A lot of the history on our antique quills has been lost.

Not all.

Some people have made notes and logs.

Sometimes there's a few notes on.

It was one of the few mediums that women had to express opinions.

That's one of things I find very interesting.

About it.

First introduced into this country by English and Scottish immigrants, quilts have developed into an American art form.

Of the tradition, it primarily comes from the British Isles, English, Welsh, and Scottish.

But the format that we have now in the very exuberant kinds of patchwork, with a lot of intricate pattern, is really, truly American.

It really evolved very quickly.

Strongly here.

Quilt tops are made by sewing or piecing material together to form patterns or by applique.

The applique is cutting out pieces and applying them to a background.

Usually it can be any form and you turn the edges under and whip them down to a back ground.

It's an applied art.

The finished quilt top is then placed on top of cotton batting with a piece of material on the bottom and all three layers are then sewn together.

Minimum time for me is 400 hours to do a quilt and you can divide that evenly.

It takes just about 200 hours to construct your top, be it pieced or appliqué, and then about 200 hours to the quilting and it can go up from there.

I know quilts out there that have 2400 hours or 3000 hours in them.

This is a good example of the old traditional type quilting.

I think my favorite colors are red, white, and green.

The center star was made for a block contest about four years ago, and it won Best of Show.

I particularly like this feather out here in the border.

It was taken from an old quilt over 150 years old.

I've used it several times in various pieces.

My favorite patterns are flower, bird, and leaf designs.

The designs are everywhere.

They are in nature.

They're in your daily newspapers, in your food wrappers, and on the food packages.

They're an architecture.

Or if.

Irene Goodrich has completed over 55 full-size quilts.

Yes, well I come from quilting families on both sides of the house.

My mother was a quilter when she was young and her mother and aunts and likewise on my father's side, my paternal grandmother was quite a quilters.

And on my father side, the quilts were sold at public auction in the thirties and they went for like a dollar and a half or two dollars and fifty cents, which is a real tragedy.

Since 1967, quilting has experienced a resurgence in popularity, and now it's estimated more than 15 million people sew or collect quilts.

Styles have also changed.

Traditional quilt makers now tend to work with patterns that have been ongoing for about 100 years.

And contemporary quilt makers tend to either branch out from that traditional background or basically ignore the traditional background and just work with the medium of fabric to express what they want to in their artwork.

This is a piece that I did after I got very interested in.

Matisse's paper cuts, it was an art medium that he used in the last part of his life.

I was very intrigued with the fact that he was using paper and cutting out simple shapes, which is much the way that applique is done in quilt making.

There seems every once in a while to be a swing back from the very technological kind of age, whether it was a hundred years ago or it was yesterday.

It also is a simple thing to do.

I don't think a lot of people realize that.

But it's a medium that almost everyone can work with comfortably.

It's very non-threatening, I think, to a lot people.

It's a very tactile.

I tend to think of quilts as having a very calming influence.

Quilts are exhibited each summer at the Ohio State Fair, and two major exhibitions are planned in 1991 at the Dayton Art Institute and the Ohio Historical Society.

A book documenting Ohio quilts is also planned.

The Ohio... Quilt Research Project is a statewide organization that has been documenting the lives of quilt makers and their quilts since 1985.

We documented about 6,500 quilts and just from the things that we know are available we figure we've probably seen maybe 2%.

In the late summer of 1991, the book will come out featuring about 120 of the quilts.

One of the things that we found in the Ohio Quilt Research Project is quite often a quilt would be the only artifact left in a family.

Sometimes even the quilt maker's name would be lost, but the family would still keep and treasure the quilt that had passed down in the family.