DAYTON-You can easily estimate the time it takes to machine quilt a piece of functional art, but who counts the hours of piecing it together? Or the love stitched into it? On a recent chat with Wendy Frame, of Dayton, she showed me two quilts brought to her by clients of her longarm quilting business, The Quilting Frame.

"A customer found this quilt her mother had pieced during the 1930s," she said, referring to the project he was quilting during my visit.

"She didn't know she had it. It was all hand-pieced," she said, referring to that tangible piece of intangibility.

She is using a Cotto...