Stitches in time

Finished quilts that Ginn uses to show her different stitching techniques include Twisted Tree. Provided to China Daily

A veteran quilter comes to Dalian and Beijing to share her art, Mike Peters reports.

Her art form has long been celebrated as a distinctly American, but Mississippi quilter Martha Ginn found an eager audience for her craft when she arrived in China late last month. There was a crowd to greet her at the Dalian Modern Museum, where her work is featured in a traveling quilt show sponsored by the US embassy. A week later she was presenting a workshop at Slow Life Patchwork, where about 20 quilters were seated at sewing machines, ready to go.

Quilts may not be a tradition here, she says over a cup of coffee after the workshop, but the craft is not alien. Quilting techniques have often been used in making clothing - especially formal dress, she notes, and that goes back to imperial times.

"Quilts were on every bed in our home and I naively assumed everyone had them," she says with a chuckle. "Both of my grandmothers quilted and sewed and crocheted," she says. "I enjoyed embroidery as a child, but I didn't try to make a quilt until about 30 years ago."

Ginn and her daughter Linda, a librarian who traveled to China with her mother, had been working from a cross-stitch book making quilt blocks. "I knew I had found my passion," she writes on her website. The blocks she and Linda had made "were so beautiful that they deserved a 'real quilter' to assemble and quilt them".

Since that first quilt came together in 1984, Ginn has been a "real quilter indeed", exhibiting her work in innumerable shows and featured as recently as January in American Quilter magazine.