How different from many women today whose work outside the home provides merely money to buy things that are soon discarded, things not valued because the work of loving and creative hands has not been invested in them.
An Indian woman exactly describes the sane and healing function of the hands-on work of quiltmaking as well as the value so conferred, even though she speaks of India's indigenous crafts. "The human touch does something to the fragments which are brought together in the finished piece where they mingle and cling together, to give birth to a new life in a fresh form--unlike the tumult and pressuring of a powerful machine where the pieces seem helpless and lost." -- Kamaladevi Chattapadhyaya in Introduction to India: Village, Ritual Arts, exhibit catalog to travelling exhibition (La Jolla, California: Mingei International, 1981), P. 8