AYDEN — For months, people have showed up six days a week at the home of George Snyder III to help with grandmother’s flower garden. Thirty volunteers have spent about 500 hours ensuring each blossom is a thing of beauty. But this labor-intensive undertaking did not require rakes, shovels or a patch of land. Instead, needle and thread have created this patchwork pattern that is pieced and quilted by hand.
This fabric feat will be featured at Saturday’s National Quilting Day event at the Ayden Community Building. At more than 3,000 pieces, the quilt represents handmade history for the Greenville Quilters Guild.
“This is the first time the guild has ever done a project like this. They’ve never quilted together on a frame,” said Snyder, who is organizing this weekend’s event. “I had a passion about doing it.”
A quilt frame that has filled the Charlotte native’s dining room for more than 100 days is clear evidence that Snyder is not merely a quilting enthusiast. He is on a mission to continue the art as it was done generations ago.
“What I’m doing to preserve a craft, an art, that’s basically been obliterated by machines, by technology,” he said. “My main passion is to preserve that bygone craft.”
Although he is an old-fashioned quilter at heart, Snyder, 57, is fairly new to quilting. He remembers a nanny teaching him to sew at age 12, but he didn’t start his first quilt until after he finished college and didn’t take a quilting class until seven years ago. A decorative artist by trade, Snyder began quilting after a back injury prompted him to retire from his work as a furniture painter and florist.
“I was trying to figure out what I could do with my hands,” he said. “I couldn’t stand and paint. I pulled out that quilt that I had started in 1989 when I graduated from college and decided I was going to finish it.
“I was really down,” Snyder recalled. “I had a kid in school and my wife was getting ready to retire. I was like, ‘How are we going to make it?’ But when I was able to put something in my hand and start working on a quilt, all that sort of went away.”
He contacted the Greenville Quilters Guild and asked if someone could teach him to make a quilt, from start to finish, the way it was done a century ago. The guild recommended Vicki Harrell, who happened to live just a few blocks away in Ayden. Snyder recalls walking into his first quilting class as the only man in the room.
“These women had set up camp at their table with machines and rulers and fabric, everything,” he said, laughing. “They’d come in with their wagons loaded with stuff. All I had was a spool of thread, a needle, some fabric and some scissors.”
Although he initially felt intimidated, he discovered a common thread among quilters: They were quick to encourage each other in their pursuit of the craft. He soon joined the guild as one of the only men in the 100-member group.
“I feel like I have 100 mothers or 100 grandmothers, but I can deal with it,” he said. “I think because of the quality of work that I’m putting out they can respect who I am and what I’m doing. I can hold my own.”
Susan Cox, who serves as co-president of the guild, said that while most of its members do machine piecing for their quilts, Snyder is helping to raise the profile of hand quilting. The group work on the grandmother’s flower garden quilt is a prime example.
“There are some that went (to Snyder’s house to quilt) almost every day,” she said. “The camaraderie and the people that it’s brought together over there has just been amazing.”
Snyder acknowledges that with so many different hands involved, the stitching is not perfect, but that is hardly the point.
“We have people from all capabilities that are working on that quilt,” he said. “As time went on, those people who came back, their stitches improved. They got more consistent and they could see their progress. That’s what’s neat about a community quilt. You’re going to have a variation in stitches, but that’s that person’s mark on that quilt. That’s her signature.”
Cox said that even after the current quilt (due to be raffled off at the end of the year) is finished, some members plan to continue hand quilting as a group at least once a week. Snyder will teach fellow quilters some of the techniques he has learned as he has researched antique quilts.
Snyder’s focus on quilts of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia from 1840 to 1900 is the subject of his current quilt exhibition, which is on display at Greenville’s Emerge Gallery and Art Center through March 28.
Emerge Marketing and Exhibits Director Sarah Lazure said that while the gallery often has fiber arts featured in its annual Schwa Show, she cannot recall a previous solo exhibition focused on quilts.
“George is just phenomenal,” Lazure said. “All of these huge quilts are researched in terms of the patterns. He’s using historical references from the 1860s to make them really authentic, and he’s doing this all by hand. That’s totally a dying art form. Most people who tried to recreate traditional quilts from certain regions are still using their sewing machines.”
Snyder concedes that machine quilting is certainly faster, but he believes that much of the personal touch of the craft is lost when hand-stitching is eliminated.
“When you sit down and put a needle in the fabric and you make those stitches, especially if you’re making it for someone, you’re thinking about that person the whole time,” he said. “That means that your heart is in that project, and when that person receives that quilt, they know.
“A lot of people think, ‘You’re crazy to sit there and put all those stitches in a quilt,’ but that’s how my mind works, even in my artwork. I’m just really into detail,” Snyder said. “There’s too much hurry up and get it done, and I’m not into that. I want things to have a meaning, have a purpose, and I think hand quilting allows you to do that. Sure it does take time, but that’s what you’re investing in that piece is your time.”
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