Some quilts are intended for functionality--they're intended to provide warmth and/or cover, but most especially comfort. Often such quilts are laden with childhood memories: being tucked in at night, the walls of a favorite fort, an improvised cape or gown with a train, or, later, a temporary drape over the first apartment window. Such quilts can be imagined tangled in soap suds as the washer scrub-a-dub-dubs the sticky fingers and grime accumulated from its hard work.

Other quilts are precious hierlooms inherited or found stashed away, sometimes with frayed spots, or tears from much use, with tiny tiny blood spots, maybe, from the needle pricks of fine stitches in a quilting bee, each patch and pattern soaked with memorable talk shared in the making; other hierloom quilts came to be by candlelight doppling one pair of hands. These quilts are treasures saved from the past filled with precious memories.

Then there are contemporary art quilts like mine. These quilts are improvisational "paintings" created with fabrics; their intricate combinations of colors and patterns--that cannot be replicated--make them one-of-a-kind artifacts intended for diisplay only on wall or bed. Their pleasure increases with each viewing, not each use. Every time one "studies" an art quilt, something new can be found aesthetically, undreamed of riches, suprising as a gold nugget among pyrite. Art quilts are created from inspiration, not prescribed pattern. Even the quilter/artist finds delight as the new quilt unfolds. in contrast, in traditional quilt-making, the pleasure is in precision, and the replication of the pattern precisely, often with only a few colors and with an expectation of control: a) the pattern of the fabrics used repeat exactly and b) the pattern of the quilt created by combining those fabrics, e.g., Flying Geese, Jacob's Ladder, etc. My art quilts set their own boundaries and dare you to discover a pattern. Each makes a name for itself.