If you had a chance to see the Ken Burns documentary, Country Music, you might have noticed that several of the performers had a tie to flour companies. Some of these relate to objects in the exhibit  “Cotton and Thrift: Feed Sacks and the Fabric of American Households.”

Linda Fisher was a prolific quilter beginning with her first quilt as an adult in 1994 and continuing through to 2019. She taught many in West Texas to quilt. 

It's fascinating how the same quilt pattern can be interpreted so differently. The traditional Seven Sisters pattern, for example, can look completely different depending on the color choices. Museums rarely display multiple variations of a single quilt pattern, since space is limited and curators typically select only one or two examples.

The featured quilt was made by The South Plains Quilt Guild in 2012 for long-time member Jackie Reis. It is titled “Sisters Memory Quilt for Jackie Reis from S. P. Q. G., Lubbock, TX 2012.”  Each block lists the handwritten name of the maker in Pigma pen.

This stunning quilt came to the museum recently as one of ten offered to the Museum by someone who had cleaned out an estate in nearby Plainview, Texas.  The first thing the donor said on the phone was that the quilts were "dirty”—not a good thing for a museum without a conservator on staff.  The second thing she said was that they all came with “stories.”  What she meant was that almost every quilt had a label attached documenting who made it and where.  Labels trump any dirt in a curator’s mind!