by Quilt Alliance | Jun 16, 2013 | QSOS, QSOS Spotlight, Uncategorized
There are plenty of stories in the Q.S.O.S. archives about moms and grandmas–many quilters describe how they learned the art of quilting from a mother or grandmother–but there are many stories about fathers, too: from fathers with a knack for sewing, to husbands who are always willing to take the kids while we pick up a few more things at the quilt shop! Today’s Q.S.O.S. Spotlight features two interviews with quiltmakers who share stories about what their fathers taught them, as well as an interview with a quilting dad: Richard Tims, father of renowned quilter Ricky Tims! Victoria Findlay Wolfe of Bumble Beans, Inc. described how her father’s job as a upholsterer provided early quilt inspiration: “My father had an upholstery business in Minnesota and I grew up on a farm in MN… When I started sewing, I had one of those Barbie sewing machines that had a glue cartridge that you would put in and it would put glue dots on the fabric. That really worked well (laughter). Then I moved up from there gradually and would steal my father’s scraps and upholstery sample books. I’d sew them together on my mother’s Singer. I remember him teaching me how to do a blind stitch and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world because you couldn’t tell there was a seam on the outside finishing it up. I thought it was pretty cool cause it looked like my Dad’s work then.” Jill Herndon describes a quilt she made for her father: “I give quilts as gifts. I have made a special quilt for almost every member of the family. It’s become somewhat of a family tradition. It’s become a wonderful emotional bond with each person who has a unique quilt and the conversations with each one are very unique. One I made for my father has been on TV… It was a departure. I scanned photographs of him from when he was a boy through to his eightieth birthday, and printed them on fabric. And then I framed them in kind of crazy Log Cabins and embroidered a center panel that says it is Edward Beverly Herndon’s quilt. He has hung it at the end of his hallway with lights on it and there are many touching stories about it… It was before people started talking about scrapbook quilts. This is something people do a lot now, and I can see why, because it was really a celebration of my father and of our relationship, that he taught me how to sew, he taught me how to photograph, and he was an inspiration in my going into information technology as a career so that I knew how to handle all of the [scanning and.] printing on fabric at home, using my own computers and printers.” Richard Tims tells the story of starting to quilt while working as a truck driver: “Why did I start? Well, I was working with the trucking company and I was working four days on, and four days off and I didn’t have nothing to do around the house but nothing, and I says if Mama can make a quilt at 85, Richard surely you can make one at 65, and I started in. And I worked four days off in here by myself and then I’d go back and work my four days and come back work another four on the quilts. Something to play with, pass time away, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.” You can read more stories from quiltmakers (and their fathers!) at the Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories page on the Alliance’s site. Posted by Emma Parker Project Manager, Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories…
by Quilt Alliance | Jun 8, 2013 | QSOS Spotlight
When friends who aren’t quilters see my tiny sewing studio (which is more like a ‘sewing corner’ than a full sewing studio!) one of the first things they ask is how I find the time to cut, piece, sew and quilt my many half-finished projects. Then, once they see my growing fabric stash, they have another question: how do you find the money to keep buying fabric? Quiltmaking might require a bit of an investment—of both hours and dollars—but for me, it’s worth it, just to keep quilting! Three quilters interviewed in Houston, Texas at the 2011 International Quilt Festival talked a bit about finding the time and money to keep quilting and how those challenges affect quiltmakers today. Lynn Welch: “I think time is a huge issue for quiltmakers. The second one would be with the economy would be money. You know we’re looking at quilt fabrics that are over ten dollars a yard, spools of thread at four dollars a spool and that’s going to start impacting what people buy and what they make. I think you’re seeing the generations behind mine as having a lot of time constraints. If they can’t get into careers and are working two or three jobs just to make even, I see that with my nieces, they don’t have a lot of free time to do handwork or even machine work. You’re seeing a growth of the modern quilt guilds which are people that are doing much simpler quilts, not so complex, but they still love quilting and using fabric but it’s a whole different way of looking at quilting, which I’m glad to see that that’s happening. I think time for a lot of people and then money probably are going to constrain the industry.” Sharon Gaylor Chambers: “I think finding time to do their craft, their art. You really have to be able to do that. With most of the women these days working outside the home, it’s difficult because I’m privileged to have been able to work and do my craft and then retire and do my thing here.” Gail Valentine: “The price of cotton [laughing.] We were commenting on the price of cotton, it must be really hard for new quilt makers to build up a stash like we certainly did years ago. Things change, up and down. I remember in the 70’s there just didn’t seem to be that much available. A lot of quilters started quilting in the 80’s and learning how to quilt in the 80’s. I had no stash, but I was able to build it up and beyond.” You can read more stories from the International Quilt Festival (and hundreds of other locations!) at the Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories page on the Alliance’s site. Posted by Emma Parker Project Manager, Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories qsos@quiltalliance.org…
by Quilt Alliance | May 25, 2013 | QSOS, QSOS Spotlight
One of my favorite questions that’s occasionally asked as part of a Q.S.O.S. interview is “In what ways do your quilts reflect your community or region?”. I love to read the great diversity of answers to this question–some quiltmakers are eager to explain how the colors of the natural world or traditions of their state appear again and again in their quilts, while others say their work is something that could be done anywhere and isn’t specific to a certain place. Judy Coates Perez, a quilter interviewed at the 2011 International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas, shared a stunning quilt with an underwater scene inspired by Texas’ early (very, very early!) history. Judy talked in her interview about how this quilt–and many of her quilts–are influenced by the world around her: “This quilt is ‘Primordial Sea’ and I made it in 2005 after living in Texas. We lived in Austin, Texas for seven years and while we were there my son became obsessed with fossils. We spent a lot of time looking around in the creek beds of Austin [Texas.] collecting fossils and it led to many discussions about the geological history of Texas and how it used to be underwater and why there were seashells in the middle of Texas. I would think about, ‘wow I wonder what that was like? What was a primordial sea like?’ After thinking about that I decided to make a quilt… CC: Aside from the quilting community that you’re in, is there any particular way that you think that where you have lived has influenced the way that you quilt? JP: It completely influences the imagery. I have so many pieces that are about where I’ve lived and that are about experiences that I’ve had. A lot of my work is very multi-cultural. When I was a kid, we moved out of our house when I was 13 and put everything in storage. I lived in Massachusetts at the time. We drove to Guatemala and spent a year traveling. We went all over the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Guatemala. We rented a house in Guatemala for six weeks and really got immersed in the culture. That has been a huge influence in a lot of my work: the colors, the imagery, that all comes into play. This quilt, ‘Primordial Sea’, is really about my life in Texas. I have another quilt that’s a big agave plant that’s about my time in Los Angeles when one of our homes that was up on a hill in a canyon. Often where I’ve lived has influenced my work in the imagery or colors or something about it.” You can read more stories from the International Quilt Festival (and hundreds of other locations!) at the Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories page on the Alliance’s site. Posted by Emma Parker Project Manager, Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories…
by Quilt Alliance | May 19, 2013 | QSOS, QSOS Spotlight
Have you ever started to make a quilt–gathered your fabric and started cutting pieces pieces–only to change your mind about the design or pattern halfway through the process? Today’s Q.S.O.S. Spotlight features two quiltmakers interviewed at the 2011 International Quilt Festival in Houston who shared the stories behind their quilts and the serendipitous change of plans that shaped their designs. Sometimes the detour can be just as fun as the original route! Barbara Ann Bauer Barrett shares a quilt that started as an intricate traditional block and unexpectedly took flight: “I call this quilt ‘Sing a New Song’. It features a large bird in the center that happened by accident. A few years ago, I thought I wanted to make a New York beauty quilt. I got started on all of the arcs that takes and soon decided that I really didn’t want to finish that. They sat around for a while on the table and one day they started to look like feathers to me. I put them up on the design wall and a bird came out. I decided he was pretty enough to pretty much stand on his own with a few friends and a little suggestion of nature. The border is interesting. It’s made of scraps from a weaver from Taos, New Mexico. She makes garments and sells her scrap bags here at festival. I picked up a couple last year and turned them into a fringed border. It’s one of my favorite parts… I think the quilt represents a joy in nature. We’ve recently moved to the country, so I have nature all around me. I’m more aware of it. I like that it used old things and repurposed them. That made it special for me. It also represents freedom. The bird is having a good time flying in the beautiful batik sky.” Helen Ridgway tells the story of a collaborative quilt and its continuing evolution from balloons to fairies: “This quilt is called “Fairy Frenzy” and it started as a quilt with five balloons and a big bow at the bottom. And since you’re looking at it, you can tell it looks nothing like that with a big bow at the bottom… We all went home from this meeting and we were all supposed to make something that looked like a balloon. So we were just doing little ideas. I remember well that I only did a quarter of mine because I thought, ‘Gosh, that got pretty big,’ and it was going to be round. I was going to have four of those… When we brought them together we thought, ‘I think those look like flowers, not like balloons. Why don’t we make a garden?’ So we scrapped the bow, we scrapped the balloons, and we decided to make a garden. We still didn’t have fairies in it at all but we all started using–I hate to tell you–ugly fabrics that we had in our stash and we put all these fabrics that we thought were ugly fabrics together and made all of these flowers. They are all paper pieced and then appliquéd onto the background. We had a hard time coming up with the background and somebody had this green batik in their stash so they gave it to us so we did that and then we started putting stems on the flowers, we started fraying some of them, we thought that was cute. We turned one of them upside over at the leaves, and then we decided what were we going to do with the bottom of this thing. Then somebody said, ‘If it’s a garden, we probably need some grass.’ So we took all of those greens and we put fusible on the back of them and then we kind of swirled them and put all of that green there. We still didn’t have a way to stop it. So we must have worked on ending this quilt at the bottom for three months.” You can read more stories from the International Quilt Festival (and hundreds of other locations!) at the Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories page on the Alliance’s site. Posted by Emma Parker Project Manager, Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories…
by Quilt Alliance | Feb 2, 2013 | QSOS
The Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories project just got a little bit bigger. With over 1,000 interviews presented on our website and archived in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, this collection is the largest of its kind. Thanks to the support of a grant by the Ardis and Robert James Foundation matched by donations from devoted Q.S.O.S. patrons, the project is taking a big leap forward. New staff support (project manager Emma Parker), the debut of our first quilts and oral history conference (coming on July 20 in Herndon, Virginia) and the launch of a scholars program aimed at mining this valuable repository for inspiring and educational content, are all on tap for 2013. Here are a few of the newly posted interviews with an excerpt from each. Enjoy and please share! Jessie McCoy Interviewed on October 14, 2010 for the Georgia Q.S.O.S. Interviewer: Jodie Davis Location: The Georgia Quilt Show in Duluth, Georgia. Read the full interview. Barbara Brackman Interviewed on March 5, 2011 for the Kansas Q.S.O.S. Location: Moda Fabrics in Dallas, Texas Interviewer: Meg Cox Read the full interview. Victoria Findlay Wolfe Interviewed on August 5, 2011 for the New York Q.S.O.S. Location: New York, New York Interviewer: Meg Cox Read the full interview. Michael Michalski Interviewed on April 27, 2011 for the New York Q.S.O.S. Location: The National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky Interviewer: Amy Milne Read the full interview. Posted by Amy E. Milne Executive Director, Quilt Alliance…
