Stitched from the Soil

Most quilts begin with a pattern. Cait Nolan’s quilts begin with a seed.

Each spring on her small farm in Williamstown, New Jersey, Nolan plants a palette of color: the deep blue of indigo, the sunny yellow of weld, the rich red of madder, the dusky purple of Hopi sunflower. Autumn adds the tannin-rich browns and blacks of foraged black walnut, acorns, and tree barks.

From June to October, she dyes her dwindling stash of secondhand linen with no particular quilt design in mind. In a dye world often focused on uniformity, Nolan embraces unpredictability. She layers and overdyes to build a library of hues and values. Come winter, she turns to her shelves to see what the year has given her. Then, in the dark and dreaming months, she begins quilting.

By day, Nolan is a programming coordinator at a public library. She jokes that she’s borrowed nearly every Amish quilt book in the New Jersey library system. Drawn to the tradition’s darker colors—reflecting the clothing scraps from which they were originally made—she is also inspired by variations on log cabin blocks, for both their visual punch and their minimal waste. When it comes to design, her compositions often begin as pencil sketches that she arranges digitally before piecing the fabric strips by machine and quilting them by hand.

Beyond traditional designs, Nolan’s quilts also bind her into a social lineage. From the AIDS Memorial Quilt to the improvisational brilliance of the Gee’s Bend quilters, quilting has long offered an avenue for both protest and perseverance. So she has recently begun organizing community quilts and using her own work to raise money for mutual aid and humanitarian relief.

Nolan sees parallels between the unquantifiable amount of labor that goes into each quilt and the roles women and caregivers play in the community. “Every piece you sew together is embedded with your care, and I think that’s very tangible for the person who receives it,” she says. “Quilting hand-dyed fabrics begs the question: practically, why would you put so much effort into something?” Nolan shrugs, as if the answer were obvious: “Because it takes a lot of work to love.”

Kimberly Coburn is an Atlanta-based writer and maker whose work explores the intersection of craft, the human spirit, and the natural world.