by Quilt Alliance | Aug 11, 2013 | Uncategorized
Now that August’s in full swing, it seems like reminders of Back to School time are unavoidable. From television commercials to the fresh pencils in the school supply aisle, everyone’s gearing up for a new school year! For some families, the start of a new academic year is bittersweet as older children move on to college or new careers and parents are left with an “empty nest”. Today’s Q.S.O.S. spotlight features two quiltmakers who found quilting after their children “flew the coop”. Fran Randolph of Georgia talked about quilting as a distraction when her youngest son joined the Air Force: “I started about 6 years ago. Basically I have always been a crafter, and have always done some kind of crafting. I had been doing counted cross-stitch mostly recently, and I just, and I’ll tell you how old now that I’m more than 50, my eyes are not getting as good at seeing those teeny little stitches. It was more than my little eyeballs could handle [laughs.] so I was looking for a new venue to do my crafts and a gal from our church was doing some quilts with some others… So about 6 years ago my youngest son went away to the Air Force and I decided I needed a new venue to fill in the emptiness in my world and I picked up quiltmaking and its picked me up. I’ve become a little bit compulsive with it [laughs.]…” The departure of her youngest child for college encouraged Kathie Lombard of Maine to start quilting: “The earliest memory I have about quilting was when I was about eight and hearing mymother, my grandmother and her sister talking about colors and cutting up clothes to make quilts and all that. I thought, this was just not for me. Then later in my life ’empty nest syndrome’ came along and when my last child, my only daughter, left home, I felt that deeply in my heart and that’s when I thought, ‘I’m going to pull out that quilt that my Canadian grandmother made for me, which was a wedding present.’ I copied the pattern, just on paper, not knowing what I was doing, and made my daughter a quilt of that pattern to take with her when she went to college, because that quilt meant a lot to me and I just wanted to give her something that would connect her to home. I probably made every mistake known to quilters in that quilt, but she loved it and she wore it out. That’s what I had wanted her to do. That was my beginning anyway.” Want to keep reading? You can find more quilt stories 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 | Aug 4, 2013 | Uncategorized
Today, the first Sunday in August, is National Sister’s Day. In honor of this holiday celebrating the special bond between sisters, today’s Q.S.O.S. Spotlight features a unique quilt inspired by the music of The Beatles created by sisters Sue Nickels and Pat Holly. In her Q.S.O.S. interview at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas, Sue described the quilt and the special experience of quiltmaking with her sister: “This is a quilt that I made with my sister, Pat Holly. It is a completely machine appliquéd, machine quilted and machine pieced quilt. It is a small version of a bigger quilt that we made together called The Beatles Quilt, which is in the AQS [American Quilter’s Society.] Museum because it won best of show. We wanted to have a smaller version because we don’t own the big quilt anymore. We wanted to have a smaller version of it so I can take it when I teach and travel and lecture, just to show the techniques that are in the original Beatles Quilt… The meaning of the original Beatles Quilt was a quilt that we made reminiscing about the Beatles’ music and how it brought back memories of us growing up together as teenagers and children. We wanted to put that into a quilt project so we made the original one, the large Beatles quilt as a joint project. It was for us, kind of a memory quilt. Through music, remembering our childhood. This quilt does the same thing. It brought back a lot of memories… Probably the only thing that I haven’t said enough is that what I find the most rewarding about what I’ve done in the quilt world is working with my sister. Making a quilt with her and winning an award. I always like to give her credit, too. Although you’re just talking to me. She’s not here, but she is just as an important part of what this is all about.” Want to keep reading? You can find more quilt stories 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 | Jul 28, 2013 | Uncategorized
The Q.S.O.S. archives are full of stories about starting to quilt. It seems that everyone has a great story about how they “caught the quilting bug”. There are stories about learning the basics from family members, world-renowned teachers and even internet tutorials! But there are also many stories about teaching others to quilt–from daughters, to grandsons, to whole groups at a local guild or quilt shop. Today’s Q.S.O.S. Spotlight features two stories about helping future generations catch the bug! Sandra McLeod of Texas says: “I am teaching my granddaughter to quilt. She’s eight. And we have finished two quilts now. I have her doing little blocks, I just pick up scraps from my quilt room, and I make strips a certain width . I have her sew two together, and then a fat strip on the end. We just put it in rows, and it’s just cute. Then, she picks out the border . Now, I’ve got her working on a charity quilt. Now, her seams aren’t always straight, but she likes to turn on the television while she’s working. So, she looks up at the TV at the same time she sews. So, those come out. But I don’t say anything to her, I just take it out, and pretty soon I slip that to her again and say ‘sew this.’ I don’t get to play with her all that often, but I am hoping that this is teaching another generation the pleasure that I’ve had in this.” Elaine Evans of Vermont shares a story about teaching a young visitor to the United States to quilt: “When I had an ESL [English as a Second Language.] student stay with me one summer,she came into the house and I took her into the bedroom. I said, ‘Well, this is your bedroom. There’s a hand-made quilt on your bed. I’d rather you didn’t eat on it or drink on it or anything like that, to mess it up and make it look terrible.’ She said, ‘Okay.’ She was a very nice young girl. She just loved the quilt. Of course, she said, ‘Do you have other quilts?’ I said, ‘Yes. Do you want to see them?’ She said, ‘Yes! They’re so pretty.’ She said, ‘Can we make one?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I think we can do that. What do you want to do?’ She said, ‘The maple leaves are so pretty, can we make a Maple Leaf?’ So we made a Maple Leaf that year. I showed her how to cut it. I showed her how to sew it. She sewed almost all of it. I did a few leaves for her. We got the squares all sewed together and we made a twin-sized quilt. She said, ‘Okay, do you want to tie it or do you want to quilt it?’ She said, ‘Your quilting is so pretty. Can we quilt it?’ [both laugh.] I said, ‘Yeah,’ but I said, ‘you’re going to have to quilt it, too. I’m not going to do it myself. You’re going to help.’ So she did and she sat there and she learned to quilt. She finished the quilt before she left, at the end of the six-weeks that she was here. She took it back home. Her mom was just flabbergasted. She said, ‘You taught my daughter how to quilt! That was just fantastic.’ A couple of weeks later, I got a package in the mail. It was all Japanese fabric. She had sent it to me because I had taught her daughter [Akiko.] how to quilt.” Want to keep reading? You can see other stories about learning and teaching quiltmaking (and more!) 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 | Jul 14, 2013 | Uncategorized
Bonjour! Today, July 14th, is Bastille Day–the French national . Browsing the Q.S.O.S. archives, I couldn’t help but notice that there were two interviews from quiltmakers who participated in a project to celebrate the Marquis de Lafayette, the French general. What better day than Bastille Day to share these two quilts and their stories? Kay Marburger shares the story of one of her first quilts: My quilt, Lafayette Hero of Two Worlds, was my very first quilt that I made starting from scratch. I live in Fayette County, the town La Grange [Texas.] and in 2006 the city of Lafayette, Louisiana, decided that the next year they were going to have a big celebration celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Marquis de Lafayette from France, after whom their city was named… My idea was a silhouette of Lafayette standing with his feet apart, one foot in the United States, one foot in France. I started thinking about that, I really had not been quilting that long at that time and I really didn’t have an idea about how to go about doing this, but I just kind of sketched and just kind of drew and then I kind of figured out by looking at maps and kind of tracing the shape of the United States and France and kind of playing around with enlarging things and I got my basic outline, or background design for the quilt. I was going to have Lafayette, water, of course the Atlantic ocean between the United States and France, and the sky in the background above, but I really didn’t want to do all the detail on Lafayette so that’s why I chose the silhouette. I was kind of trying to decide what I was going to use on my quilt, to make Lafayette. Black of course was the first thing that popped into my mind. I just put that down as black, then I decided, “Well maybe I ought to use several different blacks,” and just kind of intersperse them because I had been collecting some water fabrics and some sky fabrics, and I knew that I was going to use a bunch of different water fabrics and a bunch of different sky fabrics. This, like I said, was my first foray into designing my own quilt. Also from La Grange, Texas, Kathi Babcock shares a collaborative quilt that traveled around France before returning to Texas: In 2006 or 2007 our town received an invitation to make a quilt for an exhibit that would be hung in Lafayette, Louisiana in honor of the Marquis Lafayette’s 250th birthday or something, I think it was 250. They sent out invitations to towns that had names associated with Lafayette because he did this triumphal tour and apparently a lot of cities in the United States ended up being named after him. I live in La Grange in Fayette county [Texas.] and La Grange was the name of Lafayette’s château in France and so we’re kind of a double whammy that our town and our county are named for Lafayette. One of the girls in town got really excited about the idea and our town ended up contributing three quilts to the exhibit. I captained this one. There were other people in the group that made blocks but I primarily designed, built, and quilted it and it was exhibited at that exhibit in Lafayette, Louisiana and after that exhibit, it was chosen to go on to, it went to France and it went to six museums in France included the Musée de Toile de Jouy, you know Toile where it was originally made and at that time if you looked on their website, this was the quilt they picked for their website and when that six months was over as it traveled, it came back to the United States and the DAR Museum in Washington, D.C. picked the exhibit up. So it hung at the DAR Museum for a few months before it finally came home to me. You can read more stories about quilts and quiltmakers 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 | Jul 7, 2013 | Uncategorized
For many Americans, the 4th of July means cookouts, fireworks and a chance to celebrate their country. Since we’re just a few days past Independence Day, this week’s Q.S.O.S. Spotlight features several quiltmakers who have made quilts that salute the United States! Carlie Nichols of North Carolina shares a quilt she made for American service members: “The quilt I brought with me today is a patriotic quilt, I’m always looking for interesting, new patriotic patterns and this one I designed after seeing a picture on the internet of a quilt that was going to be on the cover of String Quilt Revival. I love string quilts and have made many of them but this one was a little different, so I took the picture, I sketched it myself and I drew it to be a little bit larger and made it into more of a patriotic quilt and it’s very patriotic, actually. The stars on the quilt are navy blue, and the border, as you can see, is red, white and blue and it’s plainly patriotic. It’s going to be a hard one to let go of but I think I’ll be able to… I know it will go to one of our service members or veterans, and from my experience in the last three or four years I realize how much they appreciate them. So knowing that they will go to someone who has given so much for our country means a whole lot to me.” Margarete Heinisch created a quilt to commemorate her new American citizenship. “The idea to do this piece was to celebrate the year 2000 and my upcoming U.S. citizenship and I wanted to use mainly the colors of red and blue… My wish was to become a citizen in the year 2000. I did send my application went in 1998 and it could take three months to three years to become a citizen, as it will be picked by computers so I thought I wish it would be the year 2000 that I get it. And my wish did come true but my friends teased me and said, ‘Do you refuse it when it comes today or next week,’ and I said, ‘Of course, not because I would have it nicely wrapped up in the year 2000.’ And my wish did come true to become an American citizen. I will actually be the citizen of fifty states and so I thought I’d do the border around the quilt with the pictures of all fifty State Capitols. They are in order by year of their admittance into the union. The two in the middle in the top row are The White House and the State Capitol in Washington D.C. and then the fifty states go clockwise. There are all together fifty-two circles, because only the fifty did not work on the square. I laid out the quilt, starting from the center, with the 2000 easy to see.” Carole Lyles Shaw shares a quilt she made to honor America’s veterans–including her own family–for a 2008 show of quilts celebrating president Barack Obama’s inauguration. “This quilt is part of a series of quilts and other mixed media art work that I am creating to honor the memories of ordinary men and women who served in the American Armed Forces, particularly in the early part of the 20th Century and most of the work features images and documents and so forth from 1960 or earlier… What I’ve done is I’ve transferred photographs onto fabric and some of these photographs are from my family collection that I have of my father, my uncles and some of their friends. I have a letter that was sent by the White House to my father thanking him for his service in the Armed Forces and that letter dates to probably the late forties or early fifties… Some of the words on my quilt are ‘land of liberty’ and ‘stars and stripes’ and ‘on the path to change’. Those words, those themes are what I wanted to convey. It is a narrative quilt, a story quilt almost but you’ve got to kind of read it slowly to get the full story.” You can read more stories about quilts and quiltmakers 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 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…
