Lancaster County, Pennsylvania is the home of the longest continuously occupied Amish community in America.



From about 1860 to 1950, the women of this rural culture produced an extraordinary kind of quilt. They were restricted by tradition from using printed fabrics, and were discouraged from engaging in the "worldly" practice of sewing together many small pieces in their quilts. Within these limitations, Lancaster County Amish women created quilts of remarkable simplicity, vitality, and power from abstract geometric arrangements of solid colored fabrics. Using the fine wools from which they also sewed their clothing, they drew from a palette rich and saturated, subtle and glowing.
I make quilts because I have a long-standing and sincere interest in the form itself and because I love fabric - I love to feel it and to handle it and I enjoy the sewing processes with which fabrics are secured together. Most of my paternal and maternal grandparents and great-grandparents were textile mill worker, so there is a familial connection to textiles, albeit a humble one. My formal art training has certainly influenced my thinking about what might happen on a quilt's surface, but my study of the history of quilts and the metamorphosis of quilt patterns and design, especially of Amish quilts, has had an equivalent influence on the development of my work.
Julie Silber, the curator of the Esprit Quilt Collection, recommends the following books:

Robert Bishop and Elizabeth Safanda. A Gallery of Amish Quilts,, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1976.

John Hostetler. Amish Society, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Third Edition, 1980.

Donald Kraybill. The Riddle of Amish Culture, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1989.

Julie Silber and Robert Hughes. AMISH: The Art of the Quilt, Calloway and Knopf, New York, 1990.