You're sitting in your sod house in the middle of Nebraska. It's night, and your 14 children are tucked away. Your husband is still outside trying to get the cattle sheltered from the blizzard. Your only candle is guttering in the icy drafts darting through chinks in the loam walls. Cold, tired exhausted, you look through your scrap basket where you save every bit of fabric, no matter its size, shape, or color. You pick out a few pieces and with needle and thread you slowly sew them together, two at a time with space between to be filled with a bit of wool. In this arctic wilderness, where you're never warm, you can not have too many quilts. . .

1. History.
Readers of Magellan's Log will have noticed that, among our various quests, the search for beauty on the Internet is perhaps the most persistent (and quixotic, but that's another story). In every issue, we do one large graphics, section, department, exhibit, whatever you want to call it, where the words stop and we give you beautiful images (often, of course, with music).

"Quilting" has been on our list of possible topics for sometime. Penis-burdened as many of us are around here, we had in mind vague memories of bright-colored geometric pieces of patchwork which, we thought, would look pretty good on readers' monitors. Research began and right away we male naïfs were plunged into a maelstrom of gender history, anti-elitist art, and the paradox of ephemeral utilitarian beauty.

I know, that's a mouthful.

Quilting, it turns out (and it should be no surprise), is an ancient activity fraught with all the terrible ambiguities of social and artistic repression. Women have been making quilts ever since we first noticed the cold and had the means to do something about it. We early figured out that two layers of cloth are better than one, and that the two layers are a lot better if you put something (wool? cotton?) between them. Ergo, quilts.

We know quilts existed at least as long ago as 5,000 years, because we can still see them in Egyptian wall paintings. That's the only way we know, because quilts don't last. We have only a few scraps more than a couple of centuries old. Quilting is a utilitarian, ephemeral art. Warmth comes first, beauty second, and endurance a poor third.

How much have we lost? We can get an idea from the richness of the quilts we have. The earliest intact examples date from the 18th century. So we have almost 300 years' worth of women's work, and judging from that, one can not begin to imagine the wonders that are gone.

Introduction continued

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