by Quilt Alliance | Jan 12, 2014 | QSOS Spotlight
Over 200,000 women are incarcerated in the United States. This week’s Q.S.O.S. Spotlight features an interview from the The Ohio Reformatory for Women Quilt QSOS Project. Interviewer Karen Musgrave spoke with Joy Major, an inmate at the women’s prison in Marysville, Ohio. Joy shared a bit about the story of her quilt, “Hands of Time.”: “I tried to come up with a title in a quilt that would be in some way part of my journey here. I thought “Hands of Time” because to me it was all about expressing what time here is like. The time before I got here and even time into the future. I thought “Hands of Time” would be able to illustrate that for me. I wrote this little poem about “Hands of Time” and it’s the way the hands turn slowly here and if I could turn the hands back things would be a lot differently. As I started working, I found it so unusual that even though I’ve been here for 12 years, some days the time passes so quickly that I can’t believe it’s been and then other times it seems like one day could be an eternity. I started to pick out material and stuff for my quilt and the most obvious piece that I found was this brick wall [points to quilt.]. To me the brick just represented a stopping point, a confinement of it all. I worked around it and I put the brick on and then I started thinking about the clock. I put the clock on and I used each little scrap of material that we could find because all of the things that we had here was donated in some kind of way. So I collected all of the beige or white pieces and I tried to make it as varied as possible because I found that the people here are just that. Everybody is just so individual. I began stitching these pieces together and I didn’t know how to quilt. I had made a couple of quilting projects before that. I didn’t have any lessons in quilting [laughs.]. That is probably obvious, but I just decided to start sewing it together how I thought it would go together. Then I put the little ticks on here, the little time markers to show how time passes here. Then I found these little black and white pieces and when I was first convicted this is what my prison uniform looked like. It was seriously like the old time prison uniforms on television. I put that one on next and I kept stitching and stitching because there is such an enormous amount of time here that I had more time than I had materials. I wanted to use the materials wisely and use the thread wisely and plus it felt real mediating to me too, just keep sewing and sewing… This particular feather stitch was something that I noticed when I was a little girl. My grandmother had a quilt with all of these different stitches on them and I wanted to learn how to make them, but at the time I wasn’t able to sit down and apply myself to it. I found them in a quilt book again and as soon as I saw them I thought some way I have to incorporate those into my project. There was a lady here, she is on here I’m sure. Her name is Ms. Betty Toole. She was in the middle of working on the quilt and she passed. She was someone that encouraged me to sew and learn how to sew. She was, I think, in her eighties so it was kind of nice to have her here. Kind of as my own little–we called them prison mothers, and she taught me how to do this feather stitch. This one I thought looked like a measuring stick. I don’t know what the name of all the stitches. Karen Musgrave: It is a buttonhole stitch. Joy Major: Button hole stitch, so I put that on because I thought it looked like a measuring stick and just the X’s I thought we could change part of our past if we could just X some of the stuff out. The fact of the matter is you can’t, so you just have to live with whatever decisions you made and the consequences that came along with them.” You can read more about Joy’s quilt and what quilting meant to her during her incarceration in her interview here. Click on Interviewee and search for Joy Major to view the full interview. You can read more quilt stories on the Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories page on the Quilt Alliance website. Posted by Emma Parker Project Manager, Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories…
by Quilt Alliance | Jan 5, 2014 | QSOS, QSOS Spotlight
Did you know that today, January 5th, is National Bird Day? The holiday was created by avian conservationists to celebrate the flying and the flightless. In honor of our fine feathered friends, we’re featuring 3 bird quilts from the Q.S.O.S. collection. First, Roberta Williams of Milwaukee shares a story about her quest to find a peacock in Wisconsin to model for her quilt, ‘But Can He Sing’: “Well, the peacock is just a funny story, because first I wanted to get a nice picture of a peacock. And, I drove about forty five minutes from Milwaukee because I understood there were peacocks in the nursery in Waukesha. We got there and they couldn’t find a peacock. And, so, I drove all the way back home, so that was one afternoon. And then I thought, well I will go to the zoo. I mean, they’ve got peacocks out there. So we went out to the zoo, and also happened to be Senior Day, which we didn’t know this was going to be there, and so I’m snapping pictures of all the events that were going on for Senior Day. They had kids from Wisconsin and they had some other groups, and I thought this is really going to be fun because I had friends at home that would like to know about these things. So we finally found the peacock, and I have a digital camera and my battery was dead. So, now I have no picture of a peacock after two attempts. [laughs.] So, then I didn’t know what I was going to do. I went to a friend of mine, to a bookstore that a friend of mine owns, and she said there are peacocks at the restaurant just north of here. So I went up there about 8:00 at night and could not find a single peacock, and went down to the river and the river, along the river, the restaurant is on the river, and they had a pen down there, no top on it, but there were peacocks in there. So, I stood there and took about fifteen, twenty pictures and that is how I got pictures for my peacock. I designed them from the pictures. I did not find him with his tail fully opened, which is what I really wanted. So, I just, I used my colors in the body and I gave my own tail just from other pictures of peacocks around. The peacock was fun to design, and then I had to break it down into parts and figure out how to do it.” The bird on Barbara Barrett’s quilt ‘Sing a New Song’ was born by chance from the pieces of an unfinished project: “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 […] It kind of represents the way my quilting is changing since I began. My quilting is getting to be more free in design. 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.” The birds on Ted Storm van Weelden’s quilt draw inspiration from the local–a little-known artistic tradition from Holland–and the personal: her own family. “[T]he quilt is made in a period of 4 years. I started it in September in 1997 and by that time I was not fit. I had a problem with my hands and doctors couldn’t find what the problem was and as I was teaching stress was the diagnose. So I was very upset that I wasn’t able to do anything, almost anything, but teaching, sitting and talking to students, but no stitches. And then I–well a design in my head showed I had to make something in black. And as I live in Holland very close to Delft I went to that company and I found some black Delft. Black Delft is the least known Delft tradition. The blue Delft is more known. And then I also heard that because it is less known it’s not sold a lot and yet it’s one of their oldest designs. They want to end that line of black Delft. It used to be called the wonder of Delft, because it’s exclusively made by that particular company, that black, like lacquer ware from the East was produced in ceramics so its influence from the East is visible in the design… So the design is Dutch based. And the–well, not fit at all I worked over a period of 4 years and finally I was diagnosed having a neck hernia. It was taken care of and then I healed. So when I started I was depressed, I was sick, I wasn’t fit. It was black and the mirrors represent the tears. So while I had surgery done and I healed, I realized how lucky I was, because the surgery went fine. I could do stitches again and the colors I chose and everything in the quilt you see it’s vivid and it’s alive and the mirrors for me no longer are tears now, but sparkles of joy. You see two birds on top of it. And the birds are a bit like, well, representing my husband. My husband is the one in the middle center. He is always home-based, doesn’t like to travel. And I’m the one that’s on the go almost ready to leave. The flowers around it are very similar to Delft, typical Delft flowers. It’s just a fantasy. There is not a real flower you can compare to.” These quilts aren’t the only quilts in the Q.S.O.S. archive featuring feathers: here are a few more! You can read more quilt stories–with and without birds!–on the Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories page on the Quilt Alliance website. Posted by Emma Parker Project Manager, Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories…
by Quilt Alliance | Dec 29, 2013 | QSOS Spotlight, Uncategorized
It’s hard to believe there are only 3 more days left in 2013! As this year winds down and we prepare for 2014, many folks are preparing their new year’s resolutions–those things we plan (or hope!) to do in the new year. Today’s Q.S.O.S. Spotlight is shining on quilter Jan Wildman’s interview, conducted 13 years ago in Houston, Texas. Jan’s touchstone quilt was a “resolution quilt” featuring her wishes for the new year. Jan shared her resolutions and the background of the quilt with interviewer Jana Hawley: “I’ve brought this quilt, because it’s kind of special to me, even though I don’t consider it my best quilt. It’s special to me, because I made this quilt instead of making New Year’s resolutions in 1995. I had decided that every year I was making the same resolutions and then breaking them by, probably the end of January. So I saw this flying pig’s fabric, and it reminded me of the expression ‘when pigs fly.’ So these are all things in my life that I figured would happen when pigs fly. So I have about nine different centers of blocks, that have different sayings of things that I would like to have happen in my life, but probably aren’t very likely… In the top block it says ‘Enjoy exercising.’ The next one is ‘Keep the house clean’ and then the next one is ‘Finish more quilts.’ And those are all kind of self-explanatory. Then in the next row I have ‘Lose weight’ and above it in little letters it says ‘If only it were as easy to lose, as my mind.’ I guess that’s rather self explanatory. In the middle of the quilt there’s a block that says ‘Cherish the miracles,’ and it has sea turtles on it. There’s a story behind that that I can tell a little later. And then there is ‘Remember birthdays and anniversaries’ which I am absolutely horrible about, still. And then on the bottom row there is ‘Use more fabric than I buy,’ another when pigs fly pipe dream there. [chuckles.] ‘”Cook nutritious meals for my family,’ and then the final one is ‘Have more time to rest, relax, think and dream.’ And of all of the nine, that’s the one that I’ve gotten closest to doing. [laughs.] […] I think one thing about doing this for me, when I made it, it was kind of nice to get rid of the guilt of making new year’s resolutions each year, and I’m pleased that I no longer do that, because I did always feel guilt over them and now, I kind of, when everybody else is saying they’re making them, I just kind of laugh about that. I think you can make resolutions any time during the year, you don’t have to wait till New Year’s, and maybe if you just make one at a time you have a better chance of accomplishing them, than making an entire list. I think that’s what it’s done for me.” Check out Jan’s interview on the Q.S.O.S. page to read about the special sea turtle block she made as a reminder to cherish miracles in her interview on the Quilt Alliance site. You can always read more quilt stories on the Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories page, too! Posted by Emma Parker Project Manager, Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories…
by Quilt Alliance | Dec 15, 2013 | QSOS Spotlight, Uncategorized
Today’s Q.S.O.S. spotlight is on a fabric I wear every day but rarely sew with: denim. I’m sure most quilters have great genes, but there are a few quilts in the Q.S.O.S. archive that have great jeans, too! First, a video from our Go Tell It at the Quilt Show series from Hollis Chatelain at the 2013 International Quilt Festival. Hollis shares the story of a quilt she made from denim and raw-edge appliqué: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc6JyKVkP_0 Natalia Burdanajdze from the Republic of Georgia shared a denim quilt she made from her daughter’s jackets and purses. “It was the Alabama State Gee’s Bend exhibition and I loved one work very much. [Karen Musgrave brought an exhibit of twelve quilts from Gee’s Bend to Georgia in 2005.] It was a quilt made of jeans. It was for me a good idea to do something from jeans. So I did one of jeans for myself. “Jean’s Generation” is in our theater, it is very good, spectacular performance… Yes, inspiration from Gee’s Bend exhibition because I loved one thing from this exhibition very much; the using of the old clothes. This one is made from my daughter’s jeans… It’s by hand. All of the panel is by hand.Karen Musgrave (interviewer): And you hand quilted it. Was it difficult? Natalia: It was very hard because it was strong material. The pieces are from bags, my bags also. And I sewed little pieces that I had. Karen: You cut away the denim pieces so you could see color underneath. Natalia: Yes. I did that special to be more interesting because it was a mix of jeans and fabric… Pockets… and zippers…. It is Wrangler’s. It’s Levi’s.” Teresa Barkley shares a “patchwork” quilt she finished when she was 15: “Okay, the quilt I have with me today is called “Denim Quilt” and it’s the first quilt that I ever completed that I felt really satisfied with–it was a two year project. I started it in 1970 and finished it in ’72. It got much bigger than I thought it would be when I started, which has been an ongoing problem for me. Things frequently get bigger than originally planned. It is a collection of mostly worn denim squares cut from jeans. They are decorated with embroidery and appliqué that’s hand done as well as with commercial company patches, Army patches, Girl Scout patches, a really wide range of designs. There are 396 squares of denim, each four inches and the designs on them are all different. The idea for the quilt came from a quilt that my great-aunt made. She saw directions for making such a quilt in a Woman’s Day Magazine in the early seventies, I believe. And on a visit to Minnesota, I saw the quilt that she had made, where the designs on each square were much simpler, and I thought that this would be a really fun project. I had always been very interested in quilts and I think I had started some piecework that I had never finished of traditional designs, but the image of this quilt really fascinated me. Every square was different and that collage kind of aesthetic had always interested me. It was an easy project to work on a little bit at a time. I was a high school student at the time. All of the edges of the squares are turned back and crocheted with red crochet cotton and into that crochet is black crochet cotton, and then those edges are sewn together. Over a two year period of time I collected patches from places that I visited. I embroidered things. I appliquéd the whole alphabet. I embroidered the signs of the zodiac. I had long been interested in a collection of Army patches that were my father’s when he was a small boy. And when I began the project I really wanted some of those patches and he was not interested in parting with them. And over the course of the project he came to see how really important this was to me and what a significant thing it was becoming and in the end he was very willing for me to choose as many patches as I wanted of his collection to put into the quilt on the condition that I never sell it. He said, ‘If you ever want to sell that quilt, you have to give me back the patches.’ I reached a point where I realized that it was plenty big, I had plenty of squares and I set out to arrange them on the floor with the alphabet in order and the Army patches evenly spaced, the alphabet evenly spaced. I’m not sure what my goal was in making it actually. I was fourteen when I started it and fifteen when I finished it. I felt very strongly about finishing it before I was sixteen. I had read in quilt history books that by a certain age you should have 12 quilts done or you weren’t going to be ready when you were married, something like this–I knew it wasn’t practical for my life but I liked the idea of it. I liked what few historical stories I had read about quilts. At the time there weren’t very many books to be had about quilts but I had read every one of them that I could find. And I just knew this was something I was going to continue to work at. I had quilts that I was familiar with– there were two or three. My mother had two quilts that her grandmother had made and I loved looking at those. My grandmother on the other side of the family had one quilt that she had made. And the mix of all kinds of things from all over the place put together in something new, fascinated me. I’ve never been very interested in quilts that were two contrasting fabrics put together or a solid color. It’s not the object of the quilt that interests me so much as the process of the assembling things from all over the place into something new that means something different. The juxtaposition of all these things from a different place brought together in a particular theme is what really interests me about quilts that they have some kind of story with them.” You can read more quilt stories on the Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories page on the Quilt Alliance site. Posted by Emma Parker Project Manager, Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories…
by Quilt Alliance | Dec 8, 2013 | QSOS Spotlight, Uncategorized
In 1930, the town of Paris, Texas had some 15,000 residents and at least two fire stations. Raymond Fuston was the only fireman at Fire Station #2, where he lived with his family from 1929 to 1948. Almost fifty years later, Raymond’s son, Fred, and granddaughter, Karla, shared one of the quilts he made during that time, a bold red and white celebration of his career and his home at Fire Station #2.Fred Fuston: Raymond joined the Paris Fire Department in 1929, in Paris, Texas.Karla Poggen: He was a city fireman, not a volunteer fireman. He was the only fireman at the firehouse. Being that he was the only one, he could never leave. He had to be ready for calls. While he was there, he found plenty of things to do with his time. And he was always doing things with his hands. This is just one of the several crafts that he did, quilting. He’d made other quilts prior to this one, but this one was made especially–Fred: For him. That’s what I was going to say. The fire department was his love and even though he made three quilt tops in his lifetime, this was his favorite. Now, if we want to describe it, the center of this is a white background with a red Maltese cross on it. And the Maltese cross is the international symbol of firefighters. On this, we have “Paris” at the top, and the “FD” fire department at the bottom. The #2 in the middle designates the station that he was at in Paris, at Station 2. And as Karla said this was a combination residence and fire station. And so Daddy, Raymond, was the only fireman there and his family […] The reason that he was a craftsman and had time to work with things – quilts, wood, horn, leather – this was a 24 hours a day, six days a week. He was relieved of duty on Saturday morning at 7, and at Sunday morning 7, he was back on duty.JoAnn Pospisil: I have a question about the material. Do you know anything about his choice, why he chose red and white?Fred: Yes, ma’am. It was probably the only material that Raymond ever bought. Red and white are standard fire colors whether that was bought at Ayre’s or Beall’s or Kresses’ or Woolworth’s, we don’t know. But his other two quilts were from remnants, from where our clothes and other things were made in the home, cut up, we know that. But I happen to know that this is the only material that Raymond ever bought, just because there wasn’t anything large enough, red and white, around the house.The city sold the fire station in 1948 in Paris, and that was the first time we had to find a home. Daddy had a home, they built a new fire station, but it was manned by paid firemen… The fire station was on the right. The residence in the center and on your left is the porch were we spent a lot of our time. And Raymond did a lot of his sewing in his lap on that porch […] from 1933 to 1948 and then Daddy didn’t do any more quilts. You can read more quilt stories on the Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories page on the Quilt Alliance site.Posted by Emma ParkerProject Manager, Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our…
by Quilt Alliance | Dec 1, 2013 | QSOS Spotlight, Uncategorized
This year has certainly flown by here at the Quilt Alliance; I can hardly believe today is the first day of December and that we’re headed into the home stretch of 2013! This week’s Q.S.O.S. Spotlight is on an interview with Irene Fankhouser of Nebraska. Irene was interviewed 4 years ago–also on the first day of December!–in 2009. Irene brought a beautiful king-sized quilt with her for her Q.S.O.S. interview that took 5 generations of clothing, 10 years to make and was the winner of a 10 dollar prize: SharonAnn Louden (interviewer): […] Irene, would you please tell us about the quilt that you brought in today? Irene Fankhouser: Yes, it is a king size Grandmother’s Flower Garden pattern that was about ten years in the making and it’s fabric from clothing that my grandmother, and my aunt, and myself and my three daughters and four granddaughters had from clothing that we made. I helped them sew when they were young and they made quite a few of there own so I thought this was a good way to utilize it. I didn’t have any idea what to do with it for all these years and one day I got an ad in the mail that had a pattern for this flower garden quilt and I thought that’s it that’s what I’m going to use. SL: What special meaning does this quilt have for you then? IF: Well, it is because it has all this fabric in it from five generations of the women in our family. Some of them are long gone so I saved all that I guess you could call me a saver. I just felt this was a good way to use it and make it more meaningful for our family… SL: What do you think someone viewing your quilt might conclude about you? IF: Well, like I said I’m a saver [laughs.] and probably that I have a lot of patience because it does take a long time to sew all the little hexagons together and it’s all hand stitched and hand quilted although I didn’t do the quilting […] I won a certificate at the Johnson County Fair from a quilt shop in Pawnee City [Nebraska.] It was for the best hand stitched and hand quilted quilt for which I was very proud of. It was a $10.00 certificate. [laughs.] I didn’t get around to using it until this past year. You can read more quilt stories on the Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories page on the Quilt Alliance site. Posted by Emma Parker Project Manager, Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories…
