While cleaning out a storage unit that had belonged to her mother, Julie Campbell came across several boxes full of carefully preserved quilt blocks that had all been hand-sewn over 60 years ago. They were made from old clothes that Campbell and her family had worn while she was growing up in the 1950s.
“When we unrolled them, there was the newspaper talking about Sputnik,” Campbell said.
She kept finding more and more fabrics that her mother had held on to for decades, some dating to the 1940s. There were pieces of hand-sewn dresses her grandmother had worn. There were shirts that Campbell’s mother had made for her as a child. All of them had been cut up and sewn into quilt blocks.
After both her mother and sister died of cancer, and after undergoing chemotherapy treatment of her own, Campbell decided to piece these clippings together into a hand-sewn garden quilt she titled, “Legacy Garden.”
“The quilting itself took me about eight months,” Campbell said. “I’m a traditional sewist, and this is how I carry forward those traditions in my family.”
On Friday, Campbell’s quilt was displayed alongside hundreds of others at the 44th Annual Smoky Mountain Quilt Show, where thousands of quilters, sewers, historians and vendors gathered from across the United States to show off their quilts and admire others; all while competing for the coveted 1st place ribbon.
The show is put on each year by the Smoky Mountain Quilters of Tennessee, a guild of quilters who meet monthly to talk about everything quilt-related. Janet Wambach is a guild member and co-chair in charge of organizing the event.
“Our turnout is normally around 2,000 people for the two days,” Wambach said. “Hopefully we get more people in. …. We’re hoping to grow.”
While many people come to the show to admire the quilts and purchase patterns and fabrics from vendors, many more come for a special event: the quilt turnings.
In a room divided from the rest of the show, local quilt historian and guild member Marikay Waldvogel turns over several historic quilts in front of a packed audience. The oldest quilt is estimated to be over 180 years old, dating to the 1840s. Some are being displayed for the very first time.
“We turn the quilts from one season to another,” Waldvogel said. “That was the old-timey thing. If you had quilts on top of your bed, you’d take them off in the Spring and put on something else.”
Quilt turning, also called "bed turning," is a time-honored tradition dating back to the Colonial era in the United States. Homemakers would gather together and watch as quilts were ‘turned,’ or flipped. This would often accompany a story about the history of the quilt, as it still does today at the Smoky Mountain Quilt Show.
“It’s a chance to show your quilt,” Waldvogel said. “When quilts are in the closet, and they’ve never come out and nobody’s ever seen them before, it’s very exciting. Because you never know what’s going to show up.”
On Friday, Waldvogel turned over five different historic quilts for showgoers to observe, dating from the 1840s to the 1970s.
One of the quilts, a garden quilt bearing red tulips, belongs to Hannah Haller. She’s 101 years old, and remembers when this faded, cream-colored quilt she still owns was displayed prominently by her mother in her Indiana farm home while she was growing up. She was in attendance at Friday’s quilt turnings.
“When I was growing up, my mother would just put it in the main bedroom to help dress it up,” Haller said. “And I loved it. I’d help her make the bed. The only thing I learned was that it was made by a great aunt of hers during the Civil War era.”
For guild members and showgoers, quilting is as much about history and storytelling as it is about arts and crafts. Many families own quilts that have been passed down for several generations or that were quilted during interesting circumstances. Over time, many of these generational stories have been lost as people die.
To help preserve the stories of quilts in Tennessee, the Smoky Mountain Quilters have partnered with The Quilt Alliance in North Carolina to archive quilts and their stories. They call the project, ‘Go Tell It.’
People can bring their quilts to the show and sit down for a three minute video interview with members of the guild, which will be archived on The Quilt Alliance’s website. Becky Harris is a member of the guild who volunteered to help with the ‘Go Tell It’ project on Friday.
“With the oral histories, like we’re doing here today, you get an entirely different approach from the owners of the quilts or the people who inherited those quilts,” Harris said. “And they’ll say something like, ‘Mama always called this,’ and then they’ll spurt out a name that we’ve never heard … and that’s through oral history, you wouldn’t get that through doing strict research. It kind of humanizes the quilts. it gives characteristics and emotion that you don’t get otherwise.”
Harris said that quilting is a unique art form in that it’s historically been done "in the moment," often without any thought put into how the quilt might be remembered in the future. They frequently go unsigned by the artists, and rely on oral history and family inheritance to be remembered.
“They're not thinking of what may happen to this quilt beyond the next generation,” Harris said “It's two or three generations forward that that history gets lost.”
That’s why Campbell decided she needed to preserve her quilt’s story, before it’s forgotten. She signed up for the ‘Go Tell It’ project, and told her story so that it could be preserved.
“This quilt needed to be the very first I entered into a show,” Campbell told ‘Go Tell It’ interviewers. “It didn’t win a ribbon, it didn’t need to win a ribbon. It just had to be the first.”
For many who attend the Smoky Mountain Quilt Show, it’s not about the competition. It’s about the stories that are shared and the histories that are remembered.
“Quilting is a manner of expression, and I don't think that will ever change,” Harris said. “We've had quilts in this show that express sorrow over losing someone. … We've had quilts that express anger. … People will express themselves in that manner through their work with textiles.”
The Smoky Mountain Quilt Show will continue on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Knoxville Expo Center. More information can be found on the Smoky Mountain Quilters of Tennessee’s website.
