by Emily Chatten.
On Saturday, October 19, 2024, the Toronto Knitters Guild organized a guided tour of the Royal Ontario Museum’s exhibit “Quilts: Made In Canada,” and over twenty people attended. The exhibit included a range of quilts from primitive to spectacular, utilitarian to art, wedding gifts to quilts made for the war-weary following World War II. While not a quilter herself, our guide had spent time learning about the history of quilts and quilting techniques in Canada. The museum owned the majority of the quilts on display with a few borrowed from the collections of other Canadian museums. Unfortunately, there were no recorded details of the oldest quilts, but the visual details of all of them told stories to even the most untrained eye.
As with any textile exhibit, the delicate nature of the materials requires dim lighting. While this is important for textile conservation it made it difficult to appreciate the detail of the handwork that went into these exceptional pieces of Canadian history. Visitors might have benefited from enlarged pictures showing minute or dark details that were difficult to see in gallery’s dim lighting. And while there were some interactive opportunities such as looking at tools and quilt piecing toward the end, having scraps of fabric that people could touch might have been grounding for folks who did not grow up in a household with quilts.
Visiting “Quilts: Made In Canada” was filled with nostalgia for me. Many of the quilts put me in mind of visiting an aunt and finding her with her friends, sitting and working around a quilt on a frame. Later in the year, if they were lucky, the work would pay off with a prize at the local agricultural fair.
As we walked through the exhibit, it seemed that if I blinked for just a second, the quilt we were coming to was on a frame surrounded by a group of women, enjoying each other’s company as they worked on a quilt for one of their households. Then I was back at the ROM.
Emily Chatten is a Toronto-based maker whose rural ancestors saved every scrap of available fabric to make things for the home.
Image source: Royal Ontario Museum
