The Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) rural rehabilitation agenda focused on efforts that would result in poor rural farmers becoming increasingly self-sufficient. At the local level, the FSA sent farm and home supervisors to guide farm families in improving their subsistence farming instead of focusing on cash crops, such as cotton. Supervisors heavily promoted food preservation, giving loans for clients to purchase appliances including pressure cookers. Supervisors also encouraged families to produce nonedible products at home, including constructing furniture from salvage materials. If a family purchased a sewing machine from the FSA’s Household Furniture and Domestic Equipment catalog, the FSA promised to arrange sewing instruction to the client without additional cost. With these goals in mind, it is easy to understand how quilts—home-produced objects made from salvage materials—served as useful symbols of the FSA’s goals of thrift and self-sufficiency. One of the strategies employed by FSA photographers was to capture quiltmakers in the midst of their work—a deliberate effort to showcase the self-sufficient act of quiltmaking: piecing together something beautiful and functional seemingly out of nothing.