Quilt Show In Water Mill

Backing, batting, top and binding. Paper piecing, appliqué, trapunto and ruching. A quilting vocabulary is one all its own.

For the uninitiated: backing, batting, top and binding are all parts of a quilt; and paper piecing, appliqué, trapunto and ruching are all quilt-sewing techniques.

“I could talk quilts all day long,” Hampton Bays resident Barbara Sirois said last week. “Every quilter is an egotist. We love to show our work. I’ll go anywhere, anyplace, just to show my work.”

She walked through the rooms of the Water Mill Museum, pointing out different patterns and stitching techniques among the hundreds of contemporary and antique quilts draped over tables and hanging from the mill’s walls for the 25th annual “Quilt Show and Sale,” which will run through Monday, September 12.

“Wherever we can hang a quilt, we hang it,” said organizer Marilyn Burden during a telephone interview last week. “You can hardly see any of the workings of the mill when you walk in.”

Though not quite as old as the beginnings of quilting, which dates back to ancient Egyptian times, the mill’s history begins with Edward Howell, who in 1644 acquired a 100-acre pond, dammed it and built a water mill. The water power ground grain and corn, spun and wove cloth, and manufactured paper. Today, it serves as a museum and, after much fundraising and restoration, it’s fully operational and grinding once again.

“The watermill is what the town is named after, not the windmill in the middle of town,” Ms. Burden pointed out. “It’s an old, old building. We have to keep replacing ceilings and walls and beams.”

A commission from the quilt sales, as well as show admission, benefits the mill’s upkeep. The annual fundraiser has brought in as much as $20,0000. But last year, revenue was down, said mill manager Joani Wilson.

“We only hit $6,000,” she said. “But I expect it will go back up. We’ve had as many as 900 people come out for the show in past years.”

Once sewn by hand to keep members of the house warm, quilt use is trending away from bedding and toward art, Ms. Burden said. She added that the actual quilting—the act of sewing together the three layers, called the top, batting and backing—is oftentimes now done by machine.

“The quilting machine is sometimes run by computer or by a person standing there following a design pattern,” she explained. “Sometimes they do the most magnificent work on those, but I’ve seen machine quilting jobs and I think they ruin the quilt. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.”

A retired math teacher, Ms. Sirois began quilting in 2002 because she likes geometry, she said. She likes precision. And while she stitches many of her tops by hand, she said she is a fan of machine quilting.

“The new tools are unreal,” she said. “Our grandmothers would go crazy.”

East Hampton-based quilter Anne O’Neill sticks to the older school way of doing things, she said. For more than 30 years, she has quilted only by hand, she said.

While Ms. Sirois usually finishes a quilt in one month, it takes Ms. O’Neill six times as long.

“It keeps me busy. I don’t like to be idle. Oh gosh, that’s the worst thing,” Ms. O’Neill said during an interview last week at the mill. “Even when I was a little kid, my grandmother showed me how to sew and all. And I always wanted to make something.”

Along with playing an essential role in the Civil War’s underground railroad (people made quilts to serve as secret maps), quilting was often a social activity for women, especially during the Depression, Ms. Sirois explained. A group would work on one quilt at the same time during a quilting bee, she said, while their children played.

Recently, in the world of quilting there has been a resurgence of Civil War colors—somber browns, reds and navy blues—and those from the 1930s, like pink, bright blue and green, Ms. Sirois said.

“You can get a design from a quilt book, have five different quilters do it, and they won’t look anything alike because they’ve chosen different colors,” she said. “It’s unbelievable.”

With few exceptions, every quilt submitted to the museum is entered into the show and sale, Ms. Burden said.

“We very rarely turn away quilts unless we don’t think it’s going to sell,” she said. “It has to be that the sewing is so poor, it has stains on it or if it’s imported from places like China. I’ve gotten to the point where I can tell if they’re an imported quilt.”