September is National Sewing Month and if there was ever an
impassioned stitcher, it’s Mary Fons. Though she’s spent her life cocooned by
quilting, it wasn’t always on her radar—in her 20s she worked in Chicago
as a writer and performer. But over the last few years she’s gained a new
perspective on sewing and quilting and she’s passionate about sharing that with
other young women.
“Sometimes I think getting women in their 20s to sit down
and make a quilt is an exercise in frustration,” she says with a laugh. “There
are always exceptions, but I maintain that we largely begin quilting in our
30s, when we finally stop and reflect on all the crazy things we did in our
20s, when we were busy figuring out who we are.” She describes quilting as
meditative, creative, and relaxing. “I wasn’t ready to meditate in my 20s,” she
says. “Now I like to sit down with a glass of wine and do some piecing—that
sounds like a really nice Friday night to me.”
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| Mary's Burgoyne |
While Mary says she’s reached a calmer phase of life, you’d
hardly know it by her schedule. In a recent week she traveled from her Chicago
home to Iowa twice, once to record the upcoming season of Fons and Porter’s Love of Quilting—since Liz Porter’s retirement
three years ago, Mary’s co-hosted with her mom, Marianne Fons—and once for
photo shoots for Quilty, the magazine
she edits that complements her online quilting show of the same name. Then it
was on to the New England Quilt Festival, where she participated in a panel on the
future of quilting.
That panel led her to reflect on the reasons why her
contemporaries quilt.
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| Mary and her mom, Marianne, with members of the Boston Modern Quilt Guild at the New England Quilt Festival |
“I think quilting fits at that intersection of DIY
culture—the interest in buying local, slow food, sustainability—the values are
similar,” she says. “Making things with your own hands, doing something that
doesn’t involve a computer screen—quilting comes from that same part of us that
wants to eat the vegetables we grow ourselves.”
Mary notes that her generation had fewer opportunities to
learn to sew in school, where home economics classes were often replaced by
keyboarding. This familiarity with computers led Mary to conceive of her online
show—she knew that beginners would gravitate toward YouTube to learn to make a
quilt, but in Spring of 2010 she couldn’t find an engaging series that spoke to
her generation. With the help of sponsors, including Moda, she’s created a
series that helps new quilters with topics ranging from the basics of presserfeet, needles, and seam rippers to quilt labels and selling quilts.
“Our shows are strong on content and instructions, but are
funny and fun to watch,” she says. The magazine follows the same format and
next year will go from two issues to six issues annually.
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| Mary's My Little Black Dress: For more about this visit The Dress Test |
Though Mary’s speaks most directly to new, young stitchers,
she feels a strong connection to quilters of the past. “The American quilt is
an important artifact for our country,” she says. “The women of the 1800s who
made quilts didn’t have to make their quilts beautiful, but they did. They were
designers and engineers, and as soon as you take up quilting you’re a part of
that legacy. I find quilting inspires extraordinary feelings of pride and
patriotism. It’s an American art form, like baseball and apple pie.”
