HUMOROUS QUILTS: Keeping Us In Stitches

I noticed  a familiar face in their show description---well a familiar hat. Bette Kelley's

"Sunbonnet Soup" is from the Seamsters' Union's 1979 quilt.

The quilt, which I worked on, is now in the Kitty Cole Clark collection at the Museum at Michigan State University. MSU must have loaned it to the New England Quilt Museum.

See more details here:

The Humorous Quilt show features other satirical Sunbonnet quilts.

Sue represents a well-mannered pillar of the community who just begs for needling. Read a 1979 a newspaper article about our quilt when it was denied display space at a regional fair. If our job as artists is to Épater la bourgeoisie (Shock the middle class) we did a fine job in 1979.

And we continue to do so today. Last spring the City Sewers displayed an altered Sunbonnet Sue quilt at our local guild show. Some people were gravely offended by Anarchist Sue, Tagger Sue, Meth-Making Sue, etc.

See more photos at this post by Deb:

We have dropped the ball, however, in the metaphorical game. Urban Threads offers machine embroidery patterns for the Seven Deadly Sinbonnet Sues. Above: Sloth.

See more of their Sinbonnet Sue designs: