strong among Finnish-Americans, particularly in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. “In comparison with other ethnic groups who came at that time – German, Norwegian, Swedish – all those people were weaving rag rugs when they came, but it was never maintained as an ethnic form of art the way it was in the Finnish community, where it has a tradition since immigration.”

Why rag rug weaving stayed a folk art among Finnish-Americans and not among other ethnicities is hard to say, according to Yvonne.

“In the (Finnish) community over time, many young women learned to spin, to knit, crochet, but it was weaving they really stuck to. Why? You’ve got that big cumbersome loom. Yet it was the art form that many women gravitated toward. It has over time become an expression of ethnicity.” Although, as Yvonne points out, many weavers don’t even think about the fact that they weave as part of their Finnish heritage. “Many of them knew it was Finnish, but they did it because their mother or their aunts did it. A lot of this ethnic stuff is subconscious.”

Within U.P. communities, neighbors will know who the weaver is, and often bring her boxes of old clothes to be woven into rugs.

“Rag rugs were woven as a utilitarian thing. It was never appreciated by anyone as art. They may have thought they were nice colors, or seen the shirt they used to wear, but they never thought about it as art, design, aesthetics.”

Yvonne describes how visitors to the U.P. will buy rag rugs and sometimes hang them on the wall. “The weavers thought that was hilarious. Now, there are some weavers who are thinking, ‘Oh, this would be pretty on the wall.’ Their function is changing – they’re no longer just utilitarian.”

When Yvonne began conducting her research in 1986, many of the weavers she met said weaving would probably die with their generation – no younger women were learning it. But just 10 years later at events such as the Great Lakes Folk Festival, weavers demonstrate for throngs of younger women wanting to learn.

“I met one young woman who was learning to weave with an older local woman,” says Yvonne. “The older woman was teaching her to cut rags. Her husband was making her a loom. She couldn’t have been more than 21, 22 years old.”

A major force in the growing popularity of textile arts is the generation of 20- to 30-year-olds learning the crafts – and using modern means to do so.

Jen Kehoe of Duluth posted on Facebook that she wanted to learn how to knit and crochet, asking if anyone wanted to start a “Stitch ’n Bitch” group.

“I was just looking for a hobby that was inexpensive and wasn’t about going to the movie theater or turning on the TV. I wanted to do something productive.”

She had seen a program about Stitch ’n Bitch groups and thought it would be a good way to learn knitting and crocheting. (Knitting uses two needles; crocheting uses a single hook.) The groups can be found worldwide; a quick visit to stitchnbitch.org can hook you up with an existing group in your area or let you start your own group.

Some of Jen’s coworkers saw the post and replied that they had intended to start a group for a while; this was the kick they needed. A core group of six began meeting weekly at Amazing Grace Bakery and Café in Duluth. Some had experience; some, like Jen, had none.

Since the group started nearly two years ago, Jen has created lots of projects, from crocheted hats and a felted bag to lots of knit scarves, one mitten, and a sweater-in-progress.

“It brings me back to basics and pulls me out of the consumerism mentality. If I can make a sweater, I can grow tomatoes, I can make my own laundry soap. It’s empowering.”

She finds that the hobby and her creations both lend themselves to cold weather. In summer, “I can’t really get into it to save my life. Then all fall, winter, even spring, I’m really into it.”

Informally, the group meets casually at Amazing Grace to stitch together. They sit, work on their own projects and chat it up. Group members come and go; anyone is welcome to attend. The core group still stands at six, and they trade ideas and patterns and talk about all sorts of topics, from gossip to more serious life issues.

Although her intention in starting the group was to learn to knit, Jen says, “I love that it brings people together. We’ve developed a lot of trust within our group. We’re really a support system for each other. All through a Facebook post.”

Duluth writer Felicia Schneiderhan keeps one quilt and two boxes of cut pieces ready to be sewn together. She has hauled them around for 15 years.