the wrong stitches?

a fascinating aspect of the experience of sharing my great grandmother's quilts in an exhibition at my beloved little museum is the conversations with those who stop by. many of those conversations are magical, as i point out details on the quilts - like the light circle in the middle of this photo that has a dark circle of fabric on it, where my great grandmother sewed together a small piece of fabric to make up the circle - ensuring that nothing went to waste. or the fact that many of these fabrics were actually flour sacks that came in colorful calicos. here in denmark, people are a little incredulous at that, as apparently they only came in white or natural fabric here. 

a number of people i talked to, including the other person whose quilts are part of the exhibition, have expressed some surprising things. multiple people have said that we are showing the wrong side of the yoyo quilt above. we are most definitely not, as i know which side my grandmother considered the top side - and it's as it is above. the way that people tell me this is quite condescending, as if i'm a small, dull child who doesn't know back from front. and yet, this is the beautiful side of the yoyo quilt. 

the other surprising thing is how judgy people can be. there are four of these unfinished quilt tops that are perfect little 2x2-ish squares. they are completely hand sewn and they are the ones my mother remembers helping sew. her grandmother had had a stroke and couldn't get around, so she sat in her bed with piles of squares around her and sewed them together. and now, 80 years later, some danish ladies who otherwise know their handicrafts, inform me that she sewed them together wrong. they look utterly perfect to me, but her method was apparently a different one than the one they know, and so they characterize it as wrong, rather than being interested in a different technique. and it rather amazes me how much they seem to want to tell me this.

and it has me thinking about the slow stitch movement i followed back in the old bloggy days. they were that way too - very judgemental and condemning of those who did things differently than them. i wonder where the need to do that arises? why not just be fascinated by the way my great grandmother did it? why the need to judge it and deem it incorrect? why can't we embrace the amazing world of handiwork and appreciate the stories that we stitch into the cloth? why not be in awe of a woman who had had a stroke, but who could sit in her bed and stitch together small squares into perfect patterns. i know i couldn't do it. i love making quilts, but i need to lay them out and look at them and move the squares around and walk away and come back and move them around some more before sewing them together with my sewing machine. i am in awe of what she could do. and while i am interested in how she sewed it together, i don't think it could possibly be the wrong. after all these quilts and quilt tops are all still here after nearly 100 years, so she must have done something right.

 

stitched stories

this is the text i wrote to go with the exhibition of my great grandmother's quilts.

these quilts and quilt tops were made by annie barnhart (1863-1946) of salem, south dakota. she was my maternal great-grandmother. i think she would be amazed to know that her rather prolific handiwork found its way to denmark with her great-granddaughter. 

 

my mother told a story from her childhood, of her grandmother, ill and bound to her bed at her daughter’s home in sergeant bluff, iowa, sewing away on these quilts. she had stacks of squares of different colors and she just spent her days, sewing them together. mom even said her eyesight wasn’t so great anymore, so the color combinations and the designs are even more amazing considering that fact. and i can’t even begin to count the number of hours that went into them. 

mom was born in 1939 and if her grandmother died in 1946, she must have been a small girl. she told me that she got to help do some of the stitching, so she had very fond memories of her grandmother working on them. i’m so glad that i know that and that she shared it before she lost those memories to alzheimer’s in her later years. 

i look at these quilts and i think of all the memories that are stitched into them that i don’t have access to. the stories behind all the old dresses and flour sacks that were cut into squares and sewn together by hand. some of the fabrics are surely 100 years old. i wish they could talk and tell of the occasions they were worn to – dances, parties, church, everyday life. i wish i could access those stories. 

sometimes, i feel like if i sit very still and i’m quiet enough, i will be able to hear them whisper their stories to me. i think one of the magical things about quilts is that they are very representative of their times – the fabrics used, the way they are stitched. they are quite literally the very fabric of their time. and they tell us a story even if we can’t necessarily hear the stories they tell. 

i feel privileged to share them all with you in this very magical place, across an ocean and a world away from where they were made. i hope that great grandmother annie is looking down and smiling. 

and i hope she likes the small mini-quilts that i made, using fabrics gifted to me by two friends, each with their own stories – mini quilts that i feel are a dialogue between me and those amazing women, continuing the tradition of telling stories through quilting in our family.

what would great grandma think?

i have a stack of quilt tops that my great grandmother made. mom said she could remember, as a little girl, seeing her bed-bound grandmother, who didn't see all that well, sitting in bed, sewing squares together by hand. it's absolutely amazing to me that she could do it and keep the pattern of the squares perfectly if she wasn't able to lay it all out on a table or a wall or the floor. when i lay out a quilt, i have to see it, photograph it, walk away, move things around, do it all over again. but she could sit in bed, sewing away and make the most beautiful quilts. i'm so pleased to display them at my favorite little museum in connection the what we call "handicrafts days" at the end of the month. i wonder what my great grandmother from salem, south dakota would think of her quilts being in denmark, displayed in a rather alternative way - one that invites people to touch them and look closely. though i never knew her, i think she'd love it. and oh the stories her stitches would tell us if only we could hear them.

if i were a designer...

...i would make munisaks - a central asian garment worn as an outer robe - with luxurious silks or ikat on the outside and beautiful, soft russian printed cottons on the inside.

these are shots of the lush and gorgeous russian textiles by susan meller.

i picked it up at the library yesterday and devoured it in one sitting.

this would be so easy to make, i just might have to get out the sewing machine.

sometimes the linings were patched together of several fabrics.
but i think that makes them that much more charming.

such a marvelous collection of pattern meller has put together

in most cases, i like the inside better than the outside.
they lined the silks with cotton because it was considered too ostentatious to have silk next to the skin.

it's also possible to make other things, not just munisaks - here's a skirt and a top and some folded bags.
so much inspiration in this beautiful book. i'm already dreading giving it back to the library.

family heirlooms

when i was home over the summer, i rummaged around in my parents' basement and found a treasure trove. a whole stack of finished quilts and half a dozen quilt tops which were sewn by hand by my great grandmother back in the 40s. mom says she remembers her grandma annie, who was ill and in bed at the time, sitting with stacks of squares, hexagons and also those beautiful yoyos (which i showed previously), just sewing away all day. now that's something i could get into - hanging out in bed (read: wearing pajamas)and sewing all day.

double wedding ring in purple - this one is my favorite (other than the yoyo)

i think what surprises me most is how vibrant, fresh and modern these are for being 70-80 years old. the fabrics my great grandmother chose would be something i would choose myself today. i believe it's a mix of flour sacks, old clothing and new fabrics (new in her time, of course). i think it proves that quilting is somehow timeless.

i remember using this one as a child and there are some frayed bits here and there that show its been loved.
it's also a bit more faded than the others.

i can see that there is a big difference between these, which are all hand-stitched and hand-quilted and the quilts i've made by machine today. i'm not sure that what i've done are heirlooms in the same sense as these are. i think my impatience enters into the picture and i want to quickly see a result. i need to learn from these to take my time. it certainly appears that it's worth it in the end.

hexagons - this one unfortunately has been up against a rusty grate and has some rust stains on it.
it's also been used and the edges are quite frayed. my grandmother must have used it.

i don't think i'll be going to quite the same level of detail on the bindings i tackle as the one on this hexagon quilt. and the binding is actually a bit frayed and needs replacing. but for me, binding is always the biggest challenge. i have a number of quilts which are "finished" except for the binding, which i guess means they're not finished at all.

what i'd love to know is whether my great grandmother did the quilting herself or if she had a group of ladies who got together and did the quilting. and how on earth, once she was bed-ridden, did she lay out these beautiful patterns? was it all just in her head and she pulled one square from one stack and one from another and sewed it as she went along - that's what my mother remembers. mom also remembers that her aunt had some of them quilted by a local quilting group, so it may be that my grandmother didn't do the finished quilting on all of these herself. they're large - at least queen-sized, all of them, so i think quilting would have been difficult without a frame of some sort.

in any case, i'm really happy to have them in my home and it makes me so happy to be using them. i'm pondering how to tackle the three finished tops i brought back as well - i simply must quilt them by hand to do honor to my great grandmother's work. but that seems a bit of a daunting job. maybe i can find a way to marry 20th and 21st centuries, but i'm still pondering that.

more swedish quilts

it's a lazy saturday afternoon and i thought i'd share a bit more from the fantastic swedish quilt book, gamla svenska lapptäcken  i bought earlier in the week. i've had a chance to read a bit more of it (tho' by no means all). it was published in 1993 as part of an exhibition of quilts that made the rounds in sweden and also in paris. it was written by åsa wettre, and she clearly knew her quilts. she discusses quilting traditions in sweden and says that many quilt designs were brought back home to sweden by people who temporarily immigrated to america in the 1800s. which explains why there are so many log cabin designs, which i always think of as somehow very american. in swedish, the log cabin quilt design is called stockhustäcke, which i somehow find very charming. there are a number of beautiful log cabin examples in the book:

i really love the play with light and dark values in these.

and even this one is a variation on a log cabin:

there are stories of quilters and quilts throughout the book. my favorite is an interview with an old man who had gone sailing with the merchant navy from the age of 14 and didn't really go back home for 18 years. he talked about how they made quilts by hand on deck in their spare time. they were taught by an older boatsman and they did it both to pass the time and to be sure they had a warm blanket in their bunks onboard. there were no pictures to go with that story, but i love the story just the same. it gives another perspective on sailors that i'll admit i wouldn't have thought of myself.

i'll share one last quilt from the book (for today), because it reminds me so much of the beautiful quilts of gee's bend:

and now, i think i'll go. all of this inspiration has me feeling decidedly like sewing something.