Tara Miller - The Quilt District

Today is members preview and filming for at *The American Quilt: Cloth & Commerce*

Show opens tomorrow! Have you registered to get the recording of my lecture or will I see you in person?

Checkout our lineup of programs for *The American Quilt: Cloth and Commerce*!

I will be back for Teresa Duryea-Wong's lecture on July 18 and Chawne Kimber's lecture on August 30.

Wish I lived close enough to make it to all the events, because I know they'll be terrific.

Quiltily yours (is that a word?),
Tara

Please join me Saturday for the opening of *Thr American Quilt* at Bowers Museum 🙌

⏳ 3 days until American Quilt: Cloth and Commerce opens — and we can't stop thinking about Florence. 🧵 Around 1889, ten-year-old Florence Hess pieced together this beautiful cotton quilt in upstate New York, just miles from the Oswego Canal — a bustling waterway that brought fabrics from across the Northeast right to her doorstep. Small town, big creativity. See it Saturday, May 23!

My adventure today brought me Dolly, American Legend.

People are super nice here — everyone opens doors for everyone else and says thank you when it's held for them. It made the fact that I was shopping a lot more bearable. Maybe it's because they had Dolly watching over them. No one in their right mind would want to disappoint Dolly.

I'll tell ya, though, I've had about all I can take of all this sun. I need some overcast and water falling from the sky. (England, I'm looking at you, baby. See you in just over two months for !)

When I was a kid in the 70s, I called her Dolly Partner. Mom says I'd ask over and over to "Play Dolly Partner!"

OK, back to work now.

Love & Light,
🫶 Tara

Also, if you run short on a piece, sew a sliver of something else onto it and slap it in there anyway.

We have a lot to learn from the makers who came before us. We waste too much today: both of fabric and of our creativity. We get hung up on the "rules" we were given that are just a bunch of made-up nonsense designed to sell you more stuff.

But I digress.

As soon as the technology and science allowed, manufacturers were creating bright, colorful cloth for the masses. A good many of today's "reproduction" fabrics are far too grayed-down for the 19th-century market. They're, frankly, improperly labeled. Most don't come close to a true reproduction.

Come take a look at how your foremothers made quilts, what they made them with, and why, at *The American Quilt* exhibition at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California. On view May 23-August 30, 2026.