Welcome to my quilt website.  My name is Sandy Small Proudfoot and I have been quilting since the early nineteen-sixties when I made my first quilt at the age of twenty-two.  My late Mother-in-law, Maude Small, who grew up on a farm just outside of Shelburne, Ontario, was a lifelong quiltmaker and an oil painter.  She encouraged me to learn how to do both.  The picture above, of Tom Gayford, Olympic rider, was painted when I was about nineteen years of age.  Inspired by a newspaper article at the time, I love it still and am quite proud of myself doing that at such an early age.  Learning how to paint with oil paints taught me what different colours were composed of and this helped enormously in choosing coloured fabrics for my quilts later on.  “Coercive Control” is the name of the quilt on the right.  It was my first wall quilt in regard to Intimate Partner Violence, of which I experienced myself and which I have placed a number of pages on my website under Violence Against Women.  Click on the Artist’s Statement to read about the meaning of the quilt.  It now resides in the boardroom of Family Transition Place, Orangeville’s women’s shelter.  In the Violence Against Women section of my website, I have placed information that may be of interest to victims of Domestic Violence now referred to as Intimate Partner Violence.   And I have created wall quilts reflecting my own experience with this very serious issue in society today.  Victims of abuse suffer greatly and I have tried to put a visual face onto the feelings I have experienced onto these wall quilts. 

A quilter’s medium is cloth.  Working with cloth as I have done for many years now, I found that teaching quilting and working with the cotton-polyester broadcloth which was the only available broadcloth available for quilters in the decade of the nineteen-seventies when I was teaching as 100% cotton was difficult to obtain at the time, the cotton-polyester cloth had an adverse effect on my own health.  Putting a hot steam iron onto the cotton-polyester broadcloth, as I was doing almost daily in producing designs for my quilting students, released a lot of chemicals into my respiratory system.  One would automatically assume that cloth was a benign medium to work with in comparison to oil paints and turpentine but I, and another quilt teacher Angie Krowtowski both ended up with very compromised immune systems and medical issues because of breathing in the chemicals released from this cloth.   (see Toxicity of Textiles page on my website). 

Since the early nineteen-seventies, the design work on quilts has changed dramatically when quilts began attracting the attention of formally-educated fine art and design student graduates who chose textiles as their medium.  They used the format of the entire quilt for their design work and the designs they created were so creatively different to the Traditional quilt patterns quilters had been using for decades prior to this time.  It was in looking at their quilt work that I began to see quilts in a different light and realized that if I were ever to grow in my own quilt design work, I would benefit from a visual art education which I never expected to happen to me.  Until one day it did.  But that’s another story entirely.

Thank you for taking the time to visit my website.  I hope you will find something of interest within the following pages.

Sandy Small Proudfoot AOCA ’89,
Mono, Ontario, Canada
Email:  farmerswalkbandb@sympatico.ca