As we close out the summer months on the North Fork, it’s only natural to crave getting cozied up with a warm blanket.
In the spirit of comfort and also creativity, here are two quilt shows to check out this month. One tells the stories of the North Fork’s past through carefully crafted and preserved design, and the other shines light on current narratives while fundraising to honor a young life lost.
On Sept. 13 and 14 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Hallockville Museum Farm’s Naugles Barn will transform into a gallery, displaying 80 quilts meticulously made by members of the Eastern Long Island Quilt Guild.
This show, titled the 2025 Eastern Long Island Quilt Guild Show and Yard Sale, is the annual celebration for the non-profit organization, where quilters of all abilities get the chance to showcase their work.
“We encourage [participation] whether you’ve been a quilter for years or if you’re a new quilter,” says quilt guild president Nancy Raynor. “That’s why I like the idea of not judging, because I don’t want people to feel that theirs is not good enough because beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
This year’s president’s challenge was to create quilts inspired by seasons of life. Each artist was tasked with making an 8-inch by 40-inch quilted mural indicative of their respective birth month and season to be hung around the barn.
Admission to the show is $5, granting attendees access to the barn plus nearly a dozen art vendors. They can also enter to win a raffle basket including a queen-sized quilt, twined rug and a lap quilt, with all proceeds going towards the Paige Keely Foundation, which raises awareness and supports early detection of brain arteriovenous malformation.
Just six miles east at the Cutchogue-New Suffolk Historical Council & Museum’s Wickham Farmhouse, another slew of stitched creations are being presented through the first week of October.
The 2025 Special Exhibit The Fabric of Time, which opened in mid-June, was centered around the donation of a 1890s Friendship quilt believed to be a neighborhood or church quilt with local family names sewn into each patch.
Sandy Midgley, one of the generous donors, documented extensive historic and genealogic research of each name in a book on display along with the quilt.
A few other rare quilts that Mark MacNish, executive director at Cutchogue-New Suffolk Historical Council and Museums, had found stored around the Wickham Farmhouse are also part of the exhibit.
MacNish matched the 20 quilts with digitized records from the American Folk Art Museum’s online quilt index.
“Most of them were 200 years old, some even older,” says MacNish. “Some of them were late 18th century quilts, which is extremely rare because quilting didn’t really become popular until the early to mid-19th century.”
Another feature of this show is a 200-year-old loom, donated by the Maertz family in the historical society’s Red Barn, surrounded by other materials used by early North Fork settlers to create cloth and linen.
Stop by from 1 to 4 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday to view the history-rich pieces; for private tours email [email protected].
