Quiltfolk Issue 16 - Family

The circumstances surrounding travel during the pandemic (especially in late spring of 2020) prompted us to reimagine Quiltfolk’s latest issue. The result?

Issue 16: Family is the first-ever themed edition of Quiltfolk. And we couldn’t be more excited to share this unique and powerful issue with our readers.

Quiltmakers know that families are a lot like quilts: They come in many colors, patterns, and sizes —and as beautiful as they may be, at some point in the process, someone’s going to cry. In fact, specific quilts can describe families. Some families are wholecloth quilts: strong and stable, with few seams and no skipped stitches —until you look closely.There are “kitchen sink” scrap-quilt families, where wildly different patches come together, hopefully harmoniously (though we know that with scrap quilts, anything could happen.) There are old quilts and old families. There are young families, new as quilts made with the latest fabric and a fresh sewing machine. Then there are the tattered-quilt families, the ones that look like they could fall apart at any second. Don’t despair: Any quiltmaker will tell you there’s always a way to mend just about anything. What kind of quilt is your family? Perhaps it’s one made of memories, like Asake Denise Foy Jones’s Land of My Hands or Shiloh Holley’s quilt for her late father. Maybe your family’s got a new lease on life, like the quilts coming out of Brittany Young’s studio. Maybe, like Erick Wolfmeyer, your family quilt isn’t finished, yet. It takes luck, faith, and a lot of work to create a family quilt that endures. Even so, those who help sew it all together will tell you that nothing matters more.