I’ve been trying to make artwork for a long time about what I owe the women who have shaped me. Of course by owe I am not talking about some transactional exchange, say $75 for three hours of quilting class (the income I was just informed I lost this week). By owe I mean a meditative way of giving thanks, a series of art works that are dedicated to the complexities and skills of the women who have come before me.
Though my cousin first taught me to knit when I was 9, my grandmother Joanne refined and guiding my knitting. We met in church basements along with a cluster of elders to knit together, making chemo hats for cancer patients. This was perhaps my earliest craft foundation. I can’t remember if it was her who took me to the local sewing shop in my hometown but somehow I found my way into a quilt class in my fourteenth summer. My septuagenarian teacher, Mary Ann, had Fourth of July themed acrylic nails. I made a pattern heavy grayscale table runner that my mom still has displayed in her office. Joanne helped me follow a pattern for the first time to make my prom dress.
This was the formative guidance that shaped me.
My practice
In recent history, my block printing/natural dyeing/sewing habit started a week before thanksgiving in 2021. I felt possessed by the urge to make a kitschy dress for the holiday. Dyed with yellow onion skin and turmeric, I learned a lot about surface design and time. I was sewing button holes by hand at 2 AM the night before but it got done.
Since then, many long nights of printing whole cloth and hours over a dye pot have followed. I forgot what prompted my first large quilt but certainly it was an equally undeniable urge. From studying art history I know that some artists consider themselves to be vessels that the spirit of art moves through. This is how I feel sometimes. I lack reasoning or the language to explain why I must make the things I do. I am compelled by some force unknown to me and it’s beautiful.
My Sewing Hand
My ideas may come from an unknown place but the skills I carry with me are traceable.
Not to be forgotten: my mother. As an elementary school art teacher with a kind and playful spirit, she gifted me a rich and art filled childhood. So much of my understanding of color and design is almost innate from her lessons, formal or informal. She taught me hand sewing at an early age and started me on this path (whatever that path is).
And her mother, Rose Marie, who has preserved the most important tool of my craft at the moment, the Singer 403 including a terrifying buttonholer and a ruffle making foot which I recently discovered and got so excited about. She said, “My mom taught me the chain stitch, double back stitch, and over cast for hand sewing. I taught myself on the machine.” There are countless unnamed others. My aunt who learned from Joanne and her husband’s mother who crocheted too. Joanne’s mother, her twin, her mother’s mother. This thread goes back further through the family, linking the working hands of women for generations. My sewing hand carries them with me.
I have been collecting ephemera such as a bobbin case, a porcelain figure, letters in lacy cursive and photographs from this Matriline. I am thinking too of the wear that holding one position has on the body. I am also collecting x-rays.
To owe for me is to make an ode. I am still chewing on ways to print and incorporate these elements into a narrative quilt through vignettes like Heidi Parkes has taught, or perhaps as a book or quilted photo album. After Joanne passed, I tried to force myself to write about her too soon. Now I accept the work will come when it is ready.
Until then, I’ll be sewing at my temporary desk at the middle school, since my teaching gigs are no longer craft based and a great deal more precarious.