Operating separately from sewing rooms, Works Progress Administration (WPA) handicraft projects similarly employed women in need, but with a distinct emphasis on artistic craft production rather than on industrial textile output. Handicraft projects also differed from the various initiatives of the Federal Art Project designed to employ trained artists or craft makers, and instead employed a small group of skilled makers to supervise “unskilled workers” from the relief rolls—often older women who did not have specific skills deemed useful for work on other WPA projects.  Like the WPA sewing rooms, Handicraft projects were also part of the WPA’s Women’s and Professional Projects Division, aimed to spark a revival of both crafting skills and a market for the products. By 1938, forty-three states had handicraft projects, with around 35,000 workers engaged on these projects nationwide, although the largest, most well-known, and most emulated was that of Milwaukee. Quilts were just one of the many crafts produced within various states’ projects; projects also included weaving, toy and doll making, block-printing, furniture making, and other crafts, all indicative of what one journalist perceived as a “rosy future” for “domestic handmade goods.”

The quilts and other goods produced by handicraft projects were sold at cost to public institutions like hospitals, WPA nursery schools, and orphanages, in contrast to the sewing room output that was supplied to needy families on relief. Handicraft projects focused on good design as well, on the theory that both the unskilled women working on the projects as well as those who eventually lived and worked among them, would benefit from the high design standards because they may not have been previously exposed to such aesthetics.