Barbara Cashman doesn’t make heirlooms, she said. Instead, she makes “quilts to be used.”

Nevertheless, her workroom could easily double as an art studio, for on the walls are not only parts of her current project, but also quilts of various sizes, the results of her handiwork and talent. Some have ribbons attached, testimony that art show judges have appreciated her work.

Though she doesn’t make quilts to tell stories, some of them do anyway. There’s Amanda’s Aquarium, a wall hanging several feet wide and deep. Barbara told the story behind it: “Amanda wanted an aquarium when she was a teenager and I did not want to clean it, and I knew who would have to, so I made her one called Storm at Sea and used all the fish stuff” in the design.

When daughter Amanda was 13, she was taking lessons from Randy Jolly and created a batik that she took home and asked her mother, “Can you make this into a quilt?”

“I said, ‘sure,’” Barbara related, “and I did it and it was awful. I did it on the machine. I ripped it all out and did it by hand, and we entered it in an art show as Mother and Child Reunion.” It won an award.

Though Amanda doesn’t quilt, her artistic bent is a help to her mother. “She’s my best critic,” Barbara said. “She’ll come by sometimes and say, ‘I like what’s going on here,’ or I’ll lay out something and she’ll rearrange, or maybe say, ‘Have you tried this color?’”

“I grew up under the quilting frame,” Barbara said. That was in West Point, and her mother, aunts and grandmother were all quilters who “had the frames that you let down from the ceiling.” Barbara watched them, learned a little and did a little bit, and then “life got in the way and all that sort of thing.”

She went to Mississippi State and later got her master’s from Colorado College with a major in French and English and a minor in German. She taught, married Pat Cashman and moved to Vicksburg, and they had two children, Amanda and John, before she became serious about sewing.

“I became a serious quilter about 1995 when my mother was dying,” she said. “Quilting was something I could do. I couldn’t control a lot that was going on, but I could control those pieces. Mother was a seamstress, too. It just gave me a lot of comfort. I sewed through all that.”

Sewing, and quilting, she said, is very much a therapy and “helped me a lot with Louis (her late father-in-law) when he had a stroke …. All day, as we waited for word on him, I cut and sewed.”

There were less serious times: she laughs about how quilting had saved her children’s lives “any number of times because by the time I would put down my handwork and go to kill ’em I had forgotten what I was going to kill ’em for!”

Though she learned to quilt by hand, she said, “it was just too slow for me,” and she does most of her work on a sewing machine, telling of a quilt she started by hand years ago, “and it’s rotting in the frame.” Again, she said, life got in the way.

Barbara credits much of her interest and skill in quilting to her mentor, the late Martha Skelton, one of the top 20 quilters in the United States, who lived in Vicksburg and died last November. Barbara described her as “like a second mother to me” and recalled that Mrs. Skelton never said anything unkind, but if she said, “That’s a dear quilt,” it meant it was terrible and throw it away.

Quilting can be done individually or in groups, and there are several local organizations, the Cotton Patchers and the Vicksburg Quilters. Ladies at Redbone Church still have a quilting session, or quilting bee, where they work the old-fashioned way, by hand. The groups usually get together to exchange ideas, not to pursue joint projects, Barbara said.

There are literally thousands of designs, many shown in a quilting encyclopedia, and there are new ones all the time. “Everybody has their favorite,” Barbara said. “They just like to get in there and quilt. Some adore the double wedding ring style, others love the log cabin design. One style over and over would bore me to death, but some specialize. My favorite is the one I’m working on now.”

Quilting has changed a lot from the time in early America when they were made primarily to keep one warm. New types of batting are light, but very warm. A quilt, she said, is like a sandwich, unlike cross stitch or embroidery, for “you have two layers of fabric and batting between.” Though the backs of many quilts are plain, she makes the flip side of her quilts attractive because “I like a surprise on the back.”

She gets most of her supplies from a local shop, Stitch and Frame, and likes 100-percent cotton rather than silk or man-made fabrics, because, “If I’m going to spend that much time on something, I want something that is going to last.” The time it takes to make a quilt depends on its size, “on time and pressures and how the creative juices are flowing.”

Quilting is not just American. Barbara has been on quilt tours in Iceland, Wales, France, Italy, England and, last year, she and Pat were the first Americans to visit a show in Hungary where “their work was gorgeous.” International shows are also held in Houston, Texas, and Paducah, Ky. International and national organizations and publications keep quilters abreast of what’s going on, and quilters are talking about a quilt that recently sold at auction in this country for $100,000.

Barbara usually doesn’t sell her work, but there was an exception: “It was from leftover scraps. The challenge was to use only those pieces and see what I could do. Amanda said, ‘Mom, this one is going somewhere.’ It was a wall hanging, and when I finished it Pat said, ‘Oh, I really like that,’ so I said, ‘OK, this is your quilt.’ I entered it in an art show and put an outrageous price on it, and the first day a couple from New York came through and bought it. He’s not let me live that down — that I sold his quilt.”

Her favorite colors are “bright — red, yellow, green and blue,” so it was a challenge when she made a quilt from Civil War reproduction fabrics. It was her first attempt at design — the hardest part being working with colors she would not have chosen. It involved more than sewing and art — math was also a factor — with triangles and squares sides A and B equalling C. “It was a hypotenuse. I had to figure all that out.”

For that quilt she wanted the oldest pattern she could find, which was the Baptist (sometimes called Methodist) Fan. She signed the laborious job with a label, “Barbara’s Battle, waged by Barbara Cashman, 2008, Vicksburg, Miss.”

The best way to display a quilt, she said, is on a bed, or put a sleeve on the back for hanging it on the wall, or drape it over a door or a quilt rack — but keep it out of the sun and fold it so the colors can be seen.

“The best way to conserve a quilt is to use it,” she said. And, if you’re going to put it up, roll it or put it in a pillowcase, but never keep it in a plastic bag.

“They need to be out, with air circulating,” she said. “Quilts are meant to be used.”

Her needles aren’t restricted to quilting, for she also enjoys knitting socks and making shirts for her husband. On a trip to Indiana, when he was wearing a Hawaiian-style shirt with automobiles on it, a man literally tried to buy it off his back. Even Pat’s explanation that he wouldn’t sell it because his wife had made it didn’t deter the man. It was basically “name your price,” but the shirt wasn’t for sale.

Barbara also meets several times a month with women who make prayer shawls, either knitted or crocheted. The number of stitches are divisible by three, representing the Trinity, and the ladies meditate or pray while they make them.

“When they’re finished, we bless them as a group with a prayer and then the shawls go to those who have suffered a loss or are going through a catastrophic illness, or to one who has lost a spouse,” she said.

Though our ancestors definitely made quilts to keep warm, Barbara said, “A quilt is both art and a comforter. But some are more comfort than art.”

Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.