Can your Quilt be seen in Public?

By Daintry Chitaroni

You have made a quilt. You are proud of yourself- you chose the fabric, the design, the batting, the backing, and your hard work has paid off- it is bound and finished, and you have invested your time and hundreds of dollars in this project. Put it on a bed, store it in your cupboard, or give it away to family and friends because those are your only options at this point in time. It can no longer be shared.

Did you use a pattern? Did you take a class? Did you buy a book? Does it resemble something in a pattern, book or class? If so you cannot hang your quilt in the local guild show, you cannot send a photo to a magazine. You cannot have a photo taken at Show and Tell for your guild website. You cannot enter it into ANY quilt show. You cannot hang it in your quilt shop as a sample to help sell patterns. You cannot give it to your son’s hockey team for a raffle to raise funds. You cannot lend it to your church to hang for the holidays without getting express permission from the designer who may be in Canada, the United States, Australia, Japan, or countless other countries where the designer may decide to take you to court for violating copyright law if they get wind of it.

It doesn’t matter that you have used several different patterns in your quilt. It doesn’t matter that you used a different colour scheme, different fabric collections, added a border, changed the size or shape, added appliqué to the patchwork, all that matters is that you are seen as stealing someone’s livelihood if you share it with the public without contacting the person(s) who gave you the inspiration and that you paid when you bought the book, pattern or took the class. Permission is required by the current interpretation of copyright law and through the lobbying of a certain sector of the quilting community.

Does this make any sense at all?

How arrogant are the designers who insist that they own the rights to something that originally came from somewhere or sometime else. Quilters have been doing their thing for hundreds of years. They have made quilts not only with squares and triangles, but with animal shapes, leaves, flowers, geometry and other natural elements since the craft began. Everything that can be done has been done before. Quilters have been using common images to embellish their work long before the lawyers got involved. It has always been public domain. How many log cabin quilt patterns are there at the shops? How many patterns have appliqué flowers and leaves, vines and woodsy animals? How many patterns are based on tile patterns from historical buildings – floors, ceilings, walls, railings, and turrets? An image is just that- an image of something that has occurred somewhere. There were dozens of flower quilts in the International Show in Chicago. Did they copy each other? Use the same source of inspiration? True some were lilies, some were lilacs, some were poppies, but they were all constructed the same, though viewed from a different angle. All were labeled “original”. Derivative works of zebras (or penguins, or art deco, or Amish quilts (which actually came from England), or snowman quilts, or…- you get my drift) are now off limits because someone somewhere feels that they own the rights to that image, and every element showing up within that image.

Where does it all end? I agree that you do not copy a pattern for sale or distribution to others. Quilters should buy their own pattern. The instructions were created by the designer and as such are protected. However the designer is selling a product- a pattern- and what we do with it once it is paid for is our business, as long as we are not mass-producing it directly for sale as a means of earning a living. The designer of this particular image has sold this image to the public. This differs from a true work of art- a painting, a photograph, or an original quilt hanging in the NJS. These remain off limits.

I am a pattern designer. If a product of my design is shown in public, I am satisfied that my work has value to quilters. It may even result in more pattern orders. If I stubbornly hold on to the notion that only I can regulate what is done with the pattern after sale, soon the whole community of quilters will simply throw their hands in the air and move on to something else to occupy their time and spend their money on. The hassle isn’t worth it. Such designers are asking too much of their customers. The base of hobby quilters that make the quilting industry so successful will drift away due to the multitude of rules attached to the product. One lawsuit aimed at someone’s grandmother will bring everything to a halt.

As long as the law is interpreted in this protectionist fashion, the quilters who work for pin money to support their habit, who do it to challenge their skills, who have made it part of their lifestyle as did their mothers and grandmothers before them, and who like to share their work with other quilters will soon retreat and leave the quilting industry entirely to the fibre artists and commercial operators who have taken over our quilting traditions of showing, sharing and learning.