Irene Young (Medford) is a machine quilter and knitter. As a young girl, she learned to knit from her aunt and mother and to quilt from a variety of quilt groups and classes in southern Oregon. She has a strong interest in color, design, and texture and especially enjoys quilting for a variety of social causes.
Bio
Irene Young (Medford) is a machine quilter and knitter with a strong interest in color, design, and texture. As a young girl, she learned to knit from her aunt and mother and to quilt from a variety of quilt groups and classes in southern Oregon. Young is a retired elementary teacher who grew up in New York City and moved to Portland, OR where she taught first and second grade for many years.
Textiles have always fascinated Young. "I started knitting, oh, when I was young, I would guess maybe 10 or 11. I had an aunt who was a prolific knitter. . . . She would knit us all sweaters, the whole family. And I'm left-handed; my mother could never show me how to do it, so my aunt taught me . . . I knitted on and off and especially when my kids were young, I used to knit things for them.” Though she continues to knit sweaters for family members, quilting, which Young took up after she retired, is her passion. A seamstress friend “dragged me to beginning quilting class . . . , and I was I was hooked after that. I just loved it." While Young is primarily a machine quilter, she has done hand quilting and some hand-appliqué work. More recently, she has been using embroidery to appliqué, rather a modern twist on Victorian crazy quilts.
Young, who moved in retirement to Medford with her husband, has been quilting seriously since 2004. She enjoys making quilts for family members and tries to incorporate their interests and color choices in her designs. She machine-pieces her quilts, both art and traditional, and used to machine quilt them. In 2013, she became interested in long-arm quilting and took the plunge and purchased a machine. For several years, she’s belonged to three different quilt guilds in southern Oregon—one an art quilt guild to stretch her creativity and skills, another a long arm group, and a third that is the umbrella quilting group for southern Oregon and has about 150 members. Her various guilds are part of contributing to several community efforts common to quilt groups all over the US: Quilts of Valor, which makes quilts for veterans and their families; quilts for homeless people; quilted bags for homeless teens to carry their possessions; and quilts for victims of the devastating fires in 2020 in Talent, Oregon and in northern California. She, like many quilters, was part of the effort to contribute quilts to the quilt shop in Ashland; the shop maintained a shelf full of quilts for fire survivors to take.
A lifelong teacher, Young continues to take classes herself and get together with her quilting groups for sewing days and potlucks. Everyone brings their sewing machine to piece or quilt at several tables that they set up at community halls. What was missing during the pandemic have been those opportunities to get together in person, to share ideas, and to do their piecing together and sometimes quilting side by side. For Irene Young, as for many quilters, that community connection is an important part of the tradition. The sociability of quilters—from quilt conventions where people buy fabric, see new machines, and view each other’s quilts, to the quilt guilds whose members share techniques and tips as well as work together on quilts for various causes—has always been part of this women’s traditional art form, which combines aesthetics, function, and learning from one another. The quilts themselves are the focus, but the relationships with different people and their communities are an inseparable part of the process.
