Search Results for: moth quilt

I stitch forward and back a few times to make sure the end is secure.  Batting side up, my quilt is heavy  to maneuver, but soft on my hands.

I cut the threads then pull  Blue Earth from under the presser foot of my sewing machine.  Draped on my work table,  I start at the opening, the space I didn’t sew, and pull out the pins.

I go all the the way around until I’m back to the other side of the opening.  I stick the last pin in my pincushion, the crushed walnut shells inside it making space for the pin, sharpening it, holding it for me until I need to use it again.

Now I move Blue Earth onto my studio floor, holding onto it at the opening.

Then I reach in.

I push my whole arm inside the quilt until I get to the far corner,  I gather the layers of fabric and batting in my fist and pull it out through the opening.

The quilt pools on my floor like an evening gown slipping off a body.  I gently ease  the fabric though the opening.

I think of a farmer helping a cow birth her calf, of a moth emerging from its cocoon.  The front and back of my quilt are joined as they have never been before.

When Blue Earth is turned right side out, I reach in to it again and poke a single finger into each corner to push the bit of fabric out as far as it will go.

Then I shake it all out, iron the edges flat and hand sew the opening.

This is when all those pieces of fabric I’ve been sewing together for days and days, goes from being flat to becoming three dimensional. Even though I still have to tack it, in my mind it has become a quilt.

A piece of art in the same tradition that humans have been creating for thousands of years.

I decided to call these my Moth Wing Potholders because I made them with a lot of the scraps from my Moth quilt. But there’s a couple of Cranes, and an acorn too.

The crane fabric comes from Africa and the acorn was a scrap from my Forest Floor quilt. They also have those slivers of circles that Karen sent me. So they are a mix of scraps as usual.

My Moth Wing Potholders are $20 each and $5 shipping for one or more.  You can see them all close-up and buy them here. 

I did finish making my Hot Pads today, but it’s late and I’m tired so I’ll put them up for sale on Sunday.

Last night Sue Silverstein called Jon and me and told us that Bishop Maginn High School was closing at the end of the school year for financial reasons.

As sad as it is, it’s not all bad news.  Sue will be teaching at a Catholic school nearby and many of the Refugee students will be going with her.  Some of them will receive a grant to pay their tuition.

The new school has more resources so the kids will have more opportunities.  Jon wrote about the move beautifully on his blog you can read all about it here. 

Mother Mary will be going to the new school too.  When Sue told us that Bishop Maginn was closing she sent me a text about Mother Mary.  She wrote…

“I am unbearably honored to have had someone buy this quilt for me and my kids. I will take it with me where ever I am. Just like high five Jesus (the statue of Jesus in the lobby of the school), it will keep us safe with the love from both of you and Mary who never fails me.  I am honored and humbled. “

Jon and Zinnia are invited to the new school and the refugee kids and their families will still need help from the Army of Good.  And I’ll go with them when I can.  There’s still the rest of the school year to go at Bishop Maginn so I’ll be back there sewing with Paris and Hser Nay and anyone else who wants to learn.

I finished sewing the blue lace on Mother Mary today. Now I just have to put the backing on her.

I’ll bring her to Sue at Bishop Maginn in two weeks after the Winter break.  So Mother Mary will get to hang in Sue’s wonderful art room at Bishop Maginn for a little while at least.  And I have no doubt that she’ll fit right in at Sue’s new classroom next year.

I was just about to start sewing the blue lace on my Blessed Mother Mary when I realized that if she’s standing on the moon, I needed to get that in place first.

As I contemplated how to attach the moon I had made to the old quilt backing, I came to see that what I really needed to do, was to make the moon right on the backing.

So I used the moon I made yesterday as a guide and recreated it directly on the old quilt using matte medium.

I wanted the piece to be able to dry laying flat on the floor, so it wouldn’t pucker.  This means sewing the blue lace would have to wait another day.  Instead, I decided to make the conch shells.

I found the perfect piece of fabric in my stash.  The color remarkably close to the weathered conch shell I used to make my drawings from. It also has a nice toothy texture, which “feels” like the shell to me and will stand out from the other fabrics in the piece.

I did a simple outline in marker to get me going, then stitched the rest of the shell freehand looking to my drawings and the original conch shell as I worked.

I used two shades of blue to make them.  I was having so much fun, I made one and an extra one.

I still have a little bit of work to do on the moon, but I need for it to be completely dry first.  I’ll do that and sew on the conch shells tomorrow.  After that, I should be ready to sew on the blue lace.

Waiting for the moon to dry.

My plan was to start some potholders today.  But it wasn’t working.

So when I got back to work after lunch, I shoved all the rejected fabric I had pulled out of my shelves to the side and began working on my Mother Mary’s hands and her bouquet of brushes.

This is where I landed today.  With a few adjustments, I think they’ll work.

I’ll stitch the brushes separately then sew her hands over them, onto the backing,  using another piece of linen the same color as her face. The brushes will be fun to stitch, I imagine them covered in dried paint which will give me the opportunity to make them colorful.

Since she’s not sewn down yet, Mary got a little messed up when I moved her to work on my quilt which is why it looks like she’s caught in the wind.

I knew it would come to me if I was patient and didn’t think about it too much.

And that’s just what happened this morning as I was piecing together my Shibori Hankie Quilt. I had the idea that a flower should be growing from my Mother Mary’s praying hands.  But which flower? That was the question running just under the surface of my consciousness.

Then it popped into my head, Indian Paintbrush.  Perfect because of the paintbrush reference connecting Mother Mary to Sue Silverstein’s art room.

I stopped what I was doing and googled Indian Paintbrush finding its proper name to be Castilleja.  Then I dug deeper having a feeling that the name “Indian Paintbrush” like the name “Wandering Jew” for the spiderwort houseplant,  was derogatory.

(Jon recently bought me an Inch Plant, which I knew from my childhood as a Wandering Jew.  I had the same feeling about the name of that plant when I said it out loud to Jon. When Jon researched it he found its origins were anti-Semitic ).

I found a bunch of different myths telling the story of how Indian Paintbrush got its name, but none of the writing seemed to be by Native Americans. Then I came across a blog post on Broken Walls and Narratives addressing the racism of certain plants and flowers. “Indian Paintbrush” and “Wandering Jew” were both there as well as some other plants I was unfamiliar with.

The author, (whose name I couldn’t find) wrote….

“…it could easily be called Paintbrush plant. Using the word “Indian” invokes something wild, mythical, or even something silly (such as literally using the plant as a paintbrush).  It reduces Native Americans into an idea about something primitive, whimsical, or even non-existent rather than actual, living people, with actual uses for plants.” 

“There is also a colonizing tone to these names, as these are not the names that Native Americans themselves gave the plants but imagined names from colonizers and their descendants.”

This makes sense to me,  it’s just the kind of thing I had been thinking without knowing the origins of the name.  And not something  I want to propagate.

So I decided flowers weren’t necessary.   Instead, my Mother Mary will simply be holding a bouquet of paintbrushes.

Stephanie sent me this quilt top that her mother had.  It came with a note that read…

“The quilt was made by a Cheyenne Indian woman in Oklahoma.  It was given to the wife of the  Cheyenne Keeper of the Sacred Arrows and she gave it to me.  Claire”
2/13/08 Claire gave it to me (Anita) to finish.”

I put the quilt together with a backing that Carolyn gave me and batting, that readers of my blog helped me buy.

It will finally  be finished by the kids at Bishop Maginn and given to one of the families at the school who could use an extra blanket this winter.

A traditional Amish quilt, blue and black, with a star pattern, covered the kitchen table.  Lena told me it was hers.

I don’t know if it’s the same in every Amish family, but with our neighbors, each girl gets three quilts when they leave.

“Where will you go?” I asked Lena.  “I’ll stay here,” she said.  “But when I’m twenty-one, I get paid for my work.” Although she didn’t say it I got the feeling her status would change as she passed into adulthood.

I looked at the silver band on the ring finger of her right hand and asked if she’d get married.  “Probably someday, “she said easily as if she had no plans one way or the other.

The big high ceiling room was hot from the wood cookstoves and filled with the smell of baking bread.  The house was humming with activity.  Lena’s sisters Fanny and Barbara were making lunch. Jon was talking to Moise and his wife Barbara about ordering pie plates.  Their dog Tina came in the open door, greeted Jon and me then ran back out.

A very little girl, wearing a faded black bonnet and the same style dress as the rest of the girls, stood barefoot in the doorway curiously watching us.  She’s the same girl I saw a few days before but then she was with a little boy the same size as her.  Each was carrying a stick and marching around the yard in some kind of game.

Fanny came over smiling. She told me that this was Lena’s third quilt and the next one they made would be for her.

Each girl gets to choose the colors and pattern they want and all the women in the family help make it.   This summer they’d have a barn raising and while the men were working on the barn, the women would do the hand quilting. Lena thought they might even do it outside if the weather was good.

They’d stretch the quilt on a frame and with about ten women and girls quilting they’d have it done in a day.

At one point, without acknowledging that he was interrupting our conversation,  Moise asked his daughters a question from across the room about the pie plates they were trying to order.   Without hesitation, the girls stopped what they saying and doing and went to where their father was, eager to help.  It didn’t surprise me, I had seen this kind of expectation from my own father and many other men.  As if their needs were more important than any conversation going on around them.

A minute or so later, Lena came back to where I was standing by the quilt.  She picked up a stencil and showed me how she used it to draw the leafy design she and the other women would hand quilt later in the summer.  I noticed that Fanny and Barbara also drifted back to their own work.

I was the only one sensitive to the interruption.

Soon their mother, Barbara, asked me what I was working on and showed me the rotary cutter they use to cut the quilt pieces.  I joked that I did it the old-fashioned way and still use shears.

On the way out I waved to the little girl who was wandering around like a curious kitten, and she waved back.  I thought the kind of freedom she had enviable for a kid her age. No one told her not to stare at us or tried to get her to say hello or goodbye.  She was trusted to be inside the house or out and not under the constant supervision of an adult.

The thing that did surprise me was that on the way home I found myself trying to hold back tears.

I was filled with emotion, but I had no idea what exactly I was feeling. It was useless trying to work, so I took a walk to try and understand what was going on inside of me.

What kept coming back to me was an interaction between Fanny and her younger sister Barbara.

Lena and Fanny and I were talking, when Barbara quietly walked up to Fanny and handed her a mason jar of pickles. Without a word, Fanny opened the jar and gave it back to Barbara who went back to cooking lunch.

There was something in the communication between, them without the use of language, that touched me. Barbara didn’t have to ask Fanny to open the jar she couldn’t open herself.  Fanny knew what she needed.  Fanny didn’t make a sarcastic or demeaning comment about Barbara not being able to open the jar and wasn’t waiting for a “thank you “or “please”.

And although there were no words, there wasn’t silence between them either.   The communication was clear and seamless, filled with warmth and generosity.

It reminded me of what Jon wrote about watching Moise and the other Amish men and boys build a temporary house for his daughter.

I know that feeling.

I’ve had it with women that I work well with.  Were we trust each other and no one is trying to tell the other what to do. There is no ego involved it’s about getting the work done and doing it well.  It’s collaborative, not dictatorial.  It creates a bond, even intimacy, and respect for each other.

When I told Jon that I was crying but I wasn’t sure what I was feeling, he said it was the same thing he’s been trying to understand since he has become friends with Moise and his family.

Jon thinks it has to do with the way we each grew up in families with a lot of hostility. Families where anger and ridicule were the norm.  Where words were used to manipulate and harm.  Where the silence was heavy with doubt and misunderstanding.

From the research Jon’s done, he says this way of an Amish family interacting comes from their religious beliefs.  That doesn’t of course mean that all Amish families are like Barbara and Moise’s. And it doesn’t mean that there aren’t other dynamics that are not damaging or harmful in other ways.

Every family has its problems.

But I think Jon may be right about my feeling in this instance. It speaks to the sense of belonging, trust, and safety that I never felt in my own family.  And that even though I have a kind and loving family now with Jon, there is still a sadness inside of me because of it.

I would not survive in an Amish family for many reasons, including that they are a patriarchy.  But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things about them that are appealing to me. That there aren’t things I can learn from them.

I wouldn’t call the Miller’s friends yet, but I do think of them as good neighbors. And I would love to witness, just for a little while, the quilting that takes place this summer with a barn being raised in the background.

I’m halfway done tacking my Pink Moon quilt.  It is the longest quilt I’ve ever made, almost 100 inches by about 80 inches wide.  That’s 270 knots.

I listened to  Ecologist Suzanne Simard’s interview on Fresh Air about trees, for part of the time.  Trees seemed to be like the right thing to be learning about as I tied each knot.

One of the things Simard talked about how trees are social creatures that collaborate with each other to stay healthy.

Her new book is called Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.  As soon as I mentioned it to Jon, he ordered it for me.  He said he’s looking forward to waking up and hearing all about trees.

I finished my Moth Pillow and it is sold.

I really loved painting on the fabric, in this case the back of an old quilt, then stitching around it.   I want to do more of this.  It may be a good thing to work on next.

I like the idea of painting arbitrary shapes then finding images in them.  But I also like what I did here with the moth, knowing what image I want to create.   It’s so different than working with cut out pieces of fabric. There’s a real freedom to it. Although I can see combining whatever I end up making with fabric too.

I think it’s time to do some experimenting….