Running Stitch - A QSOS Podcast

We’re back with our second episode of Season 4! We’re continuing our focus on the intersection of technology and quiltmaking, but this time, we’re going digital. We’re exploring the backstory and invention of Electric Quilt, the leading quilt design software that's been changing how quilters create their work for more than 30 years.  Join us for a conversation with Penny McMorris, co-founder of The Electric Quilt Company, and a key player of the late twentieth century’s quilt revival. We’ll hear how Penny and her husband Dean Neumann created Electric Quilt software, listen to snippets from quilters across the decades about how they use EQ to design their quilts, and reflect on Penny’s journey through quilt history, hosting a PBS television show, and designing software specifically for quiltmakers. This episode of Running Stitch is sponsored by A New Deal for Quilts, a book and accompanying exhibit up now through April 2024 at the International Quilt Museum by Running Stitch host, Janneken Smucker.

We’re kicking off a new season of Running Stitch, focused on the intersections of technology and quiltmaking. But it’s not just about computers and digital sewing machines! In this episode we’re going back to the roots of quilt making to discover how our nostalgic ideas about quiltmaking as a pre-industrial craft is just that: nostalgia. In fact, quilting as we know it exists because of the Industrial Revolution. New innovations like the factory-made sewing needles, cotton sewing thread, and eventually the sewing machine, created the environment in which quiltmaking flourished, democratizing the art from a form that only wealthy women could participate in, into one that women across economic classes might enjoy. Our guest is Dr. Rachel Maines, a visiting scientist in the Cornell University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a seminar associate at Columbia University. Along with her many articles on needlework and textiles, she is the author of The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction and Hedonizing Technologies: Pathways to Pleasure in Hobbies and Leisure.

An interview with Roderick Kiracofe, quilt collector and author of Unconventional & Unexpected: American Quilts Below the Radar, 1950-2000, and historian Janneken Smucker about quilts that defy convention, the creativity of quiltmakers, and what makes a museum-quality quilt. Listen as Rod talks about his career as a quilt collector and seller, and about the weird, wonky, wonderful  beauty of American quilts made after 1950. This bonus episode was originally recorded as a Textile Talk in front of a live Zoom audience. See the quilts referenced in today's episode in the Textile Talk recording here.

Quilt enthusiasts have been writing about the craft’s history for over 100 years now, first focused on collecting and sharing patterns based on historic quilts, and later collecting and trading published patterns, in essence building an analog database of quilts. These women began to interpret and synthesize quilt history, eventually moving their newspaper clippings and mimeographed copies to digitized forms. Today, quilt history flourishes in thousands of books and articles, online spaces, and exhibit galleries that collectively have expanded our understanding of the history of quilts and quiltmaking. The QSOS oral history collection of the Quilt Alliance has further contributed to that history by recording and preserving interviews with living quiltmakers. And Running Stitch now mines that archive, sharing highlights from the collection of over 1200 interviews with you. Jess Bailey is adding another layer to our understanding of quilt history. A young and relatively new quiltmaker, Jess makes quilts as a one woman studio called Public Library Quilts, a moniker she discusses with host Janneken Smucker in this episode. In addition to making quilts, Jess is an art historian currently living and working in London, where she studies medieval manuscripts. She combined her interest in quilts and historical research in her recently published zine, Many Hands Make a Quilt: Short Histories of Radical Quilting, published by Common Threads Press.