In a courtyard of the grand hacienda-style Gateway Resort, way out in the Canyon Country of Mesa County a group of women have gathered to vote on the ugliest quilt.

The quilts are small — the size of a large doormat, and they are indeed ugly — or at least garish, clashing, slapdash. But that’s the point of this particular session at the Alegre Quilting Retreat, explains Instructor and art quilter Sue Benner:

“In a lot of my classes, when I teach layered collage [my students] do the background — because I want three layers [in the end] — and they don’t want to cover it up because it’s so beautiful. So I’m purposefully having them make something they don’t like so they don’t mind covering it up,” she says. 

Over the next few days, Benner’s students will work to collage over their ‘ugly’ quilts and come out with something intuitive, surprising, and — perhaps — beautiful. 

Benner is an accomplished and widely exhibited quilt artist. Today, she presides over a classroom piled high with fabric, irons pumping out steam, and women stooped over their piecing. 

Each year at the cusp of spring, quilters from across the country descend on this resort in a distant eddy of Colorado’s Red Rock Country to enjoy off-season prices and devote themselves to studying with some of the biggest names in the art-quilting world. 

Many here are experienced quilters, but not all: Tina Ray is 23. How did she come to Alegre?

“Well, I was trying to learn how to quilt. Because there are not a lot of places to learn it. So I ended up looking for workshops where everyone gathers together, so I could sort of learn through osmosis. And this place was on a list of quilters’ favorite places.” 

Participants at the retreat sign up for a single weeklong intensive course. The day is broken by lunch with a lecture to follow. 

And, for anyone seeking inspiration, trails and pathways beckon, leading up from the resort into the scrubby footlands above the Dolores River. 

The question of what exactly is an art-quilt floats in the air. Delivering a lunch lecture, quilter Lisa Ellis addresses the divisions between craft, fine art, tradition, and modernism. 

“These categorizations make me crazy. Studio Art Quilt Associates, our definition is that if it’s original, if it's from your head, its art. This idea that “Oh it’s block-based so it’s not art” — No! There’s nothing that says you can’t make something block-based and therefore it’s traditional and not worthy.” 

Many bring finished work to share, and hanging in the dining room, it makes a collection as diverse as can be imagined. 

Terrie Mangat of Taos has taught at Alegre in the past, but this year she’s simply attending. 

“The lady that inspired me to make quilts was Miss Earl Clay in Carlisle Kentucky,” Mangat remembers. “I got a degree in Art from the U of Kentucky, and she made all these wacky quilts. She lived near a men’s underwear factory and she would make these quilts but she used these wacky fabrics from the factory. And the fact that she put these weird fabrics together made me want to make quilts. 

Miss Early Clay back in Kentucky worked without a sewing machine, hand-stitching every piece. Says Mangat, for decades she turned to modern technology:

“I thought I would never have the patience to hand-quilt. But now I’m seventy-six and I find that I love to stitch every evening, and my work is now mostly hand-pieced.”

The process of working without a machine can produce a different sort of product — less polished certainly. Organic. 

Attendee Barabra Pevny, meanwhile, got into quilting with a close friend after retirement. 

“When we got out of private practice together I told her: ‘I need to still see you every week,’ so I went and started quilting with her in her river home on the Animas [River]” she says.  

Pevny, who briefly came out of retirement in order to pay the Alegre tuition, lived for years in Durango, Colorado before moving to Fort Collins. To be back in this Western Slope Country for such study and practice — Pevny is speechless. 

“I have no words…Boy, you’re gonna bring me to tears,” she says. “I’m a red rock girl. It’s beautiful here.” 

Outside, sun mixes with wind and birdsong. There is just a hint of new growth on the overwintering trees and the day is quiet, almost sacred beneath the soaring mesa cliffs. 

But if you listen through open classroom doors, you can the Alegre quilters as they set about their afternoon