Alberta Quiltmakers and Their Quilts

Since 1982, the Friends of Royal Alberta Museum Society (FRAMS) has opened inclusive and accessible pathways to explore the wonders of the Royal Alberta Museum. While a museum contains many exciting and rare artifacts, it is the stories behind the artifacts that truly connect us to the past. These stories create connections across space and time. This is evident in the stories captured in Alberta Quiltmakers and Their Quilts. FRAMS is proud to facilitate the publishing of this seminal work by Lucie Heins. As you learn about and admire these beautiful quilts, I hope you will find that historic connection that speaks to you.

As part of the Alberta Quilt Project, Lucie Heins spent six years researching and documenting Alberta quilts. She partnered with 38 museums throughout the province to host public quilt documentation events. Assisted by local quilters, she was able to collect important information about the quilts made in Alberta as well as to capture the histories of the quiltmakers themselves.

Alberta Quiltmakers and their Quilts highlights late 19th century quilts, 20th and 21st century quilts found across the province, with a focus on quilts made during the 20th century. It includes 12 in-depth stories about individual quiltmakers and 12 wide-ranging chapters featuring many quilts around specific themes. Together, they reveal how quilters used their ingenuity for making quilts using materials on hand to stitch relationships to their families and communities. In this book, you can discover the fabric of Alberta’s history, one quilt at a time.

This 176-page beautifully illustrated hard-cover volume represents many years of research dedicated to the history of Alberta quilts and is an important contribution to the history of quilts in Canada.

Friends of the Royal Alberta Museum (FRAMS) facilitated the publishing of this book. FRAMS is a registered charity and not-for-profit membership organization. FRAMS supports the Royal Alberta Museum in a variety of ways — most importantly through telling Alberta’s stories.

Author Lucie Heins is the Assistant Curator for the Daily Life & Leisure program at the Royal Alberta Museum. She has a BSc.MA. in Human Ecology, majoring in clothing and textiles. Lucie has also worked on projects at the Textile Museum in Washington DC, and in Haifa, Israel, attending to the textile collection at the Baha’i World Centre under the care of the Department of Holy Places.

Lucie began researching the history of Alberta quiltmakers and quilts in 2010. The first three years, Phase I of the Alberta Quilt Project, was spent surveying Alberta quilters to capture 21st century quilting trends. Lucie presented the results of her research at the British Quilt Study Group Annual Seminar. It was subsequently published in their peer-reviewed journal Quilt Studies (2017).

For the following six years, Phase II, Lucie engaged 38 museums, throughout the province, to host public “quilt documentation” events to help capture the history of quilts. The research collected through this process informed her book, Alberta Quiltmakers and their Quilts, addressing the gap in Canadian literature on the history of Alberta quilts.