By Lisa-Anne Bauch
My mother is a dabbler. Too impatient to settle on one craft, she has tried her hand at many textile techniques over the years, including knitting, crochet, cross-stitch, quilting, and others. Recently, she has been de-cluttering her home in anticipation of moving to a senior apartment. (She jokes that she is “death-cleaning” in the Swedish fashion.) As a fellow textile enthusiast, I have been helping her sort through her stash, a treasure trove of buttons, knitting needles, embroidery hoops, sewing patterns, bits of lace, and other tempting items.
One treasure was a copy of The Twentieth Century’s Best American Quilts: Celebrating 100 Years of the Art of Quiltmaking, a publication put out by the International Quilt Festival in 1999. Of the 100 outstanding quilts chosen by a panel of experts for the honor, one in particular caught my eye: ‘Renaissance’ by the late Helen Kelley. I immediately recognized the subject matter as a traditional Norwegian tapestry of the Adoration of the Magi, but depicted in the humble calico fabric of American quilting.
Photo: Jason Onerheim, Minnesota Historical Society
Fascinated by this marriage of Norwegian and American textiles, I dug into the history of the quilt and its maker. I learned that Helen Kelley was a world-renowned master quilter as well as quilting teacher. (She taught more than 300 workshops in 35 of the 50 American states, as well as nine countries overseas.) A self-taught quilter who designed and stitched more than 150 quilts, Kelley was also a talented writer. She penned a regular column called “Loose Threads” for Quilters Newsletter Magazine, highlights of which were collected in three popular volumes. In 1978 Kelley was one of the founders and served as the first president of Minnesota Quilters, a non-profit organization, dedicated to celebrating the art of quiltmaking, which continues today with some 900 members. Shortly before her death in 2008, Kelley was inducted into the Quilters Hall of Fame, which called her “a major influence in the art of quiltmaking.”
Although Kelley was modest and self-deprecating—she once referred to herself as “a pretty good sewer”—her quilts were vividly colored as well as ambitious in subject matter and technical skill. A perfectionist, Kelley often took years to complete a quilt, working in marathon sessions fueled by “pots and pots of coffee.” Neighbors were used to seeing the lights in Kelley’s home workshop burning late at night as she worked. “I am an impulsive sort of person,” she explained, “and I hurl myself into my work with abandon.”
In 1976, Kelley visited Norway, where she was disappointed to learn that Norway does not have a tradition of patchwork quilting. However, she was struck by the traditional weavings in museums, including tapestries such as the one depicting the Adoration. Although not of Norwegian heritage herself, Kelley created ‘Renaissance’ as a tribute to her mother-in-law, a Norwegian who had immigrated to America. Her goal was to create something that blended both textile traditions.
For example, a distinct feature of Norwegian tapestries are the black outlines around individual design elements—in this case Mary, the baby Jesus, the three Wise Men, and their steeds, as well as a frieze of real and fantastical animals that surround the scene. Kelley translated this feature by using appliqué, a technique in which smaller pieces of fabric are layered, then stitched together. “Every image went on first in black and then the second image went on top,” she explained. “I just kind of got under the skin of those old weavers that did those pieces so I could understand what I was doing.”
A portion of the animal and bird frieze
‘Renaissance’ took seven years to complete and was exhibited in the Oslo Folk Museum. Eventually, the quilt was purchased by the Minnesota Historical Society, to be housed in its collection of more than 400 quilts. “Helen was always on our radar as a Minnesota quilter,” Curator Emeritus Linda McShannock explains, “so when she was looking for a permanent home for the quilt, we jumped at the chance to acquire it. After all, if we were going to document her art, we wanted the very best of her work.”
Thanks to the staff of the Historical Society, I was privileged to see ‘Renaissance’ in person. Even in the subdued lighting of the archives, the colors of the quilt are as vivid as ever, including bright blue, red, and yellow fabrics, as well as black, white, brown, and cream. Up close, the details showcase Kelley’s exceptional technical skills, while the faces of the characters exhibit the lopsided charm of the original tapestries. In addition to the center illustrations and abstract border, the quilt is embellished with additional stitches in tiny swirls, flourishes, and curlicues. By melding two historical textile traditions, Kelley revealed what she called “the amazing possibilities that lie in simple shapes and colors and the miracles that our fingers can produce by putting them together.”
The eight-petaled rose and vine border is a common motif in Norwegian medieval tapestries. Here you see the quilted and a woven version.
Addendum: Helen Kelley wrote about her experience making the quilt in the December, 1983, issue of the Sons of Norway Viking magazine. Thank you, Sons of Norway, for allowing us to reprint that article here.