Or, perhaps, in rubber, paper, polythene plastic, old photographic film - even government-shredded currency. Modern quilting has come a long way from Little House on the Prairie.

Some contributors to the Crafts Council's "Contemporary American Quilts" are better known as fabric and fiber artists than as quiltmakers. Yet, says McMorris, who served as one of three jurors for the exhibition, input from the art world has brought the craft to a new juncture.

"Artists have always been intrigued by the metaphor of quilting: putting together pieces, yet working towards a whole. What they have had to do, over time, is learn proper quiltmaking skills. Now that so many have done that, they're bringing our craft a huge range of choices and imaginations."

Take 'American Dream' by the New York-based Ilisha Helfman. Helfman pieced her first quilt works out of paper, guided by a popular 19th century pattern called 'Log Cabin'. Over time, she explored textures ("I folded and layered, pleated and stitched; later, I added computerised embroideries and beadwork") and worked in a range of humble materials: ticket stubs and seed packets, maps and stamps, labels and playing cards. When the resulting pieces were solicited for modern quilt shows, Halfman made a big decision: she would try to use actual fabric. "That began as a friendly nod towards those original quilts which inspired me."

Helfman uses quiltmaking to focus on issues of the moment: from divorce and recession to America's family farming crisis. ""American Dream"," she says, "is a piece about the ideal cars and homes we are brought up to expect. It has a nostalgic quality because that dream became an illusion; now, nobody can afford them." "American Dream' incorporates razor blade wrappers, currency, fortune-cookie prophecies, buttons, cards, shoe tops, advertising, safety pins - and it includes an inset tribute, congratulating new President William Jefferson Clinton.

A maker like Georgia's Pamela Studstill comes to quilting from a very different place than Helfman. Studstill alters the fabric itself, while adhering strictly to traditional procedures. (Almost all Studstill work is beautifully hand-quilted by her mother, Bettie.) With treatments such as sponge-painting, airbrushing, mottling and sprinkling of dyes, this maker shapes her colours towards an impressionistic whole - one which then vibrates in a fluid dynamic of colour. Seen from afar, a quilt such as Studstill's 'Road Noise II' can look very traditional. Read more closely, it resonates in a wonderful play of tones.

Works like those of Studstill and Helfman (or Kentucky's Arturo Alonzo Sandoval, who weaves, then quilts, with industrial 'fabric' meant to function as tape or film) seem as if they might alienate quilt traditionalists. But, to the contrary, most have been received with interest. Even conservatives view them as paving the way for a public rethink of quilting: a new view of the craft as living and responsive.

Works such as those by New York-based Katherine Knauer epitomise this objective. Knauer is a member of her city's Manhattan Quilt Guild - but she marries its classic techniques with a Nineties iconography. Works like her 'Liberation Quilt' or 'Trouble In the Tropics' are pieced from cloth she screenprints or paints, juxtaposed with commercial fabrics from China, England and Africa.

In style, her work is further from mainstream Anglo-British tradition - the Log Cabins, Wedding Ring and Arkansas Traveler patterns - than from quiltmaking's more energetic, Afro-American stream. As one would expect of an Anglo-American working with Creole traditions, Knauer employs literal, if subtle, play with emblems. (For 'Trouble', the pineapple, Colonial symbol of hospitality, blurs into a hand-grenade: which itself, from a distance, resembles the innocent sunflower.)

Knauer stresses she does not attempt to understand the vast textile traditions into which she is dipping, or the national politics and histories from which they flow. Yet her "fabric first" approach has always driven quilting - historically, this is the source of its greatest powers and syncretisms.

America's quilts have always deserved their status as central social icons. Similar to another great American contribution, jazz, quiltmaking fuses past and present, improvisation and discipline, cultural recollection and profound cultural change. Unlike jazz, however, quilting aesthetics represent the Anglo-British heritage as fully as the Afro-American. Quiltmaking's European tradition is one of bilateral symmetry and fixed ideas about order: "standards" of proportion brought to the Colonies with white British settlers.

These ideals of form derived from the "perfect", "classical" rectangle. And regular, rectilinear preferences can be easily traced - they are visible in everything from Colonial settlement plans to vintage architecture, furniture, crafts and dining traditions. ("Beyond architecture," says the folk historian Simon J. Bronner, "the American design of gravestones and dress, even the arrangement of food - meat, potatoes,vegetable - on a dinner-plate follows this bilaterally symmetrical, Anglo-inspired pattern.) Even the rectilinear form of Anglo-American grammar (beginning/middle/end; subject/object/verb; past/present/future) carries in it ideas of propriety through order.

Just as encoded, just as "American", is a very separate legacy - patterns established, through slavery, by West African customs and habits. Broadly, all of these emphasise what scholar Robert F Thompson calls "the prizing of elements in alternation." And few expressive practices display this better than black quilting tradition: filled with clashing colours, staggered accents and an expectation of visual interruption. Says critic Jon Michael Vlach of Afro-America's dealings with the unbiquitous 'Log Cabin':

"Consider...the commonplace log cabin quilt square, a block composed of small, concentrically arranged strips usually no larger than a foot along one side...Black quilters employ this motif in an ordered, precisely geometric manner, but they can also make the log cabin so big one block alone will constitute the entire quilt. They may also skew the center of the block to one side, and select high-effect colours rarely employed by Anglo quilters...Close consideration reveals that such a quilt, which seems random, misshapen and crazed, does in fact have an order, albeit not an order not marked by the same meticulous, geometric precision employed by white quilters."

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