One day in September when I was visiting our member, Phyllis Vanhorne, she showed me a magazine clipping of a quilt she had made.
I remembered the quilt because it was very distinctive – it had silhouettes of life-sized cats appliqued all over it. Phyllis said it was a commission for a California artist.
Several weeks later I was doing research for another project, on the website of the International Quilt Museum (IQM) in Lincoln, NB, and thought to do a search for quilts in its collection that were from Canada. And there it was – the cat quilt! The only problem was, though, it said it was made in Kingston, Ontario, it attributed the ‘Quilt Maker’ as ‘Tony Berlant’.
Well, after much investigation with Phyllis and Diane Berry, the story of the making of the ‘Artists’ Quilts’ exhibit in 1981 in California (and in 1984 at the ‘Agnes’ here in Kingston) has confirmed that Phyllis and Diane, along with Margaret Rhodes and Margaret McLean, were commissioned to make quilts designed by California artists. I am continuing my research on this story, but in the meantime, Carolyn Ducey from the IQM has interviewed both Phyllis and Diane by phone, and the attribution on these quilts has been corrected on the IQM website to include the women from the Kingston Heirloom Quilters who made the quilts.
They are very modest about their participation but pleased to know their names are now on the quilts they made that are now in the permanent collection of the International Quilt Museum.
