Carolyn Trumpold: Transcript

Quilter
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I'm Caroline Trumpold from Middle Amana. I've lived there all my life. One of the more famous traditions of our community, as far as folk arts go, is the quilting. And we call it Amana-style quilting because for a long time it was different from quilting anywhere else. Because we make what we call whole cloth quilts, which is sewing two panels of fabric together for one side and then two panels for the other side. And in-between, we layer some batting. And then we stitch all the way through, which sometimes the visitors come and say, "When are you going to do the other side?" Well, we do it all at once.

We do quilt some in the homes. And we have a church guild quilting group, of which I am co-chairman. I do the setting up and the chalking of the design, and then my co-chairman organizes the quilters. She calls them and schedules them. And she also organizes someone to fix something for our lunch, because a 2:30 break with something sweet is very, very important to the quilters. When you've sat there from noon to 2:30, it's time to take a break and to have a treat.

The designs in our quilts are old, most of them old designs. I've grown up with most of them. I've inherited them from my mother, from some ladies who just want me to have theirs when they can't quilt anymore. They are stencils, and they're sometimes large. Sometimes one stencil is, I would say, about three feet by four feet. And then it fills a whole corner of a quilt. And then we fill in the center with diamonds.

Sometimes we lay this pattern in the middle with the corner in the center and put those four pieces in the middle and have the diamonds around the outside. But once in a while—we did a wedding quilt in church, and these people didn't want any diamonds, and so we filled it with flowers. And so—and the ladies, the first thing they did was count how many flowers there were to do on the quilt, because a flower takes longer.

We started a quilting class here at the Arts Guild with young girls. I think they were limited to fifth and sixth-grade age, with their mothers. And they started on a quilt that was going to be given away. We can teach on quilts that are not going to be bought. But if you have a quilt to sell, you don't want to have a beginner stitch on it.

I had an interesting experience with a German professor from Central College. He wanted to tape the German—the colloquial German from Amana—because he then wrote a book, Amana German. He came to a quilting session, which is the perfect time because there's a lot of talk going on. And then he wanted to help quilt. And he sat and he put the needle in the top and then brought it straight up from the bottom and then down again. He worked for half an hour. And I think I spent equally as long taking it back out, because there's no way you can have straight stitches.

So the quality of a quilt is determined by the stitches. If the stitches are even and small—as small as possible—that is the making of a good quilt.