A Bunch of Quilts and a Mom Thinking About AI

Because who doesn't look at a quilt and think about tech?

Saturday, March 15th was National Quilting Day.

The Saturday before that, I moved shrink-wrapped plastic totes full of my great-grandmother’s quilts from my storage unit to my new home. It’s already June, and I’ve just recently unpacked them.

Of course this means I’ve been thinking about their historical significance, the work they require, and creativity….and how all that fits in today’s world with AI.

Me with said quilts.

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Here’s some context about me-the woman with a bunch of quilts:

I’ve always been a lover of history, specifically 19th century Great Plains history. I’m one of the few folks who prefer the prairie to any other landscape.

My ancestors came to Nebraska from Germany and Ireland in the late 1800s. My great-grandmother, Cora, who lived to the age of 99 and died shortly after I was born in 1982, made a lot of quilts which ultimately made their way to me, the lover of prairie stuff.

I like to open the totes, spread the quilts, study the mix of machine and hand stitching, the patterns, and imagine my great-grandmother working on them. Maybe her friend hosted a quilting bee at her farm. The women chat while their hands put the final touches on the masterpiece before them.

I tell my daughters these things when they look at the quilts with me.

The diagonal stitches are handsewn. The stitching along the blue edge binding is done by machine. I know Cora did the handstitching. The machine stitches may have been hers, as well, or my mother’s as I know she finished some of Cora’s that remained incomplete.

To give you a sense of this quilt’s size, I’m 6’3” and holding up the middle part of the quilt. The hands circled in red belong to my middle school daughters who were adamant that they not be featured in this picture.

Do I expect my daughters to lug the totes of quilts from home to home when I’m gone? Do I expect them to re-fold the quilts every couple of years to avoid permanent creasing? No. It may be time to put them on an estate sale’s table when I’m gone, and that’s okay. They’ll have learned a bit about a quilt’s construction, have seen the work it required, and learned about the people behind it.

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Here’s some sewing history:

The sewing machine became a staple in the middle class woman’s home by the late 19th century. Cora had one. Did her mother, my great-great grandmother, have one? I don’t know. I do know that at some point in her life before the sewing machine showed up, quilt making was being done entirely by hand. Did she begrudge her daughter for using a time-saving machine for part of the quiltmaking process? Did she find Cora’s handsewing skills pale in comparison to hers and have some thought akin to, “Kids these days don’t know how to sew properly” and let Cora know that? I don’t know. Did she worry the machine might threaten the quilting bee’s face-to-face community? Perhaps.

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Fast forward to now.

AI exists, and it can do all kinds of things to inspire a quilter. One doesn’t need to have a friend or family member to teach them how to pattern, sew, and assemble a quilt. AI can, and that can be scary. It could lead to people no longer appreciating the skills of those who can sew a quilt “from scratch.”

I understand the fear of tech turning something into a lost art, and AI is doing that faster than ever. I get overwhelmed if I dwell on it too much.

One way I’ve been able to make the fear subside is reminding myself life is about how we spend our time because we never get our days back. How do I want to spend the time I have?

So what if AI allows one to create patterns and teach a person how to quilt? Does that negate Cora’s skill? Does it insult her?

If Cora were here today, she’d be nearly 143 years old. I wonder if she’d be intrigued by what AI can do. Would she huddle around a laptop with my daughters and work with Dalle-E to create a unique design? Would it lead to the three of them making a quilt together where they each touch some part of the process–the cutting of the fabric (would she prefer traditional scissors or give today’s handy Rotary cutter a go?), the thread, the batting….along with the computer’s keyboard and the sewing machine? Everyone working together in tandem with various technologies?

More importantly, is this even how Cora would want to spend her time?

I don’t know if Cora would embrace today’s technology or even want to spend time making a quilt given she could just go buy one at Target. I don’t know if she’d want to bond with my daughters over something that is no longer a necessity. We have central heating. This isn’t the 1900 prairie. We don’t need heavy quilts in the winter. Cora might want to do something else. Maybe an escape room or ziplining. Maybe she’d eat Doritos and binge watch Dance Moms with my middle schoolers.

If my daughters choose to try quilting thanks to AI making the learning process less time consuming, great. If it means they’re able to explore something new within the small amount of free time they have within their busy days, that’s wonderful. If it means they create a quilt even if it’s not “from scratch,” I’m thrilled.

At the end of the day, I’m a mom, and it’s my job as a parent to be mindful of my children’s attitudes towards others and themselves regardless of the tech that surrounds them.

If my daughters choose to give quilting a try and utilize AI in their process, fine. What matters to me is how they act about it. I don’t want them to think their quilts are superior to Cora’s. I also don’t want them to put Cora’s quilts on a pedestal and devalue their own creations. I won’t tell my daughters they’re “not really quilting” because they used AI. No. They’re all making quilts in a way that works for them.

I’m not going to begrudge my daughters for growing up in a time that requires different skills than were required of the women who came before them. So while I’m a huge fan of history and want people’s stories to be told (plastic totes full of quilts as evidence), I don’t expect people to live in the past.

That being said, if time travel is invented during my lifetime, I’ll be the first to hop on that machine with a ticket for late 19th century Nebraska. I’d find Cora’s mother and tell her that if she was worried about the future, people do still talk to each other, and quilting bees still exist–they just look a little different now.

To learn more about the beauty of quilting, explore the following:

https://www.internationalquiltmuseum.org/

https://quiltalliance.org/

-Cheney Luttich–a huge fan of quilts who chooses to spend her spare time writing “from scratch.”