Anthropologie, my favorite catalog, is selling replicas of quilts from Gee’s Bend.
Gee’s Bend is a little town here on a peninsula in the Black Belt of Alabama. It’s surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River, and some of the women that live there started a quilt-making collective – the Freedom Quilting Bee.
About three years ago when I first heard about it, Av and I drove down to Gee’s Bend (it’s really called ‘Boykin’ now) to see if we could find the Bee and perhaps buy a quilt.
We did find the building, but no one was there. Later that year, we went to the Mobile Museum of Art and saw the Gee’s Bend quilt exhibit they were showing. What surprised me was that I expected tiny, uniform stitches – but the ones I saw really weren’t constructed that way at all.
Today, you can buy an original quilt directly from them – they begin at $800. I noticed today that the quilts Anthropologie is selling – the replicas – are on sale – marked down from about $300 to $145.