Revisiting Amish Quilts + Textiles in Shipshewana, Indiana
Where did my adventure into textiles go deeper, beyond weaving on a table loom, experimenting with natural dyes, and tailoring jackets when I lived in San Francisco so many years ago? In 1972, I moved from there to my husband’s natal home of South Bend, Indiana. After I opened and closed Clay Kitchen, Inc., a cookware shop, cooking school, and café, I accepted work at Indiana University South Bend (IUSB) as continuing education director of marketing and non-credit programs. It was where my professional textile life was launched continues to sustain me.
Indiana corn, soybean, and alfalfa fields were as lush then as they are now. Back country roads called to me in those years as I found refuge beyond the small Midwest manufacturing city supporting the auto industry with tool and dye shops, and a Studebaker factory that had shut just a few years before. On August 6, 2026, I revisited these backroads driving three hours north from Indianapolis to Shipshewana, where neat white farmhouses, front porches supported by lacy white metal iron bric-a-brac and sturdy barns dotted the rolling landscape. The landscape overflowed with tasseled corn plants, grazing milk cows, and flagpoles boasting patriotism. It felt like some things never change. This is where security is embedded.
Textiles, as an expression of culture, community, connection, and continuity, sparked something in me there long ago. I in the 70s and 80s, I retreated into another world shaped by the values of Old-World Amish, Mennonites, and other Anabaptist sects whose German, Swiss, Dutch, Czech, and Belgian origins defined a more essential way of life based on self-sufficiency and mutual support. They were part of the Protestant Reformation that swept Europe and transplanted itself into America’s farming heartland, spreading west and later into Central America.
In 1984, after visiting Shipshewana, Indiana, several times and meeting Amish and Mennonite folk art and quilt collector Rebecca Haarer, we conjured up the Folk Art Tour of Northern Indiana through the Indiana University continuing education program. This was the root of my textiles and travel future.
I returned to Shipshewana this week, forty years later.
We sat in rockers inside Rebecca Haarer’s Arts and Antique shop on Morton Street, remembering when handmade quilts were abundant, when, while driving down country lanes, I could see vintage quilts, some from the early 1900’s, hanging on laundry lines to dry, a patchwork in the wind. Alongside them were traditional men’s and boys’ blue cotton pants (no zippers) and girls’ and women’s frocks, closed with buttons, and aprons tied neatly at the waist.
The black horse-drawn buggies with isinglass windows were clustered in front of the mercantile and feed shops in town, a parking lot of old-timey, slow transportation. Slow was a way of life, something the rest of us longed for. Along the county roads, we knew to keep the speed down, since these buggies carried multi-generational families to town. A curiosity for me. A way of life for them.
There was much to learn. The Amish and Mennonites are self-supporting and a mutual support society. They grow only what they can consume. They mend and repair what is torn or broken. They create quilts for a practical purpose: warmth. Beauty is not the motivator; it is for meeting a household need. They may have been the original environmentalists, recyclers, tuned to the earth, and recognizing abundance in simplicity, a model for communal life.
As we rocked and talked, what came to mind was my later experience living in rural Oaxaca and visiting Japan, where folk art and especially textiles were created for personal and household use, not a tourist market. Mexican village women wove on backstrap looms to clothe their husbands and children, to honor a newly married couple, or to gift a newborn in the family. These pieces of fabric were never cut, and represented the heart and soul of the maker, as well as specific symbolism from a particular village or region.
In small-town Japan, the culture emphasized using boro and sashiko to patch, repair, stitch, mend, and layer to keep a garment whole, extend its life, and provide warmth. Boro means tattered, rags, or worn-out cloth, a way to preserve garments and continue their life for generations. Sashiko is a stitching technique to hold the fabric together. It can be a running stitch or made with designs from a particular region. This was born from poverty and scarce resources, and from people’s ingenuity to make do, like other traditions worldwide.
These techniques are now taught by many, commercialized, sewn with machines, and considered fashionable.
I proposed a new Folk Art Tour of Northern Indiana. Rebecca said she would love to do that with me. The truth is, she said, there are very few quilters remaining in Shipshewana. She drove down a side street of clapboard houses with wide plank wood front porches, once home to local women who quilted and sold quilting supplies. They are now tourist shops filled with local souvenirs, apple butter, peanut butter pie, refrigerator magnets, cinnamon rolls slathered in maple syrup frosting, and Christmas decorations.
Forty years ago, she made her first presentation to the group I organized through the university in a barn loft. This launched her as a textile knowledge expert. The floor was covered in hay, and the horses were stabled below. Our Amish hosts, the first time they had English (outside) visitors, greeted us and served a traditional home-cooked meal afterward. We talked about the core of their religious values: humility, simplicity, community, forgiveness, and service to others. Individuality is subsumed to the needs of the community. Attachment to status, materialism, fashion, and entertainment is avoided. They are fierce adherents to non-violence.
It is a juxtaposition to how we have advanced as a dominant culture, subsumed into Artificial Intelligence, ways to get somewhere more quickly, talking rather than listening, doing instead of being. The visit again reminded me how important it is to recognize and sit with feelings, remember, pay attention, and love.
Perhaps we will offer a Folk Art Tour of Northern Indiana reunion to visit the last of the quilt makers, country cooks, and the countryside where life has remained mostly the same. How many of us yearn for a simpler time when we knew our neighbors and celebrated the small things that offer so much meaning?