Creating impact within the warmth of a quilt Chester's Diak turns her artistic eye to the animal world

 

 

This article first appeared in the Vermont Arts Council’s Featured section on Aug. 12, 2026. It is reprinted with permission.

By Lorien Strange
© 2026 Vermont Arts Council

It’s a lovely cool summer day as I walk along Main Street in Chester to Linda Diak’s house. Couples are out popping between an antiques boutique, a bakery, a café and a yarn shop. Tourists and locals alike are chatting under a restaurant’s veranda.

“We’re next to the Inn Victoria,” Diak had told me when I asked for directions to her house. “Tall white colonial.”

I couldn’t ask for a better place to do an interview. Her side porch sports two comfortably-cushioned chairs, a pot of flowers, a slight breeze and — a giant flamingo?

Diak is a quilter, an abstract weaver turned animal portrait artist. And the curious fellow peering out from the porch is a fabric protest against unethical mining practices in South America.

He’s part of her series “Impacted,” a planned 12-quilt endeavor to highlight animals both familiar and strange that have been negatively affected by human activities. The Vermont Arts Council helped fund this project through a Creation Grant, which supports Vermont artists in developing ambitious new artistic projects at various stages of their careers.

Diak is well-established in the quilting world for her inventive yet down-to-earth masterpieces. “Impacted” is an invitation to bring the care her quilts embody to actions in our everyday lives.

A very Vermont start

Vermont experienced devastating flooding in 2023, including Southern Vermont towns like Weston, Londonderry and Chester. As the rain continued, stories started pouring in from around the state about animals who had escaped their enclosures — among them, a cow, a pig, an emu and a peacock.

Diak had been chatting with friends on Facebook at the time, saying she wanted to do a quilt to raise awareness for the non-humans who’d had their lives upended by the state’s second hundred-year flood in two years.

“One person said, ‘You should set them on a journey!’ ” she recounts. “Someone else added, ‘Put them in a classic car!’ So I did.”

The result was “Road Trip,” a whimsical version of the animals’ absence. It won the People’s Choice award at the Annual Vermont Quilt Sampler Exhibition at Billings Farm and Museum in Woodstock. After that, the quilt went on a road trip of its own, touring around the state.

Diak wanted to do more, but she couldn’t build off that momentum immediately.

“Shortly after completion, I broke my arm,” she shares. Unable to do the work that sustains her livelihood, Diak had to put off her ideas for doing other, similar quilts until she recovered.

Though she would have liked “Road Trip” to have had a broader initial influence, she was still able to raise some funds through the sale of cards of her bird quilts for the organization that kept one of these animals—Springfield’s VINE Sanctuary, home of Tiki the emu.

An invitation to change

In her long career as a fiber artist, Diak became a quilter relatively recently. “I started doing quilts as a way to help me calm down before bed. But I found piecing together all the precise points of traditional geometric piecework very stressful!” she laughs. “So I started messing around with a freeform animal portrait and have never looked back.”

“I do mainly animals. It’s my thing,” she says.

But she’s also familiar with quilting for a social cause.

This past year, Diak worked with the Migrant Quilt Project. She created a quilt that will bear the names of migrants from Mexico and Central America who died in southern Arizonan deserts in the last fiscal year. The finished piece, “Saguaro Woman,” is inspired in part by the legends of the indigenous Tohono O’odham of the Sonoran Desert.

The piece is haunting but not immediately disturbing or violent. Diak says this is intentional.

“I don’t want to do…” she pauses to search for the right word. “Angry art. Because that tends to push people away.”

“Just by the nature of a quilt, no matter what’s on it, people associate it with warmth and comfort.” Diak takes advantage of these qualities to draw people into her pieces.

“When I first started making animal quilts, I hung them up on a wall across from a window at night, turned the lights on in the house, and went across the street to see if I could recognize them from that distance. When you walk into an exhibition, I want them to be immediately recognizable so that people go, ‘oh, that’s a polar bear!’ and go over to take a closer look.”

That strategy is evident in the flamingo quilt on the wall of her porch.

“If you look, see, he doesn’t have a lower lip. And his beak goes down at this sharp angle.” That’s because this is an Andean flamingo, a different species than what you usually see in the zoos.

“People don’t usually think of flamingos as endangered, and most aren’t,” she says. Threatened by habitat loss related to mining activities, Andean flamingos are listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

“In the background, I’ve quilted feathers all over the place to represent crowding. He’s squished up against all these other flamingos because they’re running out of space.”

Diak is currently writing her artist’s statements for several of her quilts to explain the importance of these details.

“I used to work for an art museum,” she tells me. Frustrated by how the jargon-filled descriptions of the pieces would turn people away who were otherwise interested in learning about the intent behind a piece, she tries to keep her artists’ statements accessible for all readers.

“People ask, ‘are they really going to go over and read a paragraph about a quilt?’ And yes, they do! Because they are drawn in by the piece and want to learn more about it.”

Power in the details

One of Diak’s quilts is a fish, green and brown like the bottom of a pond. It hovers over a near-black background with one eye looking out with that cautious, alert sort of expression that fish always seem to have.

Like the Andean flamingo, the channel darter isn’t an animal that people typically think of as endangered. But in Vermont ecosystems like Lake Champlain, worsening water quality is threatening its habitat.

“They’re only about that big,” Diak says, extending her pinky and thumb in a contracted ASL y. “About 5 inches long. But they eat algae,” she explains. And while you might not notice the absence of a fish that small, the presence of more algae in ponds, lakes, and streams is a very noticeable result of their decline.

With her quilt, Diak has reversed this effect.

The humble channel darter has become several feet long with intricately quilted ridges, spines, and scales. But it takes an attentive eye to pick out the representation of algal cells stitched into the background.

This slow drawing in by a web of details encapsulates the effect that Diak hopes her work will have.

“Do I always make the most ecologically-sound decisions 100% of the time? No. I throw away some things I could probably use again sometimes.” Rather, she says, the goal is to invite people to be mindful of how their daily decisions might have an impact.

“It’s the small things we do,” she says.

Before she folds the fish quilt to set inside again, she flips it around to reveal its neatly-stitched backside. Previously hidden silhouettes of other fish dart around the outline of the front-facing figure. Even in the summer sun, they glow as if illuminated by moonlight.

“And I quilted the back in colors to show off the quilting. I don’t always use more than one color of bobbin thread,” she laughs. “I know that no one’s going to be looking at it. But I know it’s there.”