"Dublin Core:Title","Dublin Core:Subject","Dublin Core:Description","Dublin Core:Creator","Dublin Core:Source","Dublin Core:Publisher","Dublin Core:Date","Dublin Core:Contributor","Dublin Core:Rights","Dublin Core:Relation","Dublin Core:Format","Dublin Core:Language","Dublin Core:Type","Dublin Core:Identifier","Dublin Core:Coverage","Item Type Metadata:Text","Item Type Metadata:Interviewer","Item Type Metadata:Interviewee","Item Type Metadata:Location","Item Type Metadata:Transcription","Item Type Metadata:Local URL","Item Type Metadata:Original Format","Item Type Metadata:Duration","Item Type Metadata:Bit Rate/Frequency","Item Type Metadata:Time Summary","Item Type Metadata:URL","Item Type Metadata:Event Type","Item Type Metadata:Participants","Item Type Metadata:Birth Date","Item Type Metadata:Birthplace","Item Type Metadata:Death Date","Item Type Metadata:Occupation","Item Type Metadata:Biographical Text","Item Type Metadata:Bibliography","Item Type Metadata:Transcriber","Item Type Metadata:OHMS Object","Item Type Metadata:Interview Format","Item Type Metadata:Interview Date","Item Type Metadata:Interview Accession","Item Type Metadata:OHMS Object Text","Item Type Metadata:Interview Indexed","Item Type Metadata:Interview Keyword","Item Type Metadata:Sort Priority","Item Type Metadata:Interview sponsor","Item Type Metadata:Internal note",tags,file,itemType,collection,public,featured
"Susan Shie",,"In this interview, Susan Shie discusses at length her quilt ""The Potluck/ World: Card #21 in The Kitchen Tarot,"" one in her series of quilts based on tarot cards. This and other of her quilts feature political imagery from the 2008 presidential election. Her support of Barack Obama and the quilt she made featuring him in its imagery are important to understand her perspective on this time period. She also discusses her family, her interest in quilting, and her environmental advocacy.  ",,,,,,,,audio,,"Oral History",BOQ-003,,,"Karen Musgrave","Susan Shie","Wooster, Ohio","**This transcript was created by QSOS volunteers and was reviewed and, in some cases, edited by the interviewee. It may not exactly match the audio recording. For citations and interview quotations, please refer to the audio-recorded interview.** <strong>This transcript was created by QSOS volunteers and was reviewed and, in some cases, edited by the interviewee. It may not exactly match the audio recording. For citations and interview quotations, please refer to the audio-recorded interview.</strong><br />Karen Musgrave (KM): This is Karen Musgrave and I am doing a Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview with Susan Shie. Susan is in Wooster, Ohio and I'm in Naperville, Illinois, so we are conducting this interview over the telephone. Today's date is December 15, 2008. It is now 10:18 in the morning, and Susan, thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview with me. Susan Shie (SS): Thank you, Karen. KM: Please tell me about the quilt you selected for the interview, which is ""The Potluck/ World: Card #21 in The Kitchen Tarot."" SS: Well I've been doing this series on the ""Kitchen Tarot"" since 1998, and at the beginning and for a long time, the deck wasn't political, and then in 2007 my interest moved to politics a lot more. I'd been getting more political again, but it just got to be more and more so that it was in the work. By 2007 I was putting Obama in my Kitchen Tarot pieces. The deck is 22 major cards now, and I've just begun the 56 minor cards of the 78 total deck. This piece is probably my favorite of the Obama pieces. ""The Potluck"" is my choice for the Kitchen Tarot to represent the World card in the traditional tarot deck, and the concept is Obama and Clinton during the primary election this year, bringing their gifts to the table that is a conceptual potluck meal of national and international, especially international people, because the whole world was watching, not just our presidential election, but also our primary election, and wondering what was going to happen with this Democratic party. And so this piece which, like always in my work, is a spontaneously planned, and then drawn and then written image, became Obama and Clinton carrying in their donations to a potluck meal. As you look at the quilt, at the bottom is a large table with plates set on it for countries around the world. It's not a totally encompassing collection of names of countries. It's just as I thought them up as I worked. Sitting on the table is my archetype figure St Quilta the Comforter, who is becoming more and more important to me, as the world needs more and more healing. She is sort of the hostess of the conceptual potluck, and she is holding a huge bowl of something I've used a lot in my work, which is Peace Porridge. Above her in the very center of the piece is a kitchen sink, and that represents a situation where we are putting in everything, that every effort is needed here. It's like we are getting out the big guns in the kitchen. My image for the big guns is the kitchen sink, because of that old cliché of using everything but the kitchen sink, where here we are using that, too. In fact this card almost was called ""The Kitchen Sink,"" but I decided I really like this concept of a potluck meal and everyone coming together. I didn't want to make this piece be all about Obama. I supported Obama right from the beginning, but I wanted to show this neck-and-neck energy of Obama and Clinton as they progressed through the primary. This piece was made from the beginning of January until the beginning of April in 2008. The primary [race] was not really changing during that time. Nobody was getting ahead significantly. We didn't know who was going to win, and so I put them as equals in this piece, just because these energies are both coming in, and the world is looking at both of them, and we don't know which one is going to take over the Democratic candidacy - let alone which one might become president. I use pies in my work as a symbol for blessings or gifts, and I decided that that is what they would carry in. Obama's pie has the word ""Hope"" written on it, because that was one of his big things, and for Clinton I put ""Faith"" on her pie, because I thought it didn't represent her as a religious icon to people, but rather showed how people have faith in her, her reputation. They knew who she was. They had a lot of faith in her as a woman, as someone bringing things that they could expect. Whereas with Obama, his energy is about change and hope. They are bringing this stuff in, and they really are the only people in the piece except St. Quilta, and two little blessing figures on the wolves that I will get back to, and in the center between Obama and Clinton there is a window. This window has shutters on it, and the figure standing in the window is the image that I brought from the traditional tarot deck World card. Many artists of my Baby Boomer generation have created tarot decks, using their own themes, but they usually reference this classic Waite-Rider deck from the early part of the 20th century. The World card has this figure standing in this position within sort of a frame, and here it became a window. The figure here has that exact pose, but she's holding two wooden spoons, and she's wearing a chef's apron which has the title of the piece on it: ""Card #21 The Kitchen Tarot,"" which is the subtitle. After I painted that large World figure [and I'm drawing with airbrush, very spontaneously.], after I drew her I realized that it looked like my granddaughter who is now four years old, but she was three and a half then. It's a little bit more adult version of her, but I thought this face is more like my granddaughter than often when I attempt drawing Eva. In the end this figure became my ""Obama Girl,"" and I don't know if you know anything about the sort of cultural icon Obama Girl, but there is a young woman who has done a lot of YouTube videos as ""Obama Girl,"" who became sort of a superhero who was doing things to promote Obama. It was all tongue-in-cheek stuff. It was playful, and it was fun, but there was a sexual overtone to it. When I made Eva into the ""Obama Girl,"" I thought, 'Oh no. This maybe isn't good, because I don't want a sexual overtone with my granddaughter obviously.' But I realized at that point in thinking, that ""Obama Girl"" is not just this woman who is doing the YouTube videos with the sexual overtone. ""Obama Girl"" is any woman who is supporting Obama, and when you read the text of this very large quilt (it's 85 inches by 76 inches), you will find out pretty fast that my leaning is very much toward Obama, not toward Clinton, but it is not there in the overall visual images. What I'm saying about the ""Obama Girl"" is that my granddaughter who is four is an ""Obama Girl."" My next door neighbor Olga who is one hundred, now she is one hundred and one, she is an ""Obama Girl."" And anybody in between, anybody can be an ""Obama Girl."" It is just someone who is a woman who is supporting Obama, not buying into that idea, that if you are a feminist, you have to support Clinton. KM: Tell me about why making Obama art is important to you? SS: Because I'm a storyteller, but I'm not anymore just a personal storyteller, I am doing a mixture of diary and social commentary. And I guess back in 2003 there was this shift in my work, from just personal diaries, from a lot of writing on my work about my own life and lives of people around me, and sort of overall cultural events in my life, to opening up to the political issues again. I was making a piece for an exhibition of political art, for which I was invited by the curator. To everybody who was tapped for this show, the curator said, 'I'm not going to censor anything you say.' And this was around the time we were getting ready to go into Iraq the second time, the beginning of 2003. She promised that our work would be hung regardless of what we did. This was license to just open up, and as I opened up, and I was writing about things off the top of my head, and it was a very political piece, I realized in my writing that I had kind of shut down after the killings at Kent State. I wasn't in the crowd at Kent State, when the killings happened in 1970, but I was there the weekend before, when all the trouble started with the students protesting the bombing of Cambodia, with the National Guard there on campus, and I'd just found out I was pregnant. I'd gone to school there in '68 and had dropped out and gotten married. And this was now 1970, and we were on campus, visiting my brother, and I really did not want to lose my baby to tear gas. But we couldn't get out, and they wouldn't let anybody leave campus. I left the next day, the Saturday before the killings happened on Monday, and I knew something really bad was going to happen. And I know that, had I stayed in school during that time, I probably would have been out on that hill protesting that Monday, because as a freshman there, I had joined SDS (Students for Democratic Society), and I had been involved in sit-ins and teach-ins and protests, war protests and protesting the Oakland Police coming to Kent State to recruit from our police academy. A lot of stuff back in 1968, but I'd dropped out and gotten married. When those kids got killed, a lot of people like me sort of gave up for a while about politics, because the message we got was: if you talked your politics, if you did something about it, they might shoot you. They might kill you, and I think that was the message that they wanted us to get. I went underground for a while. I focused on my family, on my baby girl, Gretchen. I didn't get depressed so much about politics. I just disconnected from a lot of that stuff. I did what I could, but I didn't go out and march anymore, and things like that. I was amazed when the war ended, because the protesting had actually turned people around, to understand that we had to save the Vietnamese people. We had to save the American soldiers. We had to get out of that war. But anyway as I was working on this piece in 2003, I realized that I had shut up about my politics, and I realized that if all of us who had these strong feelings weren't presenting them in our own little personal bully pulpits in our own artwork, then we aren't helping. And I decided at that point that my work would become political again. I had been excited about Obama since I saw him give his keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004. So I had known about Obama for a while, and in 2007 a friend of mine told me that she thought that Obama and the Dalai Lama had a lot in common. And so I got to thinking about that and I made a piece called ""Olama: Two Guys and a Pie,"" and that became my first Obama piece in which I did a lot of research about him. I went to Wikipedia, read his whole biography and did a lot of note taking, and ended up making this very large piece about both of them. When he decided to run for president I just started documenting everything he was doing, and of course a lot of people became pretty much fixated on what he was up to, and I was one of them. And since my work is all about my personal feelings and what I am focused on right now, that just came out in my writing and also in my imagery. KM: What are your plans for ""The Potluck/World""? SS: It's been in several exhibitions already. The next thing it's going to is the Obama Quilters exhibition, that Sue Walen is doing at Montgomery University's Cafritz Center in Silver Spring, Maryland in February and March 2009. That's a challenge quilt exhibition that she started out with forty people, and I think she might be up to sixty. She invited people to contact her, if they wanted to make a piece or had a piece about Obama, and it would be shown, or they'd try to show it in the space they have. I've submitted three pieces for that, knowing that they may not all be shown, especially since my pieces are pretty large. But I'm very excited about that show. Also, ""The Potluck"" is part of my ""Kitchen Tarot"" series so it's going to be part of a deck of twenty-two cards, the actual tarot cards in a deck of major cards called ""The Kitchen Tarot."" However from my ""Kitchen Tarot"" actual deck, I've decided to crop down my pictures to keep the politics out of it, because you don't know who is doing the tarot reading, but traditionally it is not a political thing. So this deck started out in 1998. It was totally apolitical then, and now it's gotten extremely political, and I'm using the magic of Photoshop to crop each political piece down to a good composition of not-political imagery. That works for me, and in a 3½ by 5 inch image card you can't read any of my tiny airpen writing, which is political. I use an airpen and fabric paint to write all over my work, but it is like the size of writing you do in a letter, if you're writing a letter on paper to someone. If you shrink it down from this larger size, the lettering becomes little lines of patterns rather than legible writing. You can't tell there's political stuff in the writing anymore, at that size. It's a form of sabotage to me because it is a very political thing, but hopefully they won't even notice that in the tarot cards, because they won't be able to read the super-tiny writing. Obama and Clinton are cropped out of the Potluck piece for the tarot deck card, and the only thing of this piece that's going to be left of my full quilt in that tarot card is that central figure in the window, which is also in the tradition deck. That's what you'll see in that card: that central figure. This decision allowed me to realize that I could go on doing very political work and my tarot cards, though there was a point where I was afraid that I was going to have to quit doing the tarot deck, because I wasn't going to quit doing the Obama work. I plan to keep doing Obama in my imagery and in my writing as long as he is active in politics. So I thought maybe I have to stop the Kitchen Tarot work now, having made the twenty-two major cards as quilts. After ten years maybe I would stop and just do the more political art. But I really do want to keep going with the Kitchen Tarot, too, so the cropping tool in Photoshop will be actively used to keep the deck apolitical visually. Then if people come and see my work on my website, who are brought into it from ""The Kitchen Tarot,"" they will find out what I'm up to otherwise. KM: What is your website? SS: www.turtlemoon.com. Shie’s Interest in Quilt Making KM: Tell me about your interest in quiltmaking. SS: I had a mother who was raised Mennonite, who had roots in the Amish culture. Her grandfather and grandmother jumped over and became Mennonites, so she was raised Mennonite. She and her mother made all their family's clothes and the quilts and things like that. I grew up as a little girl going to church with her on Wednesdays once a month to the Ladies Aid Society at East Chippewa Church of the Brethren, which is a church very similar to the Mennonites. I used to go to this little church near Smithville, Ohio, where at Ladies' Aid, all the women sat around a quilt frame and talked and gossiped and laughed and worked on these quilts to raise money for service work that the church did, outreach to help people, disaster relief, etc. I remember sitting under the quilt frame and watching the left hands and some people's right hands, the hand that is underneath to tell where the quilting is going, to tell when the needle comes down through. I would wonder how on earth they could sew when their hands were holding still. I'm sitting under there like a little kid sitting under a tent. That is my first memory of quilting. As I grew up, I learned to sew as a little girl and made all my clothes with my mother. She made my clothes up through high school, and then I took over, but I made my doll clothes and things that I wanted to make. I took 4-H and home ec and all that, and I was painting as a little girl and doing a lot of writing as a little girl. I worked with clay, too. Later, these things all came together in my art work when I was in college as an art student. In college in the late 70s, a woman named Miriam Schapiro came to my school, the College of Wooster, and did a residency a couple of times, and both times I interacted with her a lot. She was a feminist, and she was running around the country giving lectures, meeting women artists and telling them to take what they are learning from their mothers and put that in their art work if they want to make a feminist statement. She was making the point that all of this beautiful art work we made was art. It wasn't just women's work. I, as a painter, decided to start sewing my paintings. We didn't have the term art quilt back then. This was the late seventies. There wasn't the term art quilt until the mid-eighties. I didn't quite know what to call them. I just called them paintings. I got permission from my prof to stop working on stretched canvas, and that way the other benefit was: I was able to take the work home rolled up in a bag and work on it and bring it back, instead of having to drag a huge, stretched canvas around, which I couldn't do. I had the joy of being able to merge all of these things that I had done since I was a little girl - painting, sewing, writing, and work with clay, while I was embellishing my work quite a bit with clay and beadings. I've gotten away from that now. I'm really back kind of full circle to the paintings, and the only thing different from what I was doing back in my junior high days in my bedroom with the canvas, is that now I'm working on a lighter weight cotton. And I'm merging my sewing and my writing into my paintings. I feel really good about this, because it's like this one form is connecting all of these energies that I like to work with. I'm making what I consider to be time capsules now. If I pull out a quilt from, let's say 2006, and start reading it, it would bring back all of these memories as if I were reading a diary. When I write on my work I'm never copying from a diary. People get that idea, but I'm writing off the top of my head, exactly what is on my mind right then, and I date my entries a lot of times. Almost always. Later on they become interesting to just pop in and look at, but I couldn't stand reading the whole thing at once, nor could I ever stand to do a transcript of one of them. I've had a few art historians get kind of upset with me, because I don't make a transcript of my work. What has become my habit, to make up for that, is that I write notes about what I write. Let's say I write for a half hour with my airpen, and then I turn around, and I have a piece of paper there, and I write down a little sentence about what I just wrote about on the painting. It's a list of the topics that are in that particular art quilt painting. So I can go back now with my newer pieces, and I can reference their topics. I can say, 'Well, this is what was going on, and this is what was going on, and this happened, and I wrote about this.' But that is as close as I'm going to get to doing a transcript, because the time to make a transcript would be the time I could be making some art. That is not going to happen for me. I spend enough time on paperwork! Shie’s Quilting Progress KM: Tell me about the quilting part, the process for you. SS: For a long time I was hand sewing all my quilts from the late seventies on, and then I had a few attempts at machine quilting in 1990, when my husband, Jimmy, and I finally got married after fourteen years. I'd gotten a new sewing machine after our wedding, and I decided to use the sewing machine on my quilts. I thought it would make them go faster, but that was a real failed experiment, because the machine sewing seemed so flat, and I was into dimension. I wanted really beautiful sewing with a good texture, so I pretty much stayed away from machine quilting for a long time. Then in '03, in the beginning of the year, I started working with an airpen, and all my painting life, since I was a child, I had tried to make very sharp, very crisp lines with a brush and had always failed. I never could find anything in the way of a pen or brush of any kind that made thin lines that I liked on a painting. At the end of '02, Jimmy got me an airpen. [www.silkpaint.com.] I didn't know anything about it, and in '03 I started working with that and started to learn to make it behave. It took me about a year to make it work well with the fabric paint. It's a tricky instrument! Now I teach it. I've been teaching it for about five years now in my classes, along with my airbrush and brush painting and quilting work. Anyway, this airpen changed things to the point where I could quit hand sewing over my writing in my quilts, because the crispy little line writing that I could do with the airpen is very rich and very black and very permanent, because it's pigment paint. Now I had the problem that my background hand stitching was getting in the way of my writing. The stitching was too big and causing the writing to be overshadowed, so I decided that maybe it was time for me to go to machine quilting. In '04 I started to. I backed off from hand quilting slowly first, because I'd been doing very elaborate, very dense quilting and a lot of beading, but by '04 I started to back off, to the point where I didn't even want to use the beads anymore. Starting in late 2004, I was taking care of my baby granddaughter for a year and a half, and by 2006 my fingertips were getting very numb. I understand now that part of what was causing it probably was caffeine. Now I know I can't tolerate caffeine very well, and when I have chocolate or especially coffee or caffeinated tea, I get this numbness in my fingers that keeps them from functioning very well for hand work. I think the numbness came from too much hand sewing, too!! So that was kind of a blessing in disguise. It pushed me to going over to the machine sewing. When I had first started to machine sew in 2004 my friends all told me I couldn't do that, the big part of my work was the beading and the hand stitching. I really didn't want to believe that, but it was a lot of peer pressure that seems to be effective with most of us. I was confused about it for a while, but the fingertips' numbness pushed me to switch sewing methods. By 2005 in the middle of the year I had made my first really large piece with the machine quilting and it was sold into John M. Walsh, III's art quilt collection, which was a green light for me. I just decided he could have had any of my quilts he wanted, but he chose that one, so it's all about the painting and the writing, it's not about the sewing and that was it. After that piece I started putting one line of hand stitching all the way around the border edge of all my machine sewn pieces. It is a little nod to my old hand sewing, and it also helps the border edge lay a little flatter, but it is mainly a little bit of an excuse for me to do some hand sewing, and it is just enough. There is no beading in these. I sew one little Buddha boy bead on the corner of each piece, and for a while I've had a little Buddha girl bead that I sew with the Buddha boy. The Buddha boy, I call him my green temple Buddha boy, I put one on each quilt. They are plastic beads from a bead store in Santa Barbara, California, called Beads, and they are just a little, maybe one inch tall, maybe less, green Buddha sitting in lotus style. I started out with 77 of them, when I bought all they had, when I was in the store. I thought I would have this series of 77 pieces with this one bead on them, but as I got near the end of them, I called the store, and I ended up with 200 more of them, and I think I can get more. I can keep making quilts with Buddha boys on them for a long time. It is a little blessing bead and also to me, it is a little bit humorous that you want beads on my work? Okay, here is a bead, but you only get this one. [laughs.] KM: [laughs.] That is cute. SS: He is always there. The Buddha Boy is always that little blessing guy, down in the corner of my work. I want to go back to the Potluck piece just really quick, because I never really talked about the wolves on that and the Buddha girls that are sitting on them. There is just a little more imagery there that I would like to talk about, if that's okay. KM: Sure. SS: There are two wolves, and they're big and they're on a table, and they're yellow dogs. That's another little secret: that the wolves are yellow dog Democrats - someone who would rather vote for a yellow dog than vote for a Republican. So, the yellow dog wolves. One of them says Trust on its body and the other one says Tolerance on its body. They are the guardians of the potluck. They are there to make sure when the world comes together for this potluck, there will be trust and tolerance. Each one of them has a little Buddha girl sitting on its back with a peace symbol on it. She's radiating peace energy. Also there are shutters on the door, or the window that the World figure's in, that Eva figure. On the shutters there are little heads of people in rainbow colors, each one a color of the rainbow, and that's the idea of incorporating people from all of the world, and all races and all cultures coming to this potluck thing. There are six fortune cookies on this piece. Six is a number for success, and I've always loved putting fortune cookies into my work, way back to my early college days. So I put six of them into Potluck, and they ended up, most of their writings are transcripts here. There's a breaking of my own little rule, of not copying things! I was so impressed with Caroline Kennedy's op-ed letter to the New York Times, endorsing Obama for president. On the first fortune cookie I tried to paraphrase, by using some ellipses, leaving out other parts of this letter. And then I realized I could continue this letter on the other fortune cookies. So you progress reading through the fortune cookies, and you read her entire op-ed letter through that. That was sort of a good luck thing for Obama [using fortune cookies for images, as I think of them as good luck symbols.]. Around the large figure in the window there are four symbols in the corners. If you look at the top left corner and go around the corners clockwise, there's a paring knife—and that is my image I’m going to be using as the minor cards of the kitchen tarot and I'm going to have paring knifes instead of swords. Then in the top right have a green pyrex measuring cups and they will be my symbol for the cup suit in my kitchen tarot. As you look at the bottom right there’s a wooden spoon: my symbol for the wand and the bottom left corner there’s a potholder. I’m going to be using potholders as my icon for the for the symbols of coins. KM: Why do you think quiltmakers are embracing Obama so greatly? SS: First of all, I think it is more art quilters than traditional quilters, and there is a difference there. I think that art quilters tend to be more funky, more liberal, probably a lot more Democrat. Traditional quilters are often more conservative, not saying anything bad about traditional quilters. Remember that my mother and grandmother were traditional quilts, but my mom would be an Obama Girl, no doubt. [both laugh.] And my dad would love Obama, too! But anyway, I think traditional quilters aren't telling literal stories in their work for the most part. That is another big difference. They are usually working with beautiful patterns and patchwork or appliqué. They're focusing on the beauty of the image and not telling a story of any kind. I know there are exceptions to that, but that is just a stereotype that I'm throwing out for making this reason. Also it's interesting that when Vicky Mangum sent out a call for quilts for a political exhibition at the International Quilt Festival this last fall. I think it was called ""Political Patchwork."" KM: Yes it was. SS: She sent out calls for quilts and she wanted this to be shown right before the election, and she wanted to have a full representation of both sides. She wanted Republican. She wanted stuff from the primary elections and everything, and her problem was she couldn't find any McCain quilts. And she says to me, 'Where can I get a hold of somebody who is doing a McCain quilt?' I told her that I haven't seen any art quilters doing McCain quilts, and I think this tells you something about these art quilters. They tend to be liberal people who are artists first and quilters second. And they tend to be liberal. So you're going to have a hard time finding McCain art quilters. Maybe there are traditional quilters who are making them. Maybe she found something in the end. I didn't go to Festival, so I didn't see the exhibition. I don't know what she had there, but I just remember that very distinctly that she couldn't find McCain quilters and could find a lot of Obama quilters. I think we are risk takers, people who are interested in forward thinking, we are liberal, some of us are even radical, and we just naturally fall in line with Obama and his energy. KM: You recently moved to using bamboo batting. Tell me a little bit about bamboo batting and why you like it. SS: Just a real quick throw back to why I'm interested in green stuff, or to show that I was, I guess. In 1989 I started a project called The Green Quilts Project, which was an international project for fifteen years in the end. In the beginning I thought it would be forever, but I wore out, and in 2004 I ended it. But you can still find it on my website. There's a link from the bottom of any page on my website to The Green Quilts Project. It stopped in 2004, but you can read some of its history there. My best friend, Robin Schwalb, who's an art quilter from New York City, and I worked on the project together for those fifteen years. Robin made optional hand silk screened labels for the quilts, and you could also make your own labels. We have a big archive of slides of the work. The idea was to use quilting energy in a cosmic sense, as a metaphor, as mental, emotional energy to help heal the world. You'd make your quilt and you didn't have anyone judge whether or not it was a Green Quilt. You'd decide that yourself. So the idea was to incorporate prayer, meditation, energy, whatever you wanted to call it, for healing of the earth, into the making your piece. Most of those quilts were storytelling quilts. It just naturally was that way, there were a few people who put in patchwork, abstract, or geometric quilts, but for the most part they were something that you could look at, and you could tell what was up from the imagery. You could work on anything from the earth in general, down to even a specific person or animal that you wanted to have healing for, or for a species, or for water or air. It could be anything involving the microcosm or the macrocosm of the earth. I quit doing the Green Quilts project in 2004, simply because most of the people who were going to make a Green Quilt had done it. Some artists made a bunch of pieces for the project, but many sent one or two images in slides. it was getting old and I was running out of steam. Like you say: we do too much multitasking. Then we try to simplify, so I ended the project. Fast forward now to 2007. I guess it was this last year, and I was asked to test this bamboo batting that Fairfield Processing was coming out with, because they had read about my Green Quilts Project somewhere and thought I would be a good person to be one of the testers. I just really leaped on this, because I was so excited to have a product that would be more user friendly for the earth. I was using polyester batting before that for a long time, but when I switched to machine quilting, I could go to cotton batting because, even though it was dryer and it would drag, it didn't matter with machine work. I wasn't hand stitching any more, so I had gone over to a cotton batting. Anyway I tested this bamboo batting for them, and I loved it. They had one hundred percent bamboo, they had a batting that was eighty percent bamboo and twenty percent organic cotton, and one that was fifty/fifty bamboo and cotton. And they all handled about the same. It was really interesting. I think that the difference would be: if you had the one hundred percent bamboo, you probably would see no creasing in your quilts after they were folded and unfolded, because bamboo is so flexible, and it bends over, and it unbends so well. This bamboo batting is also interesting, because my husband is an avid fly fisherman and he only fishes with bamboo rods that people he knows make. They are just sort of the snob culture of the elitists of fly fishing, and they're really into these lovely works of art in themselves, these bamboo rods. They're nothing like the ones where you take a piece of bamboo, and you fish with it. It is a whole composition, reconstruction of the bamboo, and it is amazing. But anyway, this was also a way for me to have another connection to my husband. He's working with bamboo, I'm working with bamboo. So that's great. Here are the cool things about the bamboo in terms of the earth. Bamboo is extremely fast growing, probably the fastest growing grass in the world and it's a cross between a grass and a tree, and they can make fiber out of it after one growing season. The thing that I also love about it, like I said, it folds over and doesn't crease like cotton does. Cotton is really crease problematic. You can quilt this stuff six to eight inches apart, which I don't do, but that just shows you how this stuff isn't going to crumble like cotton would. It really holds together well. It is slippery, the needle goes in and out of it very nicely compared to cotton. So the fifty/fifty product that they came out with was a little bit creasy, a little bit of a drag on your needle, but not nearly as much as with cotton batting. I just love that it's renewable and it's naturally anti-bacterial. So they don't put any crud on these batts, don't add any chemical stuff to make it anti-bacterial, which is what they were doing with polyester for a long time. I don't know if they still are. One thing they need to do is to make sure they're getting the bamboo from a fair trade commitment with some farmers who are doing some holistic work with their farming, so they aren't raping the earth. I think we are not there yet. I think China especially is mono-cropping its bamboo, which is really very harmful to the environment. Whenever you mono-crop anything in a big way it is not good. Animals don't eat bamboo, so it is harmful to the ecosystem to only have bamboo growing. I hope they can come up with somebody who is going to grow the bamboo responsibly and be more conscientious of farming a variety of crops together. I'm not a farmer, so I don't have the answers on that. I just know I love working with bamboo batting, and it makes me feel that it's a lot better statement. I also wish somebody would invent some fabric paint that is not petroleum plastic based, because now all we have to work with are fabric paints that work really well, are very beautiful and easy to handle, but they are chemically nasty. And we need something: we need some organic fabric paints, if that's ever going to be possible. In the meantime, I always lecture my students about using up all their paint, wiping their brushes on rags, not on paper towels, not sloshing brushes around in water to clean them, and trying to keep as much of the paint as possible from going back into the water supply which is something that as children we were never taught. I also lecture my students a lot about using a respirator when they're working with the airbrush or they're heat setting any of their fabric paints. They should use a respirator when they are working with any art supplies that have chemical changes that go on or that have fumes. I've been sort of the queen of respirator advocacy since the late '70s I guess, when I was kind of treated like a nit-wit for suggesting to artists that you should wear a respirator. Luckily now it's become a lot more acceptable among students. They are giving it a lot more, they are working with toxins. Less toxins you have to work with the better and I look forward to eco friendly art products becoming a trend more, not just bamboo batting and not just recycled paper. KM: How do you want to be remembered? SS: It's really interesting. I've thought about that a lot because I have such a hard time transitioning from the woman who is known for all the hand work and the beading, to the woman who is hopefully known for the stories and the images of the stories. I've decided that I don't need for anybody to remember that I did all that intense hand sewing or all that beautiful beading. I want those pieces to be saved and archived and remembered, but I want to be remembered as an artist who told stories that made a difference in the world, that helped improve the world. That's what I care about the most for my art. KM: Excellent. Is there anything that you would like to share that I haven't touched upon? SS: No, just that anybody interested in my work can go to my site. I try to keep all my new work posted in the gallery of my website, www.turtlemoon.com if you don't remember the website name just Google ""Susan Shie website"" and it will come up. It's Turtle Moon Studios. I teach at my home and I teach around the world. I teach really strange, but exciting art camps at my house in a program that I describe as a biosphere, where up to five students come and live with my husband and me for a week at a time. We have a five day class that is bracketed by the two travel days. Each student has their own bedroom at our house, and we work in our home studios, with 24 hour access. My home's the only place where I teach airbrush, which is too big and bulky equipment for me to take to other places. And I can't work with a large group of students with airbrush, because it requires too much one-on-one for that. You come here and learn airbrush, airpen, and regular brush painting. And you learn the most important thing that I teach: that everyone is an artist, and that you can draw, and you can write, and you can paint - even though you were probably told, when you were a small child, that you couldn't do those things. Somewhere in between small child and adult, you gave up on drawing, and my message is that drawing is an acquired skill, just like any other acquired skill, like playing piano. I want people to learn that they can express themselves, and they can make art that is valid. And it just happens that I use airpen, airbrush, brush painting, and writing to help you learn that, but it could be a lot of things. I want to be known as the person who helped a lot of people realize their own artist selves and become able to spontaneously work without being so judgmental of themselves. KM: Tell me about your garage door. SS: [laughs.] I haven't put it on my website yet. I have to do that really soon. That is the biggest painting that I have made since I made the high school prom murals that I watched being burned on a bonfire after the prom. [laughs.] It was quite a shock. I think those murals were nine feet tall and I think this one, I haven't measured this, but it is a double garage door and I think it is seventeen feet plus all the frame work around. You know, there is a big frame around the door. I painted that too, so I think in the end it is about eight feet tall and probably about twenty two feet wide including the frame I painted it with the theme in mind, ""Personal Landscapes,"" because my local artist group, WAGE, which is an acronym for Wayne Artists Group Effort, has that theme for our upcoming show. That is my little artists' support group for my area. The theme for our exhibition coming up this January/February is personal landscapes so my personal landscape is my husband Jimmy and me and our house on one side of the garage door, and it bleeds over to my daughter, Gretchen, her husband Mike and their daughter Eva who live in Lakewood, Ohio, an hour from us right up by Lake Erie, and their house. And all of our cats are in the mural, and the houses, the people, and the cats are entwined. And coming up behind Jimmy and me is a giant Barrack Obama head and he is rising over the horizon like a big sun. And next to him what started out to the chimney on our house, ended up being the Statue of Liberty, who is kind of leaning into Obama. I used the best house paint I could find, and I had these Createx liquid pigments that I had bought years and years ago, that I used to make all my colors out of the white house paint. It is hopefully going to hold up longer than my front door painting did. My front door mural is now sitting inside my breezeway, and I have a new door on my front door that is not a mural. That's the first thing you see on my website: that old door mural. When we took it down and put up a regular house door, lots of people thought we'd moved away, we'd died, or something. When I started painting the Obama mural, people would stop, even the first day when all I had done was draw the outlines of it on with a brush, people would stop and say, 'You don't know me, but I'm so happy to see that you're putting art on your house again. I miss your front door mural so much.' This is a very middle class, sedate neighborhood from the late sixties. It's one of those neighborhoods that doesn't have sidewalks, but now the trees are big, and one generation is moving off to nursing homes or dying, and the next generation is coming in with their little kids. So it's one of those kind of neighbors where it is pretty conservative, to be honest, and I was so amazed that all through the making of this mural, which took me a month, people would stop in or people would yell encouragement from their cars. One time some guy just stopped and yelled, 'Go Obama!' [laughs.] I was really happy to hear that in my neighborhood. It has been really nice, because a lot of people have told me that they are so happy to see the art back. I've had people who assumed that if Obama didn't win, I would paint him out and I said, 'No, no! That's never going to happen.' The other day I had a woman who told me that she just knew I painted him in, after he won the election. I said, 'No, no. He was in the composition from the very beginning and he will stay there.' It's a very upbeat piece, full of words and symbols about peace and love, besides stories about all of us. The writing on it is not done with airpen, which would not work on a vertical surface. You have to use airpen with the work lying flat. I used the smallest hand brush that I could, to do the writing, but I had to write fairly large, because I couldn't get a small enough line for tiny writing. And I decided not to use black paint, because I didn't want to make the mural get really dark. So the writing is in colors. They are just enough darker than the background color they're on, that they show up. The weirdest thing about it is that the mural kind of glows, like in the evening and at night when lights hit it, or even walking past it in the daytime. It's got this glow I really can't understand, that must come from this white house paint I used. It's glowing out through the colors I mixed into it, but it's a very beautiful glow that makes me feel like it's got the kind of energy that I talked about with The Green Quilts Project, where I said that what we would be creating a conceptual blanket around the earth with these quilts. There would be this layer of energy where each one of these quilts would be like a storage battery, holding all this good energy, and that the earth could tap into that. I feel like that is what my garage mural means to me, that there is this energy there for hope and change and love and peace. A lot of peace symbols all over it because I'm a pro-peace, anti-war person from way back, and that will never change. That is incorporated in the mural. It doesn't hit you over the head, but it's incorporated into what I hope is a very loving image. KM: I think this is a great way to end and I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to do this interview with me. SS: Thank you, Karen, I am so happy to do it. KM: We are going to conclude our interview at 11:08.",,,"50 minutes 47 seconds ",,,,,,,,,,,,"Kim Greene",http://quiltalliance.net/ohms-viewer-master/viewer.php?cachefile=BOQ-003Shie.xml,audio,05/18/2009,,"    5.1      Susan Shie BOQ-003     Quilters' S.O.S. -- Save Our Stories   Barak Obama Quilt QSOS Quilt Alliance    Barack Obama Politics art quilt Tarot cards environmentalism Susan Shie Karen Musgrave   1:|7(66)|9(112)|11(101)|13(50)|17(98)|19(23)|21(120)|22(76)|26(67)|28(79)|30(6)|34(32)|36(48)|40(96)|42(125)|48(19)|54(2)|56(121)|60(11)|62(91)|66(15)|68(83)|72(88)|76(1)|80(18)|84(24)|86(135)|96(8)|98(72)|102(4)|108(2)|108(150)|112(72)|116(9)|120(14)|122(59)|124(170)|128(75)|130(123)|134(88)|136(105)|140(2)|144(36)|146(31)|150(24)|152(67)|154(54)|156(108)|160(9)|162(114)     0   http://quiltalliance.net/qsos-audio/BOQ-003-Shie.mp3  Other         audio        0 Introduction   This is Karen Musgrave and I am doing a Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview with Susan Shie. Susan is in Wooster, Ohio and I'm in Naperville, Illinois, so we are conducting this interview over the telephone.       telephone ; wooster ohio       40.825455, -81.931970 17 Wooster, Ohio           25 &quot ; Potluck Quilt/World: Card #21 in The Kitchen Tarot&quot ;     KM: Please tell me about the quilt you selected for the interview, which is &quot ; The Potluck/ World: Card #21 in The Kitchen Tarot.&quot ;        Shie describes her quilt &quot ; The Potluck/ World: Card #21 in The Kitchen Tarot,&quot ;  one in her series of quilts based on tarot cards. This one features both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton bringing pies to a potluck attended by the world. Shie details some of the imagery, along with the origins of the Kitchen Tarot series.    Barack Obama ; Democratic Party ; Hillary Rodham Clinton ; kitchen ; political quilts ; potluck ; presidential election of 2008 ; Saint Quilta the Comforter ; tarot ; tarot cards         17     http://quiltalliance.net/qsos-images/Shie_OH44691-001_Potluck.jpg Potluck Obama/Clinton Quilt     214 Inspiration behind the quilt   I didn't want to make this piece be all about Obama. I supported Obama right from the beginning, but I wanted to show this neck-and-neck energy of Obama and Clinton as they progressed through the primary.    Shie explains her reasoning for making her Obama pieces and the impact he has made in her life and others. She explains the imagery in the quilt and the importance of the imagery in a traditional tarot deck. Including the imagery and symbolism of the &quot ; Obama Girl&quot ; .    2008 Democratic Presidential Primary ; apolitical ; Barack Obama ; faith ; granddaughter ; Hillary Rodham Clinton ; hope ; pie ; politics ; Rider-Waite tarot deck ; sexuality ; tarot cards ; “Obama girl”         17     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU &quot ; Obama Girl&quot ;  video on youtube     506 The Importance of &quot ; Obama art&quot ;  to Shie   KM: Tell me about why making Obama art is important to you?    SS: Because I'm a storyteller, but I'm not anymore just a personal storyteller, I am doing a mixture of diary and social commentary.   Shie elaborates on why making the art that she creates is important to her, mentally and emotionally therapeutic. She notes her time attending Kent State University before the massacre and how that effected her mental state. Including how Obama made her open up with talking about politics again.   antiwar protest ; art exhibition ; Barack Obama ; Dalai Lama ; family ; Iraq War ; kent state ; Kent State University Massacre ; political art ; political expression ; politics ; pregnant ; Quilt Purpose - Artistic expression ; research ; Vietnam War   kent state     17     http://quiltalliance.net/qsos-images/OH44691-001_Shie_a.jpg Susan Shie, Quilt Piece     786 Exhibition, series plan &amp ;  making the piece apolitical    KM: What are your plans for &quot ; The Potluck/World&quot ; ?    SS: It's been in several exhibitions already. The next thing it's going to is the Obama Quilters exhibition, that Sue Walen is doing at Montgomery University's Cafritz Center in Silver Spring, Maryland in February and March 2009.    Shie describes the meshing of her love of quilting and tarot card making. She talks about how her plans for her original tarot deck were going to be apolitical at first, so she wouldn't offend anyone (since tarot decks are not political) but as she's progressed over the years she has allowed her deck to get more political.   She also discusses her techniques with airpens and photoshop for her quilts/tarot quilts.    Airpen ; Barack Obama ; Montgomery College (Silver Springs, Maryland) ; Obama quilts ; Photoshop ; potluck world ; Quilt Purpose – Exhibition ; Quilt shows/exhibitions ; Susan Walen ; tarot ; The Cafritz Foundation Arts Center ; “President Obama: A Celebration in Art Quilts”         17     http://www.turtlemoon.com/ Susan Shie's Website     1021 Shie’s Interest in Quilt Making   KM: Tell me about your interest in quiltmaking.    SS: I had a mother who was raised Mennonite, who had roots in the Amish culture. Her grandfather and grandmother jumped over and became Mennonites, so she was raised Mennonite. She and her mother made all their family's clothes and the quilts and things like that.   Shie talks about her childhood and how she was introduced to quilting and making art from her kid years to her college years and there onward into college and adulthood.    airpen ; Amish ; art student ; childhood ; College of Wooster ; diary ; East Chippewa Church of the Brethren ; feminism ; homemade clothing ; journal ; Ladies Aid Society ; Learning quiltmaking ; Mennonite ; Mennonite quilts ; Miriam Shapiro ; mission work ; sewing ; Smithville, Ohio       40.863572, -81.863725 17 Smithville, Ohio   http://www.artnews.com/2015/06/23/miriam-schapiro-pioneering-feminist-artist-dies-at-91/ Obituary of Miriam Sharpo     1345 Shie’s Quilting Progress   KM: Tell me about the quilting part, the process for you.    SS: For a long time I was hand sewing all my quilts from the late seventies on, and then I had a few attempts at machine quilting in 1990, when my husband, Jimmy, and I finally got married after fourteen years.    Shie describes her evolving quilting progress from hand stitching, attempts at machinery quilting finding new ways to incorporate an Airpen as a way to paint fine lines on quilts. She describes her struggles with her personal and various quilting processes.   airbrush ; Airpen ; beading ; blessing ; caffeine intolerance ; Embellishment techniques ; granddaughter ; hand quilting ; hand stitching ; Home sewing machine ; humor ; Knowledge transfer ; lotus pose ; machine quilting ; marriage ; painting ; quiltmaking process ; Teaching quiltmaking ; Technology in quiltmaking ; “Buddha Boy”         17             1663 More on the Potluck Quilt   I want to go back to the Potluck piece just really quick, because I never really talked about the wolves on that and the Buddha girls that are sitting on them. There is just a little more imagery there that I would like to talk about, if that's okay.    KM: Sure.     Shie elaborates on her Potluck Quilt design mentioning the symbolism in her personal tarot card decks and tarot quilts, comparing and contrasting traditional tarot works to her customized symbols.    Caroline Kennedy ; design ; fortune cookies ; iconography ; New York Times ; op-ed letter ; pairing knife ; Pyrex ; rainbow ; symbolism ; tarot ; wolves ; “Buddha Girl” ; “yellow dog”         17             1856 On Quilt Makers Embracing Obama   KM: Why do you think quiltmakers are embracing Obama so greatly?    SS: First of all, I think it is more art quilters than traditional quilters, and there is a difference there. I think that art quilters tend to be more funky, more liberal,    Shie shares her thought as to why quilt makers may be embracing Obama and his impact on them and as to why more liberal followers will be more creative with their quilting and why conservative follows may be less likely to create outside the traditional-quilting-comfort-zone.    Art quiltmaking ; Barack Obama ; Democratic Party ; International Quilt Festival ; John McCain ; liberal ; Quilt Purpose – Exhibition ; Quilt shows/exhibitions ; traditional quiltmaking ; Vicky Mangum ; “Obama Girl” ; “Political Patchwork”         17             2036 Bamboo Batting and Green Quilts Project   KM: You recently moved to using bamboo batting. Tell me a little bit about bamboo batting and why you like it.    SS: Just a real quick throw back to why I'm interested in green stuff, or to show that I was, I guess. In 1989 I started a project called The Green Quilts Project,    Shie discusses on her reasoning of why she likes bamboo batting over cotton batting and other variations. Being environmentally friendly is important to Shie, the symbolism involving that to &quot ; heal the world&quot ;  and the pros to using bamboo batting in general. Including her wishes for more environmentally friendly crafting products.   antibacterial ; bamboo batting ; batting/wadding ; China ; eco friendly ; environmentalism ; fabric paint ; fair trade ; Fairfield quilt batting ; Fiber - bamboo ; Fiber – Cotton ; Fiber – Polyester ; Green Quilts Project ; hand quilting ; meditation ; monocropping ; organic ; prayer ; respirator ; Technology in quiltmaking ; toxin         17     http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1184&amp ; context=jstae Blandy, Doug, Kristin G. Congdon, Laurie Hicks, Elizabeth Hoffman, and Don Krug. &quot ; The Green Quilt: An Example of Collective Eco-Action in Art Education.&quot ;  Accessed November 3, 2017. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1184&amp ; context=jstae.     2517 How Shie wants to be remembered   KM: How do you want to be remembered?    SS: It's really interesting. I've thought about that a lot because I have such a hard time transitioning from the woman who is known for all the hand work and the beading,   Shie briefly notes on what she would like to be remembered for after she has moved on in life or in the quilting community. She wants to be remembered as an artist who told stories that has made a difference in the world and she has improved the world. She doesn't want to be remembered as a person who did hand work and beading.   beading ; Embellishment techniques ; hand stitching ; improving the world ; stories         17     http://quiltalliance.net/qsos-images/OH44691-001_Shie_b.jpg Shie, Quilt One Piece, detail     2560 Promotion of website and classes   KM: Excellent. Is there anything that you would like to share that I haven't touched upon?    SS: No, just that anybody interested in my work can go to my site. I try to keep all my new work posted in the gallery of my website, www.turtlemoon.com if you don't remember the website name just Google &quot ; Susan Shie website&quot ;    Shie talks about her classes and what she is known for within her teachings.    airbrush ; Airpen ; biosphere ; drawing ; knowledge transfer ; painting ; Quilt Purpose - Artistic expression ; studio ; Teaching quiltmaking ; Website         17             2691 Shie on her garage door mural   KM: Tell me about your garage door.    SS: [laughs.] I haven't put it on my website yet. I have to do that really soon. That is the biggest painting that I have made since I made the high school prom murals that I watched being burned on a bonfire after the prom.   Shie discusses her painted garage mural and how it has livened up her community and how many people like it. It includes her and her family with Obama being projected like a big sun behind them. It is a staple of unique artwork in her neighborhood.    Barack Obama ; cats ; garage door ; Green Quilts Project ; landscape ; mural painting ; Statue of Liberty ; symbolism         17     http://www.turtlemoon.com/gallery08/Garage%20Door%20Mural%20full.htm Susan Shie, Door Mural      Oral History In this interview, Susan Shie discusses at length her quilt &quot ; The Potluck/ World: Card #21 in The Kitchen Tarot,&quot ;  one in her series of quilts based on tarot cards. This and other of her quilts feature political imagery from the 2008 presidential election. Her support of Barack Obama and the quilt she made featuring him in its imagery are important to understand her perspective on this time period. She also discusses her family, her interest in quilting, and her environmental advocacy.  Karen Musgrave (KM): This is Karen Musgrave and I am doing a Quilters&#039 ;  S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview with Susan Shie. Susan is in Wooster, Ohio and I&#039 ; m in Naperville, Illinois, so we are conducting this interview over the telephone. Today&#039 ; s date is December 15, 2008. It is now 10:18 in the morning, and Susan, thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview with me.     Susan Shie (SS): Thank you, Karen.    KM: Please tell me about the quilt you selected for the interview, which is &quot ; The Potluck/ World: Card #21 in The Kitchen Tarot.&quot ;     SS: Well I&#039 ; ve been doing this series on the &quot ; Kitchen Tarot&quot ;  since 1998, and at the beginning and for a long time, the deck wasn&#039 ; t political, and then in 2007 my interest moved to politics a lot more. I&#039 ; d been getting more political again, but it just got to be more and more so that it was in the work. By 2007 I was putting Obama in my Kitchen Tarot pieces.     The deck is 22 major cards now, and I&#039 ; ve just begun the 56 minor cards of the 78 total deck. This piece is probably my favorite of the Obama pieces. &quot ; The Potluck&quot ;  is my choice for the Kitchen Tarot to represent the World card in the traditional tarot deck, and the concept is Obama and Clinton during the primary election this year, bringing their gifts to the table that is a conceptual potluck meal of national and international, especially international people, because the whole world was watching, not just our presidential election, but also our primary election, and wondering what was going to happen with this Democratic party. And so this piece which, like always in my work, is a spontaneously planned, and then drawn and then written image, became Obama and Clinton carrying in their donations to a potluck meal.     As you look at the quilt, at the bottom is a large table with plates set on it for countries around the world. It&#039 ; s not a totally encompassing collection of names of countries. It&#039 ; s just as I thought them up as I worked. Sitting on the table is my archetype figure St Quilta the Comforter, who is becoming more and more important to me, as the world needs more and more healing. She is sort of the hostess of the conceptual potluck, and she is holding a huge bowl of something I&#039 ; ve used a lot in my work, which is Peace Porridge. Above her in the very center of the piece is a kitchen sink, and that represents a situation where we are putting in everything, that every effort is needed here. It&#039 ; s like we are getting out the big guns in the kitchen. My image for the big guns is the kitchen sink, because of that old cliché of using everything but the kitchen sink, where here we are using that, too. In fact this card almost was called &quot ; The Kitchen Sink,&quot ;  but I decided I really like this concept of a potluck meal and everyone coming together.     I didn&#039 ; t want to make this piece be all about Obama. I supported Obama right from the beginning, but I wanted to show this neck-and-neck energy of Obama and Clinton as they progressed through the primary. This piece was made from the beginning of January until the beginning of April in 2008.     The primary [race] was not really changing during that time. Nobody was getting ahead significantly. We didn&#039 ; t know who was going to win, and so I put them as equals in this piece, just because these energies are both coming in, and the world is looking at both of them, and we don&#039 ; t know which one is going to take over the Democratic candidacy - let alone which one might become president.     I use pies in my work as a symbol for blessings or gifts, and I decided that that is what they would carry in. Obama&#039 ; s pie has the word &quot ; Hope&quot ;  written on it, because that was one of his big things, and for Clinton I put &quot ; Faith&quot ;  on her pie, because I thought it didn&#039 ; t represent her as a religious icon to people, but rather showed how people have faith in her, her reputation. They knew who she was. They had a lot of faith in her as a woman, as someone bringing things that they could expect. Whereas with Obama, his energy is about change and hope. They are bringing this stuff in, and they really are the only people in the piece except St. Quilta, and two little blessing figures on the wolves that I will get back to, and in the center between Obama and Clinton there is a window. This window has shutters on it, and the figure standing in the window is the image that I brought from the traditional tarot deck World card. Many artists of my Baby Boomer generation have created tarot decks, using their own themes, but they usually reference this classic Waite-Rider deck from the early part of the 20th century.     The World card has this figure standing in this position within sort of a frame, and here it became a window. The figure here has that exact pose, but she&#039 ; s holding two wooden spoons, and she&#039 ; s wearing a chef&#039 ; s apron which has the title of the piece on it: &quot ; Card #21 The Kitchen Tarot,&quot ;  which is the subtitle.     After I painted that large World figure [and I&#039 ; m drawing with airbrush, very spontaneously.], after I drew her I realized that it looked like my granddaughter who is now four years old, but she was three and a half then. It&#039 ; s a little bit more adult version of her, but I thought this face is more like my granddaughter than often when I attempt drawing Eva. In the end this figure became my &quot ; Obama Girl,&quot ;  and I don&#039 ; t know if you know anything about the sort of cultural icon Obama Girl, but there is a young woman who has done a lot of YouTube videos as &quot ; Obama Girl,&quot ;  who became sort of a superhero who was doing things to promote Obama. It was all tongue-in-cheek stuff. It was playful, and it was fun, but there was a sexual overtone to it. When I made Eva into the &quot ; Obama Girl,&quot ;  I thought, &#039 ; Oh no. This maybe isn&#039 ; t good, because I don&#039 ; t want a sexual overtone with my granddaughter obviously.&#039 ;  But I realized at that point in thinking, that &quot ; Obama Girl&quot ;  is not just this woman who is doing the YouTube videos with the sexual overtone.   &quot ; Obama Girl&quot ;  is any woman who is supporting Obama, and when you read the text of this very large quilt (it&#039 ; s 85 inches by 76 inches), you will find out pretty fast that my leaning is very much toward Obama, not toward Clinton, but it is not there in the overall visual images. What I&#039 ; m saying about the &quot ; Obama Girl&quot ;  is that my granddaughter who is four is an &quot ; Obama Girl.&quot ;  My next door neighbor Olga who is one hundred, now she is one hundred and one, she is an &quot ; Obama Girl.&quot ;  And anybody in between, anybody can be an &quot ; Obama Girl.&quot ;  It is just someone who is a woman who is supporting Obama, not buying into that idea, that if you are a feminist, you have to support Clinton.     KM: Tell me about why making Obama art is important to you?    SS: Because I&#039 ; m a storyteller, but I&#039 ; m not anymore just a personal storyteller, I am doing a mixture of diary and social commentary. And I guess back in 2003 there was this shift in my work, from just personal diaries, from a lot of writing on my work about my own life and lives of people around me, and sort of overall cultural events in my life, to opening up to the political issues again. I was making a piece for an exhibition of political art, for which I was invited by the curator. To everybody who was tapped for this show, the curator said, &#039 ; I&#039 ; m not going to censor anything you say.&#039 ;  And this was around the time we were getting ready to go into Iraq the second time, the beginning of 2003. She promised that our work would be hung regardless of what we did. This was license to just open up, and as I opened up, and I was writing about things off the top of my head, and it was a very political piece, I realized in my writing that I had kind of shut down after the killings at Kent State.     I wasn&#039 ; t in the crowd at Kent State, when the killings happened in 1970, but I was there the weekend before, when all the trouble started with the students protesting the bombing of Cambodia, with the National Guard there on campus, and I&#039 ; d just found out I was pregnant. I&#039 ; d gone to school there in &#039 ; 68 and had dropped out and gotten married. And this was now 1970, and we were on campus, visiting my brother, and I really did not want to lose my baby to tear gas. But we couldn&#039 ; t get out, and they wouldn&#039 ; t let anybody leave campus. I left the next day, the Saturday before the killings happened on Monday, and I knew something really bad was going to happen. And I know that, had I stayed in school during that time, I probably would have been out on that hill protesting that Monday, because as a freshman there, I had joined SDS (Students for Democratic Society), and I had been involved in sit-ins and teach-ins and protests, war protests and protesting the Oakland Police coming to Kent State to recruit from our police academy. A lot of stuff back in 1968, but I&#039 ; d dropped out and gotten married. When those kids got killed, a lot of people like me sort of gave up for a while about politics, because the message we got was: if you talked your politics, if you did something about it, they might shoot you. They might kill you, and I think that was the message that they wanted us to get.     I went underground for a while. I focused on my family, on my baby girl, Gretchen. I didn&#039 ; t get depressed so much about politics. I just disconnected from a lot of that stuff. I did what I could, but I didn&#039 ; t go out and march anymore, and things like that. I was amazed when the war ended, because the protesting had actually turned people around, to understand that we had to save the Vietnamese people. We had to save the American soldiers. We had to get out of that war.     But anyway as I was working on this piece in 2003, I realized that I had shut up about my politics, and I realized that if all of us who had these strong feelings weren&#039 ; t presenting them in our own little personal bully pulpits in our own artwork, then we aren&#039 ; t helping. And I decided at that point that my work would become political again.     I had been excited about Obama since I saw him give his keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004. So I had known about Obama for a while, and in 2007 a friend of mine told me that she thought that Obama and the Dalai Lama had a lot in common. And so I got to thinking about that and I made a piece called &quot ; Olama: Two Guys and a Pie,&quot ;  and that became my first Obama piece in which I did a lot of research about him. I went to Wikipedia, read his whole biography and did a lot of note taking, and ended up making this very large piece about both of them.     When he decided to run for president I just started documenting everything he was doing, and of course a lot of people became pretty much fixated on what he was up to, and I was one of them. And since my work is all about my personal feelings and what I am focused on right now, that just came out in my writing and also in my imagery.     KM: What are your plans for &quot ; The Potluck/World&quot ; ?    SS: It&#039 ; s been in several exhibitions already. The next thing it&#039 ; s going to is the Obama Quilters exhibition, that Sue Walen is doing at Montgomery University&#039 ; s Cafritz Center in Silver Spring, Maryland in February and March 2009. That&#039 ; s a challenge quilt exhibition that she started out with forty people, and I think she might be up to sixty. She invited people to contact her, if they wanted to make a piece or had a piece about Obama, and it would be shown, or they&#039 ; d try to show it in the space they have. I&#039 ; ve submitted three pieces for that, knowing that they may not all be shown, especially since my pieces are pretty large. But I&#039 ; m very excited about that show.     Also, &quot ; The Potluck&quot ;  is part of my &quot ; Kitchen Tarot&quot ;  series so it&#039 ; s going to be part of a deck of twenty-two cards, the actual tarot cards in a deck of major cards called &quot ; The Kitchen Tarot.&quot ;  However from my &quot ; Kitchen Tarot&quot ;  actual deck, I&#039 ; ve decided to crop down my pictures to keep the politics out of it, because you don&#039 ; t know who is doing the tarot reading, but traditionally it is not a political thing. So this deck started out in 1998. It was totally apolitical then, and now it&#039 ; s gotten extremely political, and I&#039 ; m using the magic of Photoshop to crop each political piece down to a good composition of not-political imagery. That works for me, and in a 3½ by 5 inch image card you can&#039 ; t read any of my tiny airpen writing, which is political.     I use an airpen and fabric paint to write all over my work, but it is like the size of writing you do in a letter, if you&#039 ; re writing a letter on paper to someone. If you shrink it down from this larger size, the lettering becomes little lines of patterns rather than legible writing. You can&#039 ; t tell there&#039 ; s political stuff in the writing anymore, at that size. It&#039 ; s a form of sabotage to me because it is a very political thing, but hopefully they won&#039 ; t even notice that in the tarot cards, because they won&#039 ; t be able to read the super-tiny writing.     Obama and Clinton are cropped out of the Potluck piece for the tarot deck card, and the only thing of this piece that&#039 ; s going to be left of my full quilt in that tarot card is that central figure in the window, which is also in the tradition deck. That&#039 ; s what you&#039 ; ll see in that card: that central figure.     This decision allowed me to realize that I could go on doing very political work and my tarot cards, though there was a point where I was afraid that I was going to have to quit doing the tarot deck, because I wasn&#039 ; t going to quit doing the Obama work. I plan to keep doing Obama in my imagery and in my writing as long as he is active in politics. So I thought maybe I have to stop the Kitchen Tarot work now, having made the twenty-two major cards as quilts. After ten years maybe I would stop and just do the more political art. But I really do want to keep going with the Kitchen Tarot, too, so the cropping tool in Photoshop will be actively used to keep the deck apolitical visually. Then if people come and see my work on my website, who are brought into it from &quot ; The Kitchen Tarot,&quot ;  they will find out what I&#039 ; m up to otherwise.    KM: What is your website?    SS: www.turtlemoon.com.    KM: Tell me about your interest in quiltmaking.    SS: I had a mother who was raised Mennonite, who had roots in the Amish culture. Her grandfather and grandmother jumped over and became Mennonites, so she was raised Mennonite. She and her mother made all their family&#039 ; s clothes and the quilts and things like that. I grew up as a little girl going to church with her on Wednesdays once a month to the Ladies Aid Society at East Chippewa Church of the Brethren, which is a church very similar to the Mennonites. I used to go to this little church near Smithville, Ohio, where at Ladies&#039 ;  Aid, all the women sat around a quilt frame and talked and gossiped and laughed and worked on these quilts to raise money for service work that the church did, outreach to help people, disaster relief, etc. I remember sitting under the quilt frame and watching the left hands and some people&#039 ; s right hands, the hand that is underneath to tell where the quilting is going, to tell when the needle comes down through. I would wonder how on earth they could sew when their hands were holding still. I&#039 ; m sitting under there like a little kid sitting under a tent. That is my first memory of quilting.     As I grew up, I learned to sew as a little girl and made all my clothes with my mother. She made my clothes up through high school, and then I took over, but I made my doll clothes and things that I wanted to make. I took 4-H and home ec and all that, and I was painting as a little girl and doing a lot of writing as a little girl. I worked with clay, too. Later, these things all came together in my art work when I was in college as an art student.     In college in the late 70s, a woman named Miriam Schapiro came to my school, the College of Wooster, and did a residency a couple of times, and both times I interacted with her a lot. She was a feminist, and she was running around the country giving lectures, meeting women artists and telling them to take what they are learning from their mothers and put that in their art work if they want to make a feminist statement. She was making the point that all of this beautiful art work we made was art. It wasn&#039 ; t just women&#039 ; s work.     I, as a painter, decided to start sewing my paintings. We didn&#039 ; t have the term art quilt back then. This was the late seventies. There wasn&#039 ; t the term art quilt until the mid-eighties. I didn&#039 ; t quite know what to call them. I just called them paintings. I got permission from my prof to stop working on stretched canvas, and that way the other benefit was: I was able to take the work home rolled up in a bag and work on it and bring it back, instead of having to drag a huge, stretched canvas around, which I couldn&#039 ; t do. I had the joy of being able to merge all of these things that I had done since I was a little girl - painting, sewing, writing, and work with clay, while I was embellishing my work quite a bit with clay and beadings.     I&#039 ; ve gotten away from that now. I&#039 ; m really back kind of full circle to the paintings, and the only thing different from what I was doing back in my junior high days in my bedroom with the canvas, is that now I&#039 ; m working on a lighter weight cotton. And I&#039 ; m merging my sewing and my writing into my paintings. I feel really good about this, because it&#039 ; s like this one form is connecting all of these energies that I like to work with. I&#039 ; m making what I consider to be time capsules now.     If I pull out a quilt from, let&#039 ; s say 2006, and start reading it, it would bring back all of these memories as if I were reading a diary. When I write on my work I&#039 ; m never copying from a diary. People get that idea, but I&#039 ; m writing off the top of my head, exactly what is on my mind right then, and I date my entries a lot of times. Almost always. Later on they become interesting to just pop in and look at, but I couldn&#039 ; t stand reading the whole thing at once, nor could I ever stand to do a transcript of one of them.     I&#039 ; ve had a few art historians get kind of upset with me, because I don&#039 ; t make a transcript of my work. What has become my habit, to make up for that, is that I write notes about what I write. Let&#039 ; s say I write for a half hour with my airpen, and then I turn around, and I have a piece of paper there, and I write down a little sentence about what I just wrote about on the painting. It&#039 ; s a list of the topics that are in that particular art quilt painting. So I can go back now with my newer pieces, and I can reference their topics. I can say, &#039 ; Well, this is what was going on, and this is what was going on, and this happened, and I wrote about this.&#039 ;  But that is as close as I&#039 ; m going to get to doing a transcript, because the time to make a transcript would be the time I could be making some art. That is not going to happen for me. I spend enough time on paperwork!    KM: Tell me about the quilting part, the process for you.    SS: For a long time I was hand sewing all my quilts from the late seventies on, and then I had a few attempts at machine quilting in 1990, when my husband, Jimmy, and I finally got married after fourteen years. I&#039 ; d gotten a new sewing machine after our wedding, and I decided to use the sewing machine on my quilts. I thought it would make them go faster, but that was a real failed experiment, because the machine sewing seemed so flat, and I was into dimension. I wanted really beautiful sewing with a good texture, so I pretty much stayed away from machine quilting for a long time.     Then in &#039 ; 03, in the beginning of the year, I started working with an airpen, and all my painting life, since I was a child, I had tried to make very sharp, very crisp lines with a brush and had always failed. I never could find anything in the way of a pen or brush of any kind that made thin lines that I liked on a painting. At the end of &#039 ; 02, Jimmy got me an airpen. [www.silkpaint.com.] I didn&#039 ; t know anything about it, and in &#039 ; 03 I started working with that and started to learn to make it behave. It took me about a year to make it work well with the fabric paint. It&#039 ; s a tricky instrument! Now I teach it. I&#039 ; ve been teaching it for about five years now in my classes, along with my airbrush and brush painting and quilting work.     Anyway, this airpen changed things to the point where I could quit hand sewing over my writing in my quilts, because the crispy little line writing that I could do with the airpen is very rich and very black and very permanent, because it&#039 ; s pigment paint.    Now I had the problem that my background hand stitching was getting in the way of my writing. The stitching was too big and causing the writing to be overshadowed, so I decided that maybe it was time for me to go to machine quilting. In &#039 ; 04 I started to. I backed off from hand quilting slowly first, because I&#039 ; d been doing very elaborate, very dense quilting and a lot of beading, but by &#039 ; 04 I started to back off, to the point where I didn&#039 ; t even want to use the beads anymore.     Starting in late 2004, I was taking care of my baby granddaughter for a year and a half, and by 2006 my fingertips were getting very numb. I understand now that part of what was causing it probably was caffeine. Now I know I can&#039 ; t tolerate caffeine very well, and when I have chocolate or especially coffee or caffeinated tea, I get this numbness in my fingers that keeps them from functioning very well for hand work. I think the numbness came from too much hand sewing, too!!     So that was kind of a blessing in disguise. It pushed me to going over to the machine sewing. When I had first started to machine sew in 2004 my friends all told me I couldn&#039 ; t do that, the big part of my work was the beading and the hand stitching. I really didn&#039 ; t want to believe that, but it was a lot of peer pressure that seems to be effective with most of us. I was confused about it for a while, but the fingertips&#039 ;  numbness pushed me to switch sewing methods.    By 2005 in the middle of the year I had made my first really large piece with the machine quilting and it was sold into John M. Walsh, III&#039 ; s art quilt collection, which was a green light for me. I just decided he could have had any of my quilts he wanted, but he chose that one, so it&#039 ; s all about the painting and the writing, it&#039 ; s not about the sewing and that was it.     After that piece I started putting one line of hand stitching all the way around the border edge of all my machine sewn pieces. It is a little nod to my old hand sewing, and it also helps the border edge lay a little flatter, but it is mainly a little bit of an excuse for me to do some hand sewing, and it is just enough. There is no beading in these. I sew one little Buddha boy bead on the corner of each piece, and for a while I&#039 ; ve had a little Buddha girl bead that I sew with the Buddha boy. The Buddha boy, I call him my green temple Buddha boy, I put one on each quilt. They are plastic beads from a bead store in Santa Barbara, California, called Beads, and they are just a little, maybe one inch tall, maybe less, green Buddha sitting in lotus style. I started out with 77 of them, when I bought all they had, when I was in the store. I thought I would have this series of 77 pieces with this one bead on them, but as I got near the end of them, I called the store, and I ended up with 200 more of them, and I think I can get more. I can keep making quilts with Buddha boys on them for a long time. It is a little blessing bead and also to me, it is a little bit humorous that you want beads on my work? Okay, here is a bead, but you only get this one. [laughs.]     KM: [laughs.] That is cute.    SS: He is always there. The Buddha Boy is always that little blessing guy, down in the corner of my work.     I want to go back to the Potluck piece just really quick, because I never really talked about the wolves on that and the Buddha girls that are sitting on them. There is just a little more imagery there that I would like to talk about, if that&#039 ; s okay.    KM: Sure.    SS: There are two wolves, and they&#039 ; re big and they&#039 ; re on a table, and they&#039 ; re yellow dogs. That&#039 ; s another little secret: that the wolves are yellow dog Democrats - someone who would rather vote for a yellow dog than vote for a Republican. So, the yellow dog wolves. One of them says Trust on its body and the other one says Tolerance on its body. They are the guardians of the potluck. They are there to make sure when the world comes together for this potluck, there will be trust and tolerance.     Each one of them has a little Buddha girl sitting on its back with a peace symbol on it. She&#039 ; s radiating peace energy. Also there are shutters on the door, or the window that the World figure&#039 ; s in, that Eva figure. On the shutters there are little heads of people in rainbow colors, each one a color of the rainbow, and that&#039 ; s the idea of incorporating people from all of the world, and all races and all cultures coming to this potluck thing.     There are six fortune cookies on this piece. Six is a number for success, and I&#039 ; ve always loved putting fortune cookies into my work, way back to my early college days. So I put six of them into Potluck, and they ended up, most of their writings are transcripts here. There&#039 ; s a breaking of my own little rule, of not copying things! I was so impressed with Caroline Kennedy&#039 ; s op-ed letter to the New York Times, endorsing Obama for president. On the first fortune cookie I tried to paraphrase, by using some ellipses, leaving out other parts of this letter. And then I realized I could continue this letter on the other fortune cookies. So you progress reading through the fortune cookies, and you read her entire op-ed letter through that. That was sort of a good luck thing for Obama [using fortune cookies for images, as I think of them as good luck symbols.].     Around the large figure in the window there are four symbols in the corners. If you look at the top left corner and go around the corners clockwise, there&#039 ; s a paring knife—and that is my image I’m going to be using as the minor cards of the kitchen tarot and I&#039 ; m going to have paring knifes instead of swords. Then in the top right have a green pyrex measuring cups and they will be my symbol for the cup suit in my kitchen tarot.  As you look at the bottom right there’s a wooden spoon: my symbol for the wand and the bottom left corner there’s a potholder. I’m going to be using potholders as my icon for the for the symbols of coins.      KM: Why do you think quiltmakers are embracing Obama so greatly?    SS: First of all, I think it is more art quilters than traditional quilters, and there is a difference there. I think that art quilters tend to be more funky, more liberal, probably a lot more Democrat. Traditional quilters are often more conservative, not saying anything bad about traditional quilters. Remember that my mother and grandmother were traditional quilts, but my mom would be an Obama Girl, no doubt. [both laugh.] And my dad would love Obama, too! But anyway, I think traditional quilters aren&#039 ; t telling literal stories in their work for the most part. That is another big difference. They are usually working with beautiful patterns and patchwork or appliqué. They&#039 ; re focusing on the beauty of the image and not telling a story of any kind. I know there are exceptions to that, but that is just a stereotype that I&#039 ; m throwing out for making this reason. Also it&#039 ; s interesting that when Vicky Mangum sent out a call for quilts for a political exhibition at the International Quilt Festival this last fall. I think it was called &quot ; Political Patchwork.&quot ;     KM: Yes it was.    SS: She sent out calls for quilts and she wanted this to be shown right before the election, and she wanted to have a full representation of both sides. She wanted Republican. She wanted stuff from the primary elections and everything, and her problem was she couldn&#039 ; t find any McCain quilts. And she says to me, &#039 ; Where can I get a hold of somebody who is doing a McCain quilt?&#039 ;  I told her that I haven&#039 ; t seen any art quilters doing McCain quilts, and I think this tells you something about these art quilters. They tend to be liberal people who are artists first and quilters second. And they tend to be liberal. So you&#039 ; re going to have a hard time finding McCain art quilters.     Maybe there are traditional quilters who are making them. Maybe she found something in the end. I didn&#039 ; t go to Festival, so I didn&#039 ; t see the exhibition. I don&#039 ; t know what she had there, but I just remember that very distinctly that she couldn&#039 ; t find McCain quilters and could find a lot of Obama quilters. I think we are risk takers, people who are interested in forward thinking, we are liberal, some of us are even radical, and we just naturally fall in line with Obama and his energy.     KM: You recently moved to using bamboo batting. Tell me a little bit about bamboo batting and why you like it.    SS: Just a real quick throw back to why I&#039 ; m interested in green stuff, or to show that I was, I guess. In 1989 I started a project called The Green Quilts Project, which was an international project for fifteen years in the end. In the beginning I thought it would be forever, but I wore out, and in 2004 I ended it. But you can still find it on my website. There&#039 ; s a link from the bottom of any page on my website to The Green Quilts Project. It stopped in 2004, but you can read some of its history there. My best friend, Robin Schwalb, who&#039 ; s an art quilter from New York City, and I worked on the project together for those fifteen years. Robin made optional hand silk screened labels for the quilts, and you could also make your own labels. We have a big archive of slides of the work.     The idea was to use quilting energy in a cosmic sense, as a metaphor, as mental, emotional energy to help heal the world. You&#039 ; d make your quilt and you didn&#039 ; t have anyone judge whether or not it was a Green Quilt. You&#039 ; d decide that yourself. So the idea was to incorporate prayer, meditation, energy, whatever you wanted to call it, for healing of the earth, into the making your piece. Most of those quilts were storytelling quilts. It just naturally was that way, there were a few people who put in patchwork, abstract, or geometric quilts, but for the most part they were something that you could look at, and you could tell what was up from the imagery.    You could work on anything from the earth in general, down to even a specific person or animal that you wanted to have healing for, or for a species, or for water or air. It could be anything involving the microcosm or the macrocosm of the earth. I quit doing the Green Quilts project in 2004, simply because most of the people who were going to make a Green Quilt had done it.     Some artists made a bunch of pieces for the project, but many sent one or two images in slides. it was getting old and I was running out of steam. Like you say: we do too much multitasking. Then we try to simplify, so I ended the project. Fast forward now to 2007. I guess it was this last year, and I was asked to test this bamboo batting that Fairfield Processing was coming out with, because they had read about my Green Quilts Project somewhere and thought I would be a good person to be one of the testers. I just really leaped on this, because I was so excited to have a product that would be more user friendly for the earth. I was using polyester batting before that for a long time, but when I switched to machine quilting, I could go to cotton batting because, even though it was dryer and it would drag, it didn&#039 ; t matter with machine work. I wasn&#039 ; t hand stitching any more, so I had gone over to a cotton batting.     Anyway I tested this bamboo batting for them, and I loved it. They had one hundred percent bamboo, they had a batting that was eighty percent bamboo and twenty percent organic cotton, and one that was fifty/fifty bamboo and cotton. And they all handled about the same. It was really interesting. I think that the difference would be: if you had the one hundred percent bamboo, you probably would see no creasing in your quilts after they were folded and unfolded, because bamboo is so flexible, and it bends over, and it unbends so well.     This bamboo batting is also interesting, because my husband is an avid fly fisherman and he only fishes with bamboo rods that people he knows make. They are just sort of the snob culture of the elitists of fly fishing, and they&#039 ; re really into these lovely works of art in themselves, these bamboo rods. They&#039 ; re nothing like the ones where you take a piece of bamboo, and you fish with it. It is a whole composition, reconstruction of the bamboo, and it is amazing. But anyway, this was also a way for me to have another connection to my husband. He&#039 ; s working with bamboo, I&#039 ; m working with bamboo. So that&#039 ; s great.     Here are the cool things about the bamboo in terms of the earth. Bamboo is extremely fast growing, probably the fastest growing grass in the world and it&#039 ; s a cross between a grass and a tree, and they can make fiber out of it after one growing season. The thing that I also love about it, like I said, it folds over and doesn&#039 ; t crease like cotton does. Cotton is really crease problematic. You can quilt this stuff six to eight inches apart, which I don&#039 ; t do, but that just shows you how this stuff isn&#039 ; t going to crumble like cotton would. It really holds together well. It is slippery, the needle goes in and out of it very nicely compared to cotton. So the fifty/fifty product that they came out with was a little bit creasy, a little bit of a drag on your needle, but not nearly as much as with cotton batting.    I just love that it&#039 ; s renewable and it&#039 ; s naturally anti-bacterial. So they don&#039 ; t put any crud on these batts, don&#039 ; t add any chemical stuff to make it anti-bacterial, which is what they were doing with polyester for a long time. I don&#039 ; t know if they still are.     One thing they need to do is to make sure they&#039 ; re getting the bamboo from a fair trade commitment with some farmers who are doing some holistic work with their farming, so they aren&#039 ; t raping the earth. I think we are not there yet. I think China especially is mono-cropping its bamboo, which is really very harmful to the environment. Whenever you mono-crop anything in a big way it is not good. Animals don&#039 ; t eat bamboo, so it is harmful to the ecosystem to only have bamboo growing. I hope they can come up with somebody who is going to grow the bamboo responsibly and be more conscientious of farming a variety of crops together. I&#039 ; m not a farmer, so I don&#039 ; t have the answers on that. I just know I love working with bamboo batting, and it makes me feel that it&#039 ; s a lot better statement.     I also wish somebody would invent some fabric paint that is not petroleum plastic based, because now all we have to work with are fabric paints that work really well, are very beautiful and easy to handle, but they are chemically nasty. And we need something: we need some organic fabric paints, if that&#039 ; s ever going to be possible. In the meantime, I always lecture my students about using up all their paint, wiping their brushes on rags, not on paper towels, not sloshing brushes around in water to clean them, and trying to keep as much of the paint as possible from going back into the water supply which is something that as children we were never taught. I also lecture my students a lot about using a respirator when they&#039 ; re working with the airbrush or they&#039 ; re heat setting any of their fabric paints. They should use a respirator when they are working with any art supplies that have chemical changes that go on or that have fumes. I&#039 ; ve been sort of the queen of respirator advocacy since the late &#039 ; 70s I guess, when I was kind of treated like a nit-wit for suggesting to artists that you should wear a respirator. Luckily now it&#039 ; s become a lot more acceptable among students. They are giving it a lot more, they are working with toxins. Less toxins you have to work with the better and I look forward to eco friendly art products becoming a trend more, not just bamboo batting and not just recycled paper.     KM: How do you want to be remembered?    SS: It&#039 ; s really interesting. I&#039 ; ve thought about that a lot because I have such a hard time transitioning from the woman who is known for all the hand work and the beading, to the woman who is hopefully known for the stories and the images of the stories. I&#039 ; ve decided that I don&#039 ; t need for anybody to remember that I did all that intense hand sewing or all that beautiful beading. I want those pieces to be saved and archived and remembered, but I want to be remembered as an artist who told stories that made a difference in the world, that helped improve the world. That&#039 ; s what I care about the most for my art.    KM: Excellent. Is there anything that you would like to share that I haven&#039 ; t touched upon?    SS: No, just that anybody interested in my work can go to my site. I try to keep all my new work posted in the gallery of my website, www.turtlemoon.com if you don&#039 ; t remember the website name just Google &quot ; Susan Shie website&quot ;  and it will come up. It&#039 ; s Turtle Moon Studios. I teach at my home and I teach around the world. I teach really strange, but exciting art camps at my house in a program that I describe as a biosphere, where up to five students come and live with my husband and me for a week at a time. We have a five day class that is bracketed by the two travel days. Each student has their own bedroom at our house, and we work in our home studios, with 24 hour access. My home&#039 ; s the only place where I teach airbrush, which is too big and bulky equipment for me to take to other places. And I can&#039 ; t work with a large group of students with airbrush, because it requires too much one-on-one for that.     You come here and learn airbrush, airpen, and regular brush painting. And you learn the most important thing that I teach: that everyone is an artist, and that you can draw, and you can write, and you can paint - even though you were probably told, when you were a small child, that you couldn&#039 ; t do those things. Somewhere in between small child and adult, you gave up on drawing, and my message is that drawing is an acquired skill, just like any other acquired skill, like playing piano. I want people to learn that they can express themselves, and they can make art that is valid. And it just happens that I use airpen, airbrush, brush painting, and writing to help you learn that, but it could be a lot of things. I want to be known as the person who helped a lot of people realize their own artist selves and become able to spontaneously work without being so judgmental of themselves.     KM: Tell me about your garage door.    SS: [laughs.] I haven&#039 ; t put it on my website yet. I have to do that really soon. That is the biggest painting that I have made since I made the high school prom murals that I watched being burned on a bonfire after the prom. [laughs.] It was quite a shock. I think those murals were nine feet tall and I think this one, I haven&#039 ; t measured this, but it is a double garage door and I think it is seventeen feet plus all the frame work around. You know, there is a big frame around the door. I painted that too, so I think in the end it is about eight feet tall and probably about twenty two feet wide including the frame    I painted it with the theme in mind, &quot ; Personal Landscapes,&quot ;  because my local artist group, WAGE, which is an acronym for Wayne Artists Group Effort, has that theme for our upcoming show. That is my little artists&#039 ;  support group for my area. The theme for our exhibition coming up this January/February is personal landscapes so my personal landscape is my husband Jimmy and me and our house on one side of the garage door, and it bleeds over to my daughter, Gretchen, her husband Mike and their daughter Eva who live in Lakewood, Ohio, an hour from us right up by Lake Erie, and their house. And all of our cats are in the mural, and the houses, the people, and the cats are entwined. And coming up behind Jimmy and me is a giant Barrack Obama head and he is rising over the horizon like a big sun. And next to him what started out to the chimney on our house, ended up being the Statue of Liberty, who is kind of leaning into Obama.     I used the best house paint I could find, and I had these Createx liquid pigments that I had bought years and years ago, that I used to make all my colors out of the white house paint. It is hopefully going to hold up longer than my front door painting did. My front door mural is now sitting inside my breezeway, and I have a new door on my front door that is not a mural. That&#039 ; s the first thing you see on my website: that old door mural. When we took it down and put up a regular house door, lots of people thought we&#039 ; d moved away, we&#039 ; d died, or something.    When I started painting the Obama mural, people would stop, even the first day when all I had done was draw the outlines of it on with a brush, people would stop and say, &#039 ; You don&#039 ; t know me, but I&#039 ; m so happy to see that you&#039 ; re putting art on your house again. I miss your front door mural so much.&#039 ;  This is a very middle class, sedate neighborhood from the late sixties. It&#039 ; s one of those neighborhoods that doesn&#039 ; t have sidewalks, but now the trees are big, and one generation is moving off to nursing homes or dying, and the next generation is coming in with their little kids. So it&#039 ; s one of those kind of neighbors where it is pretty conservative, to be honest, and I was so amazed that all through the making of this mural, which took me a month, people would stop in or people would yell encouragement from their cars. One time some guy just stopped and yelled, &#039 ; Go Obama!&#039 ;  [laughs.] I was really happy to hear that in my neighborhood.     It has been really nice, because a lot of people have told me that they are so happy to see the art back. I&#039 ; ve had people who assumed that if Obama didn&#039 ; t win, I would paint him out and I said, &#039 ; No, no! That&#039 ; s never going to happen.&#039 ;  The other day I had a woman who told me that she just knew I painted him in, after he won the election. I said, &#039 ; No, no. He was in the composition from the very beginning and he will stay there.&#039 ;  It&#039 ; s a very upbeat piece, full of words and symbols about peace and love, besides stories about all of us.    The writing on it is not done with airpen, which would not work on a vertical surface. You have to use airpen with the work lying flat. I used the smallest hand brush that I could, to do the writing, but I had to write fairly large, because I couldn&#039 ; t get a small enough line for tiny writing. And I decided not to use black paint, because I didn&#039 ; t want to make the mural get really dark. So the writing is in colors. They are just enough darker than the background color they&#039 ; re on, that they show up.     The weirdest thing about it is that the mural kind of glows, like in the evening and at night when lights hit it, or even walking past it in the daytime. It&#039 ; s got this glow I really can&#039 ; t understand, that must come from this white house paint I used. It&#039 ; s glowing out through the colors I mixed into it, but it&#039 ; s a very beautiful glow that makes me feel like it&#039 ; s got the kind of energy that I talked about with The Green Quilts Project, where I said that what we would be creating a conceptual blanket around the earth with these quilts. There would be this layer of energy where each one of these quilts would be like a storage battery, holding all this good energy, and that the earth could tap into that. I feel like that is what my garage mural means to me, that there is this energy there for hope and change and love and peace. A lot of peace symbols all over it because I&#039 ; m a pro-peace, anti-war person from way back, and that will never change. That is incorporated in the mural. It doesn&#039 ; t hit you over the head, but it&#039 ; s incorporated into what I hope is a very loving image.     KM: I think this is a great way to end and I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to do this interview with me.     SS: Thank you, Karen, I am so happy to do it.    KM: We are going to conclude our interview at 11:08.     2017 Quilt Alliance. All Rights Reserved. audio   0 http://quiltalliance.netBOQ-003Shie.xml BOQ-003Shie.xml      ",yes,"Barack Obama",,"Martha Sielman",,"Barack Obama,Politics","http://qsos.quiltalliance.org/files/original/551d4306ca4d98ef73894c3de579dcc6.jpg,http://qsos.quiltalliance.org/files/original/1d58c80a440934192b7ca04400c6c435.jpg","Oral History","Barack Obama Quilt QSOS",1,0
"Ricky Tims",,,,,,,,,,,,"Oral History",QSOS-080,,,"Barbara Beck","Ricky Tims",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Elaine Johnson",https://quiltalliance.net/ohms-viewer-master/viewer.php?cachefile=QSOS-080.xml,audio,11/3/00,,"    5.4      Ricky Tims QSOS-080         Quilt Alliance’s Quilters' S.O.S.- Save Our Stories Oral History Project: International Quilt Festival Quilt Alliance    Ricky Tims Barbara Beck   2:|33(8)|53(4)|90(9)|111(13)|137(1)|175(4)|203(3)|228(8)|264(2)|292(6)|325(6)|347(10)|374(14)|407(11)|437(3)|462(10)|496(4)|526(8)|561(1)|583(10)     0   https://quiltalliance.net/qsos-audio/QSOS-080_Tims.mp3  Other         audio          Oral History    Barbara Beck (BB): I&#039 ; m Barbara Beck and we&#039 ; re at the Houston Quilt Festival  interviewing Ricky Sims. Wrong?    Jo Francis Greenlaw (JFG): It&#039 ; s Ricky Tims.    BB: Tims.    Ricky Tims (RT): T-i-m-s, it&#039 ; s Tims with one &#039 ; m,&#039 ;  thank you very much.    BB: Thank you and it&#039 ; s 3:40, November 3, 2000. I&#039 ; m glad to have you here.    RT: Thank you very much.    BB: Yes, you make quilts.    RT: Yes maam, I do.    BB: Tell me about your quilt which quilt did you bring today?    RT: Well I--the main quilt I brought for you to see today is a quilt that is a  new quilt of mine it&#039 ; s called &#039 ; The Beat Goes On&#039 ;  and you&#039 ; re wanting to see this?    BB: Yes, yes we are. Come on and let&#039 ; s spread it out. [rustling from quilt.]    Tell me about this quilt.    RT: I&#039 ; ll tell you about the design of the quilt first. The design of the quilt  is a central heart which is sort of string pieced together in red hand-dyed  fabrics. Surrounding that heart is sort of a turquoise blue and chartreuse green  ribbon that&#039 ; s just wrapping around it and then there is a rainbow colored ribbon  that just flows through the whole surface of the piece. The entire quilt is made  from hand-dyed fabrics and then it is quilted with sort of flowers that look  like they might have been flowers from the sixties and then stipple quilted in  between that. The quilting is mostly metallic threads but not all metallic  threads and that&#039 ; s the design of the quilt. The name of the quilt is called &#039 ; The  Beat Goes On&#039 ;  and I made this quilt--I began making this quilt eight days after  I had quadruple bypass surgery. I had the surgery on April the twenty-fourth of  this year, 2000, and eight days later I was working on this quilt and finished  the top four days later and then I quilted it. It was to commemorate that  significant event in my life. I was home five days after the surgery. I had  written my thank you notes and I said, &#039 ; I&#039 ; m going crazy sitting in this chair, I  can sit in my chair and sew.&#039 ;  My dad who was also a quilter. Hint-future  question--my dad who was also a quilter was there and my mom was there. They  were taking care of me as I was recuperating so when I went down into that  studio eight days afterwards I did not know what I wanted to do but I knew I  wanted to sew and less than five or ten minutes later I had drawn three or four  little stylized hearts and I thought that I&#039 ; d just make a little heart quilt and  by noon that day I had pieced the entire center heart. Drew it full size on the  freezer paper and started string piecing it onto the paper. Now when I do that  technique I typically tear my fabric strips and just organize them so then I can  have them all ready to go to just flip and sew, I don&#039 ; t need to have the rotary  cutter to do those strips. But every time I would fold the paper back and trim  off the seam allowances to the proper size it need to be I would have this  little leftover scrap of fabric that was maybe a quarter of an inch wide or  something and had these little strings. I would turn around to sew the next one  and turn back around and it would be gone, and that&#039 ; s because my dad sat there  the entire four days and took every little fabric scrap and put it into the  trash. So, I never had one string or one stray thread I had a perfectly clean  work area for those four days. And that was pretty fun and I give my mom credit  for this quilt too, because while I was working on this she was upstairs making  me healthy meals for me to recover from the surgery so I called it the &quot ; The Beat  Goes On&quot ;  obviously because after the surgery and I woke up and came through all  of that, &#039 ; my heart is still beating.&#039 ;  Often times my quilts are named after some  musical element, not always, but many many times after having grownup as a  musician and a professional musician I use musical titles. I was reminded while  working on this of the Sonny and Cher song from the sixties &quot ; The Beat Goes On&quot ;   so that&#039 ; s how it got its title which is also actually trapuntoed into the  surface of the quilt.    BB: This is just beautiful.    RT: Thank you.    BB: This is just beautiful. It&#039 ; s just terrific so tell me what are your plans  for this quilt?    RT: Well the first plan I had for this quilt was to enter it into the show today  here at the IQA. [International Quilt Association.] I entered this quilt and my  other quilt. I entered two quilts into the show. Only one of them got in. This  was the reject from the show. The one that got in won the Pfaff Machine Artistry  award for $5000 so you go from here to here ya know you might get one in and you  might not get one in but, anyway, that&#039 ; s the story behind this particular quilt.    BB: Tell me about when you started quilting?    RT: How I got involved in quilting?    BB: Yes.    RT: I began quilting in 1991 as the result of acquiring a sewing machine from my  granny. My granny was my mother&#039 ; s mother. Her name was Bertie Marie Newsom and  she lived for years in North Texas in a place called Lake Kickapoo. I was born  in Wichita Falls, Texas so I wasn&#039 ; t far from Lake Kickapoo and I spent most of  my time with my granny. I loved being at the lake, fishing and swimming, and  working in her garden. When I was a child, I remember her sewing on her Kenmore  sewing machine. She made nothing that I remember that was fancy in the way of a  quilt or a garment. She made practical things and she patched things and she  reused things. And when she did make a quilt it was chunks of scraps sewn  together usually the filling was done with a wool army blanket and the back  might have been a flannel and then she would tie those quilts together and they  were very heavy. We used them to sleep under in the cold North Texas winters and  we also used them to pull heavy furniture across the floor but in 1991 we are  all living in Wichita Falls. My granny had become a widow and we built a house  for her across the street from us. In 1979, Wichita Falls had a tornado that  tore our neighborhood down and it was after that, that we rebuilt our house but  we also rebuilt a house for her that my granny moved into so she lived there  from &#039 ; 79 until &#039 ; 91. In 1991, I was living in St. Louis, Missouri doing music  work there professionally and she had been a widow for several years. She got a  phone call-- she&#039 ; s 83 years old--she gets a phone call from a fellow by the name  of Pete Hudgeons who lived in Lubbock, Texas. Pete is 87 and he had become a  widower and she had not seen this man in at least 15 years and he proposed to  her over the phone. And she threw away her cane [laughter.] and she drove four  hours to see this man in Lubbock, Texas and they were married exactly two weeks  later. After which we had to sell her house and divvy up her belongings amongst  her two daughters and four grandchildren. Well, my momma said, &#039 ; What of your  granny&#039 ; s do you want?&#039 ;  Well, my granny didn&#039 ; t have nice things and I didn&#039 ; t want  to fight over anything so I said, &#039 ; You let everybody else pick and I&#039 ; ll take  what&#039 ; s left over.&#039 ;  And what was left over was her Kenmore sewing machine so the  Kenmore sewing machine made its way up to St. Louis, Missouri and it sat in the  corner of my dining room for a week or two. My mother had shown me how to wind  the bobbin. I thought, &#039 ; well if I know that I should be able to do anything I  want to with this sewing machine.&#039 ;  So I decided that I would make myself a shirt  so I drive off to the Cloth World store and I go in and I start looking at the  pattern book for men&#039 ; s clothing. While I&#039 ; m doing this the voice of my granny and  the voice of my mother are both coming into my head. When I was a child they  would never made me a shirt because they said the shirts were the hardest things  you could make. They made dresses for my sister. They made dresses for  themselves but they never make shirts that I&#039 ; m aware of. So I decided if I&#039 ; m  going to do something I probably should start with something easier. So I turned  around and there was a rack of quilt books and one of them was called &quot ; Learning  to Quilt: Quilting for Beginners&quot ;  and it had twenty sampler blocks or  traditional quilt blocks. At the time I didn&#039 ; t even know that quilt blocks had  names. I didn&#039 ; t know that there was such a thing a name for a quilt block but I  bought this book thinking that I could certainly make a quilt a lot easier than  I could make a shirt. Nobody ever told me a quilt was hard. And I&#039 ; m thinking to  myself that a shirt has shoulders and curves and sleeves and a quilt is just  flat so that should be much easier to make. I bought fabric for that quilt I  started making it by cutting out templates and drawing around those templates  with a Bic ™ pen because I couldn&#039 ; t see a pencil marking and I would do my  best to make a quarter of an inch seam allowance. And every one of those blocks  ended up being somewhere between eleven and thirteen inches and they were  supposed to be twelve. [laughter.]. Well I figured that must be okay because  that averages out to be twelve inches and on that same quilt [announcement over  the loudspeaker.] and then it came time to sash the quilt and I started putting  the vertical sashing in for the rows, the columns I mean, to make the long ones  together and I ran out of sashing fabric so I just thought I would go back and  get some more of that. When I got back to the store it had been four or five  weeks after I started the quilt and of course there&#039 ; s not anymore of that fabric  so I have literally maroon sashing going vertically and green sashing going  horizontally. [laughter.] Oh, I could keep going with this story if you want to  hear more of it.    BB: What size was it?    RT: It was a full size quilt or queen size ;  I didn&#039 ; t measure but like 96 by 80  or something. A big quilt.    BB: What was the pattern?    RT: It was a sampler quilt. It had twenty different blocks.    BB: So you did twenty different blocks?    RT: Twenty different blocks and learned the names. Memorized their names and to  this day--One of them was a Grandmother&#039 ; s Fan. One was a Shoofly. One was a  Friendship Star. One was an Ohio Star. One was a Honeybee block, you know.    BB: How long did it take from beginning to end?    RT: Well--    BB: You said it was four or five weeks until the sashing.    RT: Well yes, but to get the sashing--actually getting the quilt top together  was probably more like three or four weeks because I was really loving this. I  started reading every quilt magazine I could get my hands on because I loved it  so much. I discovered there was such a thing called a rotary cutter and mat  which I never even knew existed. And there were other quilt books that taught  methods of doing quilts like that so I don&#039 ; t know. I started making other  projects even while this one was starting to go on to a quilt frame and get  quilted. So it might have taken a year before I finally got around to getting  the binding on it after quilting it but in that year I had probably made another  good thirty or forty quilts of varying sizes. Some of them were very small. Most  importantly I would like to say that, that first quilt is the only quilt that I  made from a pattern because my life as a musician had been in the creative part  of music. I had been a composition student in college and I love creating so I  immediately started adapting my own designs and creating my own quilts ;  the  second one through now. None, of them are--are--    BB: So, the first one was like the book?    RT: Exactly like the book. I think I even put the blocks exactly like the  picture in the book. But, past that I went on my own and started doing my own  creative type things. And I hand quilted that first quilt. As a matter of fact,  it&#039 ; s at home and there are times when I sleep under it but I keep it a little  bit more treasured now because I think of it as my first quilt and there&#039 ; ll  never be another first quilt. So I take very good care of it. This is a funny  story---I&#039 ; ll go ahead and tell you this too. When I hand quilting I did not know  a quilter for three months at least and I went into a Ben Franklin store one day  looking for fabric and when I got in there, there was this--she wasn&#039 ; t old, but  she was an older lady and she was looking at fabrics. And she struck up a  conversation with me and she said, &#039 ; What are you doing back here?&#039 ;  and I said,  &#039 ; Well, I&#039 ; m looking for some fabric.&#039 ;  And she wanted to know what I was using the  fabric for and I said, &#039 ; I&#039 ; m making a quilt.&#039 ;  It was so cute because only a  quilter would do this but in one fell swoop she reached into her tote bag and  went &#039 ; whoosh&#039 ;  and there was a quilt and she said, &#039 ; What color border would you  put on this one?&#039 ;  [laughter.] And I went, &#039 ; Ma&#039 ; am, I don&#039 ; t know. I don&#039 ; t have a  clue.&#039 ;  That lady&#039 ; s name was Ponnie Brinkman, P-O-N-N-I-E Brinkman. And she ended  up inviting me to the quilt meeting that night. Now I did not know there were  going to be so many people there. I was expecting a little quilt frame and  several women sitting around it kind of talking and drinking coffee and that  sort of thing. And I ended up in a meeting of 250 of those quilters but as a  result of getting involved with those quilters in that guild-- while I am  self-taught. I learned from them. It&#039 ; s them individually that I&#039 ; ve learned from  one on one. I was quilting that quilt and I didn&#039 ; t know how to do anything  except what that book said and that was make a running stitch. I stab stitched  the quilt for several days, just piercing the needle all the way and then back  up. And I was making the stitches exactly like the book. The book did not bother  to tell me that the picture they had was a magnified version of the quilt stitch  so I&#039 ; m making my stitches about a quarter inch a piece. I hadn&#039 ; t seen quilting  stitches ;  this was something I had never in my life. Well finally a friend came  over one day and said, &#039 ; I&#039 ; ve watched my aunts quilt and what you&#039 ; re supposed to  do is get several stitches on the needle rocking it back and forth and then pull  the needle through.&#039 ;  And my friend told me in order to do that I was supposed to  be using a much bigger needle so I went and bought a four inch needle to try to  quilt this quilt with. As you can imagine, I can&#039 ; t get three stitches into this  quilt before the needle is stuck in the quilt so I&#039 ; ve got my tool box out--I&#039 ; ve  got a pair of pliers. I&#039 ; m doing anything I can to try to quilt this quilt the  way it&#039 ; s supposed to be quilted and really that&#039 ; s the roots of how I began as a  quilter. And it wasn&#039 ; t until I got into the guild that I started asking people  about needles sizes and so on and so on and so forth and I found that really the  smaller the needle size the better your quilting stitches will be but I was  using a fairly large needle at the beginning of this endeavor.    BB: What aspects of quilting do you not enjoy?    RT: [long pause.] I used to not enjoy putting on bindings because I felt the  quilt was so done. I was so finished it was all quilted and then you would sew  on the binding and then you would sew it on the binding and I would sew it on by  hand and that could still take me days and days it would seem to get the binding  on. I didn&#039 ; t enjoy that. But now I use this machine type binding you&#039 ; ll notice  on this quilt. I love putting these bindings on so I really have to tell you  there is nothing that I don&#039 ; t like about the quilting process. I love the  designs ;  the fabrics ;  the top. I love the quilting part. I love the binding  part. I even love making the sleeves.    BB: Tell me--my daughter-in-law thinks you&#039 ; re wonderful--    RT: Okay.    BB: She saw you a couple of years ago. Tell me how you came to what--the way you  do it--how you put the quilt together?    RT: How I put--    BB: You know you draw on the design--    RT: You know what ;  there are so many ways to put a quilt together. My philosophy  from the beginning was and this is what happened that first year I was reading  every magazine I could. If there was a technique I didn&#039 ; t know anything about, I  would try that technique. And I wouldn&#039 ; t make a full sized quilt I would just do  enough a small piece or something to learn the technique. The more techniques I  had in my little bag of tricks when the design came to my mind I could go from  that repertoire of tricks to create that quilt so the more you know - the more  you can create. I sort of am settled now into only a few things that I&#039 ; ll tend  to do. One of them is called &quot ; Quilting Caveman Style,&quot ;  that is not anything  other than a name but it means cutting and sewing fabrics using a rotary cutter  and mat not planning a seam allowance and not using templates and not measuring  anything but just creating an improvisational design and it could be  representational. I could make a flower, or a house, or a bird or whatever, a  fish, just doing this method but it&#039 ; s not a precise method of sewing. I also do  &quot ; flip and sew&quot ;  method with the design on freezer paper and when I want to be  precise and I need to be accurate then I use that particular method. I can do  other things but those seem to be the two methods that I tend to use most  because I like working with curves. And so the freezer paper helps me with  precision curves and the &quot ; Caveman&quot ;  method I can just create spontaneous curves.    BB: Tell me about this other quilt you&#039 ; ve brought.    RT: Well I brought things to just spark some questions, I guess. This little  quilt is--was done &quot ; Caveman&quot ;  style. The heart quilt we&#039 ; ve been talking about was  done on freezer paper drawn full size and &quot ; flip and sew,&quot ;  let me just say that.  This quilt--these squares were just randomly cut and actually they were part of  a larger quilt that I had made and there were some leftovers so I just set them  together sort of on point and had fun with this quilting design which really  can&#039 ; t really describe on tape but it&#039 ; s a non-stop quilt design. The  entire--everything inside there is non-stop quilting by the way I did that.    BB: Tell me how you did that.    RT: Okay, I did this, this, this, and then here, here, here, here, here, here,  here, here, here, and here, and then the outside ones here, here, here--.    BB: And Ricky is going around each flower with his finger showing how it goes.    RT: Right. Good and I go on to the outside ones and once I got back to here then  I can do these outside ones--    BB: That&#039 ; s lovely.    RT: And then these inside ones and then it&#039 ; s done so--and then I can start  stippling and so the thing of this--the thing of note on this quilt is the  binding once again. I used to hate doing bindings. This is a scalloped binding  and it looks like the scallop is a fold that&#039 ; s put on the quilt and then the  binding is put on that--[BB: &quot ; uh, hum.&quot ; ] in actuality the scallop is put onto  the binding and the binding is put onto the quilt and I quilt in the ditch  between the scallop and the binding. There&#039 ; s a line of stitching you can barely  see running right along the edge of that quilt so there&#039 ; s not a single hand  stitch anywhere on this or this or the quilt that I won with here at IQA  [International Quilt Association.] today. This quilt has a little bit of history  that I would like to share--    BB: This is another beautiful quilt flower    RT: This is a small quilt--probably a--18 by 24 inches or something like that  and its name is &quot ; Tulip for Chantelle Number Two.&quot ;  Yes there is a &quot ; Chantelle  Number One.&quot ;  And I&#039 ; m going to tell you the story of Chantelle. When I was in  England teaching for the first time in 1997, as I was jet lagged, they drug me  to a beginning quilter&#039 ; s class. I wasn&#039 ; t teaching, just observing. These  beginners didn&#039 ; t know much about quilting but the next morning the teacher  called and said, &#039 ; One of my students just called and she wanted to know who  Chantelle was last night.&#039 ;  And she had said &#039 ; What do you mean who was  Chantelle?&#039 ;  And she said &#039 ; Well, Ann brought Chantelle and I thought I met  everybody but I didn&#039 ; t meet anyone named Chantelle and right towards the end of  the evening you said Ricky brought Chantelle and I still hadn&#039 ; t met this  &#039 ; Chantelle.&#039 ; &#039 ;  And the lady started laughing and laughing and she said, &#039 ; No, no,  no. I said, &#039 ; Show and tell. Show and tell.&#039 ; &#039 ;  So Ann had brought &#039 ; show and tell&#039 ;   and Ricky had brought &#039 ; show and tell.&#039 ;  Well, the hostess that had arranged my  trip to England, I wanted to do something nice for her so I made this quilt or  rather a quilt like this one, in my &quot ; Caveman&quot ;  style. I just cut and sew the  pieces randomly, not knowing exactly how they are going to turn out but I ended  up having this little three pointed tulip with a stem and two leaves and I ended  up giving it to her. And as a joke I called it &quot ; Tulip for Chantelle.&quot ;  Okay so  it&#039 ; s a tulip for show and tell, right. When I got home, I wanted one for myself  so I made this one so I call it &quot ; Tulip for Chantelle Number Two.&quot ;  Well whenever  I had the opportunity to send one of my previous prize winning quilts to England  to enter in one of their shows, I thought those ladies would get a real kick if  I sent this little piece over just for fun to go with that. About three weeks  later I got a phone call and I could not believe that my other quilt, the large  quilt had won two blue ribbons at this national show in England but I was  stunned whenever I found out that this little quilt had won judge&#039 ; s choice  award. And it was only really sent over as a joke for those ladies. It features  what has now become one of my trademarks as well and that is called &quot ; bobbin  quilting.&quot ;  You will notice that in the flower and in the two frames there is a  black sparkly thread and that black thread is really too heavy to go into the  top of the machine and work well so it&#039 ; s put in the bobbin and then I have  orange thread in the top and quilt with the wrong side of the quilt facing me.  Usually people say, &#039 ; Well then how do you know where to do that?&#039 ;  because that  fills in those frames. In this case, I quilted in the ditch first from the top  with the orange thread all the way around and once I&#039 ; ve outlined all those wavy  frames then I can just turn it over and fill in between those. Sometimes I don&#039 ; t  want to see that quilting in the ditch stitch so now I use the wash away water  soluble thread. Quilt in the ditch again, flip it over. I can still see where to  do the bobbin quilting and then when the quilt is wet that all dissolves and you  have no idea how it got marked just sew it on the back so I use two different  methods to do that.    BB: It&#039 ; s lovely, just lovely, it&#039 ; s beautiful. And you have another one there, is  there another one?    RT: Yes, there&#039 ; s one more here. This small piece is from a new series that I am  and becoming more and more well known for that I call &quot ; Harmonic Convergence.&quot ;   Now, we already talked about my closeness in involvement with music so the word  &quot ; harmony&quot ;  would be a musical term but what happened was I was working on the  back of quilt one day and I wanted to use some of my hand-dyed fabrics that I  didn&#039 ; t like very well. And so I chose two fabrics that were spirals. Now this is  something similar to what you&#039 ; d see on a modern pop t-shirt with the spiral  going around it. I had two of those and I didn&#039 ; t particularly like them so I  figured I could use both of them on the back but when I put them side by side I  thought I was looking at two owl&#039 ; s eyes, just kind of going crazy. So I started  thinking what could I do to those two pieces of fabric that would break that up  and I decided to slice them into strips starting at the center. I had two  fabrics laying side by side and then starting at the center I cut a one inch  strip and then a one and a half inch strip and then a two inch strip and then a  three inch strip going from the inside and to the out. Then I took the skinniest  strip of this piece and moved it over into this and I sort of started sorting  these pieces into each other and suddenly the spirals were flying into each  other and it was amazing. So then I began developing a new idea and I have an  entire series of quilts now based on this. I have instruction patterns that  people are using to do this series. And this particular piece that I brought is  a very basic, simple example of that work.    BB: Did you cut this &quot ; Caveman&quot ;  style?    RT: This is done with a rotary cutter, a ruler, and a mat. So this is a one, one  and a half, two, two and a half, three inches. It is done precisionally. There  is no tearing involved but look if you will you&#039 ; ll notice--to see the two  fabrics. Find this fabric and notice that it will just jump over this bar. This  is the same fabric now jumping over here and you see yes it is still flowing  along. Jump one more. It&#039 ; s still the same fabric moving across and finally it  ends with this little piece. But just go the opposite direction and you&#039 ; ll see  that this one just moves right into that. So this fabric--these were two little  squares and they just fly into each other.    BB: That&#039 ; s just lovely--    RT: And in order to create this one little extra seam I cut an inch off of the  top. I sliced the quilt and I rotated it 180 degrees and just sewed it right  back into the quilt. It&#039 ; s truly the easiest thing and when I teach this class in  a day the students will do two pieces more complicated than this but they do two  quilt tops in a day.    BB: Did you quilt this bobbin--    RT: No, I quilted the rayon threads from the top and what was left over I  flipped over and quilted on the back with the metallic thread from the bobbin.  BB: Okay, tell me what you think makes a great quilt? [announcement over the  loudspeaker.] RT: Well, I probably--You caught me with a question that I have to  think about. BB: That&#039 ; s good. RT: I--first and foremost I want that quilt to  reach out and grab me visually. I want the overall statement of that quilt to  hit me in a big way. I tend to like quilts that have large, powerful, impact of  designs as opposed to most traditional quilts that are maybe lots and lots of  little blocks that create a kind of lattice work or something overall. I find  those beautiful but then they&#039 ; re going to have to do something other than that  to create an explosion of design for me. The way they&#039 ; ll use their color or  something and then make the overall thing very compacted. That&#039 ; s the number one  for me. Second for me, I then am going to want to see pretty much how the  workmanship of the quilt is. Is it crisp? Is it clean? Is it neat? Are the  stitches good? And is the workmanship good? And all of those kind of things  would come secondary to me, the use of color, fabric and so forth.    BB: Seems to me--seems to me that you are very good at this and it came to you  very quickly.    RT: Yes, it did. It did.    BB: And you really enjoy it.    RT: &quot ; Simple Gifts&quot ;  is a quilt of mine I made in 1996. It was here at festival in  1996 and won the second prize. It won a second prize in the AQS [American  Quilter&#039 ; s Society ;  Paducah, Kentucky.] festival. It won best machine quilt at  the NQA [National Quilting Association, Inc.] show that year. It&#039 ; s the quilt  that won two first prizes in UK. [United Kingdom.] It was selected by one of the  panelists last year as her hundred and first choice for the &quot ; 100 Best Quilts of  the 20th Century.&quot ;  [special exhibit at International Quilt Festival 1999 and  book.] Interestingly enough, I know this is probably sounding like bragging and  I don&#039 ; t mean it to because I am so grateful for this incredible thing that found  me nine years ago but that quilt was my first large machine quilted quilt. And  it won a best machine quilting award at a national show and people say you must  have practiced, and practiced and practiced to get there and I didn&#039 ; t. It just  came to me. And people say, &#039 ; How could that happen?&#039 ;  I&#039 ; m guessing that having  been a pianist since I was three years old I have pretty good eye-hand  coordination, so manipulating that quilt under the needle with free motion  quilting is very--it just came natural for me because I think of the piano  background. This quilt for example with the flowers quilted on it. There is no  marking. I don&#039 ; t mark the quilt in any way. I didn&#039 ; t mark this quilt ahead of  time, just sew it. That&#039 ; s the way I do it.    BB: Tell me how you feel when you&#039 ; re quilting. Tell me how you feel about this  whole experience.    RT: Well I&#039 ; m working. I like seeing it. I get excited and I sit back and look at  it and sometimes I feel I need to give up and then I get inspired again, and  then I want to go out and you know, I want to ride my bicycle and take a walk or  do something and come back again. I love it. I watch t.v. while I&#039 ; m doing it.  It&#039 ; s when I&#039 ; m at home doing it. It is just what I&#039 ; m doing. In light of what I&#039 ; m  doing showing quilts at exhibitions and in the way that it has now become my  profession, full time, to be lecturing all over the world and giving workshops.  I really feel that it would be a waste of me if I didn&#039 ; t give it back And at  venues, shows and guilds and so forth that allow me to share what I have back  with the world that&#039 ; s where I share. So if my quilt--if that is hanging and it  moves somebody--if it inspires somebody then it&#039 ; s doing the job I would want it  to do. I truly do not believe that it is not right to gloat over a win. &#039 ; Aren&#039 ; t  I great because I made a wonderful quilt that has been recognized,&#039 ;  because the  judging process is still subjective. A different set of judges could come up  with different quilts to win ;  that still have just the same amount of merit to  win. So you can&#039 ; t gloat over a win but you also can not beat yourself up and  pout if your quilts are not winning awards or you didn&#039 ; t win an award. It  doesn&#039 ; t mean the quilt isn&#039 ; t valid. The most important thing for me and the  reason I entered the shows is because I want the quilts to be seen. I want  people to experience them. That&#039 ; s a way of sharing.    BB: Is there anything I haven&#039 ; t asked you that you want to tell us about?    RT: I don&#039 ; t know.    BB: I think we&#039 ; re running out of time.    Unidentified Person (UP): I had a question. I wanted to ask about your father  and his quilting?    RT: Okay, that&#039 ; s a good question. The same week I began quilting in 1991 sort of  by mistake. I called home that weekend and my dad had retired. We thought we  would get him into stained glass or something like that but when I called home  that weekend and said, &#039 ; What are you doing dad?&#039 ;  He said, &#039 ; I started making a  quilt this week.&#039 ;     And he ended up making a traditional broken star quilt with all those diamonds.  The finished quilt is 104 inches square, so it&#039 ; s huge. His mother at the age of  85 had made him and his two siblings a broken star quilt so she made three of  them. He decided that if she could do that at 85 he could do it at 65 after he  retired. He made the top all by himself and he did a wonderful, wonderful job  and since then he&#039 ; s made about ten quilts. He doesn&#039 ; t usually hand quilt them  himself. He sends them out to have that done. There have been times when my  mother has hand quilted them. My dad has tried to hand quilt them but my dad&#039 ; s  hands are--well they didn&#039 ; t work that well for him but when it comes to the  precision patchwork it&#039 ; s amazing. His quilts are very scrappy. They&#039 ; re very  traditional. Many of them are samplers because he would go, &#039 ; I had fun making  this block, now I&#039 ; m going to try this block,&#039 ;  and he&#039 ; d have enough blocks to  make a quilt so many of his quilts were samplers after that. He and I have  worked together. His brain understands it. My dad is 72 now and he is not  quilting as much any more now after my mother retired. They&#039 ; re out kind of  traveling now. He doesn&#039 ; t have as much time at home by himself but it&#039 ; s been  amazing. And then another point of interest since we&#039 ; re saving our stories--  another point of interest is that when my nephew married, a couple of years  later they were expecting their first child and as a result of me quilting and  my dad quilting, he wanted to make the baby quilt and he did. And now he&#039 ; s  involved in quilting and sewing at some level as well. He&#039 ; s made two or three  quilts and doesn&#039 ; t think anything about it. He is currently Mr. Mom but before  the baby he was a prison guard and my dad was a retired truck driver so the  stereotypes are a little bit broken in our family since we have three  generations of men quilters and none of the women really quilt.    BB: How&#039 ; s granny doing?    RT: Good question. I usually get two questions like that. Do I still sew on my  granny&#039 ; s sewing machine and is she still alive? My grandmother passed away in  1993. She was married to Pete for two years and Pete passed away one year later.  He was 90 and she was 85 when they passed away. Then in 1994, I bought a used  sewing machine from a sewing dealer. It was an older model Pfaff. I used my  granny&#039 ; s up until that time. So that was three, three and a half years. Then I  started on this other sewing machine and now I have more sewing machines so--    BB: Yeah, how many sewing machines do you have?    RT: I&#039 ; ve got four, four right now that I can count. They&#039 ; re handy. Is there  something else you wanted to ask?    UP: I do have many more questions but we&#039 ; re limited to a forty-five minute  format. And I&#039 ; m not sure how much time we have. How much time do we have?    BB: I&#039 ; m not sure, what time did we start?    RT: 3:03 or 3:33    Another Unidentified Person: The first question was asked at 3:33.    RT: See, so we have time left.    BB: We have a couple more minutes left.    UP: I&#039 ; d like to hear about how it was--what it was you did before you became a  professional teacher and quilter and what that conversion was like?    RT: It--the funny thing about that is that it&#039 ; s not a conversion. It&#039 ; s an add  on. People who know me now, know that I have been able to put music and quilting  together in one package. As a musician--well I took my first real--well I taught  through high school, teaching piano. When I was seventeen years old I had been  awarded several musical awards. I was also hired as a conductor of choral music  for a church in Wichita Falls. I was seventeen and I worked my way through  college doing that and teaching piano and then I became a performing artist. I  began working in studios. So I had been doing conducting. I had been doing  commercial work and I ended up in St. Louis, Missouri to be a professional  recording engineer and music producer. I did the original music for this  company. And they did commercials, jingles, small film scores, and whatever. I  was writing music professionally and then that company finally--it closed  actually and I bought the recording studio and I built a recording studio in my  home and continued to work free- lance which basically means I didn&#039 ; t have a  job. And it was during that time I started quilting because I had all that extra  time on my hands. A year later I was hired as a choral conductor for one of the  larger churches in St. Louis, Missouri. I built that program up to the point  that when I left that job in 1998 I had an eighty-five voice chorus with about  30 piece orchestra. We had just released our third CD and it was released on a  national classical album, doing Vaughn Williams and Rutter and Handel and those  wonderful people. I loved conducting. And the first thing I did. And it was  during the time that I was there. I was continuing to quilt and starting to  teach a little bit more and more and I realized that I could probably do this  full time. And I made the break to do that. In the interim I also conducted the  most significant night of my life. It was the night I conducted the St. Louis  Symphony Orchestra and a community chorus of about 85 singers to do a Midwest  premier of a choral work that went through the seven stages of grieving. And we  benefited three area health organizations that dealt with terminally ill  patients. It was a phenomenal night and I literally took every penny I had in  retirement and the next night we came back together and I invested in the  recording of that event so that the music would continue to heal and give hope  and comfort to others, long past the night of the concert. That recording is  still doing well. It is something that even if I never did anything else in my  life. That was why even during my heart surgery, I did something important in  this world, it&#039 ; s okay to go now if I need to. So now I incorporate music in my  quilting. All of my quilting lectures incorporate either my piano playing,  sometimes singing. I do a presentation called &quot ; Celebrate the Century,&quot ;  it&#039 ; s an  historic perspective of music and quilts and in thirty-three minutes you get 250  historical facts, 50 songs and you hear all about quilting and history - decade  by decade. So everything is placed in its own decade and it&#039 ; s memorized. I have  a sound score that goes underneath of it that I composed with it and there is a  slide show that goes on behind it. It&#039 ; s a multi-media extravaganza. And that&#039 ; s  what I did for lunch here yesterday so I&#039 ; m able to do my music and the product  that I market now besides my fabrics are my CDs, that&#039 ; s recorded that I just  told you. I have a solo piano CD. I have the symphony CD that&#039 ; s recorded. And  next year I&#039 ; ll probably have more. It&#039 ; s combining two passions - music and  quilting and that&#039 ; s pretty much what people know me for.    BB: So you like getting up in the morning?    RT: Yes, I do. I think of myself as one of the happiest people on the planet. I  love traveling. I love meeting people. I love quilting. I love music. I get to  do all of that and have a living of it so I do, I count my blessings everyday. I  don&#039 ; t take it for granted-- not ever.    BB: It&#039 ; s been wonderful talking to you.    RT: Thank you, my pleasure.    BB: Thank you very much. We&#039 ; ve been talking to Ricky Tims. It is 4:17 PM at the  International Quilt Festival, in Houston, Texas. November 3, 2000.       All rights to the Quilters' S.O.S. -- Save Our Stories (QSOS) oral history project, including but not restricted to legal title, copyrights and literary property rights, have been transferred from the Quilt Alliance to the University of Kentucky Libraries. Please contact the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History regarding rights pertaining to individual interviews. audio Interviews may only be reproduced with permission from Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries. 0 https://quiltalliance.net/ohms-viewer-master/viewer.php?cachefile=QSOS-080.xml",,,,,,"quilt show","http://qsos.quiltalliance.org/files/original/101e3334675a263ed4d438009640bdf8.jpg,http://qsos.quiltalliance.org/files/original/6fe58f430257a22a729ad9f9f3605971.jpg","Oral History","International Quilt Festival QSOS",1,0
"Kathi Babcock",,"Kathi Babcock learned how to quilt from a book she got when she was about 19 or 20 around the time of the bicentennial. Her mother taught her how to sew on and she views her quilting as an extension of that. She led the group that made the quilt she brought which they made for the Marquis Lafayette’s birthday. It hug in the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in Washington, D.C, and the Musée de Toile de Jouy in France.",,,,"November 5, 2011","Christine Sparta",,,audio,,"Oral History",TX77010-055,,,"Phyllis Jordan","Kathi Babcock","Houston, Texas","**This transcript was created by QSOS volunteers and was reviewed and, in some cases, edited by the interviewee. It may not exactly match the audio recording. For citations and interview quotations, please refer to the audio-recorded interview.** <strong>This transcript was created by QSOS volunteers and was reviewed and, in some cases, edited by the interviewee. It may not exactly match the audio recording. For citations and interview quotations, please refer to the audio-recorded interview.</strong><br />Phyllis Jordan (PJ): This is Phyllis Jordan, today's date is November the 5th, 2001; the time is 4:17 and I'm conducting an interview with Kathi Babcock, Kathi with an ""I"" for Quilters' S.O.S.-Save Our Stories, a project of the Alliance for American Quilts. Kathi and I are at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas. Kathi, will you tell me about the quilt you brought today? Kathi Babcock (KB): Yes ma'am. 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. It doesn't belong to me, but it's mine and I think I got more than my fifteen minutes of fame out of this one so when they asked us to pick something that represented us, I guess I liked this one best. PJ: Well this has a special meaning, is there anything else you could tell us about it? KB: About this particular quilt? PJ: Right. KB: The guild voted because it belongs to them because I didn't pay for the fabric. Since Karey Bresenhan has built her museum in our town, La Grange, Texas, they voted that we would give it to her to be something that perhaps someday might be hung at that museum and I wasn't at the meeting that day, or I would've said, ""No, I think you should give it to me,"" and yes that's where it's going to go so it's still at my house waiting to be presented to Karey who will become its future owner, or the museum will become its future owner I guess. PJ: Someone looking at this quilt would conclude what about you and your group? KB: One of the things they would conclude about me is that medallion quilts are kind of my favorite form because I have trouble seeing a whole quilt at once but I can build it row by row by row so I like starting with the center and kind of building out from there and both this and my quilt that is in Lone Stars Three are done on a medallion format. Probably a lot of what I do is. I also work primarily in kind of a nineteenth century color pallet. I like reproduction fabrics. I tried to carry out the theme of Lafayette and Washington, I did use a lot of things that weren't, but I think it still has that flavor. I have old taste maybe. PJ: You said, is it hanged, how do you use this quilt? Is it hanging in your home right now? KB: I have an antique fruit ladder, you know an apple orchard ladder in my living room, and it's been, since it came back from it's triumphal tour, it's been hanging there in the living room because I know my time with it is short so I have several places in my house that will accommodate different sized quilts. There's a rod in the dining room that I switch out with quilts of a certain size and the larger ones either hang above my bed or over the fruit ladder in the living room and I rotate them as I get tired of looking at them and want to see something else. This has been there because I know one day I won't get to have it anymore, so I've been enjoying it. PJ: We know what your plans are for this quilt, when you designed this quilt, did you design from the inside and go out? KB: Yes. The center was in a drawer, because I'd made it at a workshop on how to do a mariners compass from some famous quilter that came and did a workshop and the day that we were going to make the quilt, we were going to send to the Lafayette exhibit, there were too many women trying to work on one project and the organizer wasn't organized and I got a little frustrated at the lack of organization and probably because I wasn't in control, so I went home, get this center that was just languishing in a drawer and said, ""Let's make something to go around this."" We started brainstorming. The theme of the quilt was, the theme of the exhibit was to be the friendship of Lafayette and Washington and so we started doing the whole friendship star and you know, what kind of blocks can we come up with that will follow that theme. So yes, it was built from the inside out. PJ: Let's go back to talking about you. Tell us about your interest in quiltmaking. KB: Okay. I've always sewn, always. I sew on the little Featherweight that my mom bought when I was an infant to start making children's clothes and curtains and things. So quilting was just an extension of other sewing, you sew two pieces of fabric together the same way you make pants, and I was in college during those, that whole bicentennial-type time period that magazines had all started showing quilts hung behind your sofa and you know, it just kind of created an awareness that I hadn't been as aware of. I got a couple of books for Christmas one year and started making olive green and gold corduroy quilt patterned pillows and kind of went from there. I was nineteen or twenty and simultaneously started a hand pieced grandmother's flower garden, because that's what people start with and hand appliquéd Baltimore album that I wasn't aware was a Baltimore album because that vocabulary I'm not sure had even been invented yet in 1965, '75 .That was kind of it. I got married when I was young and poor and you can't knit anymore because you can't afford yarn and you can't buy those cool embroidery kits that I used to buy because you can't afford those, but you could afford fifty cent a yard fabric off that remnant table because you were supposed to make quilts out of remnants right? You weren't supposed to buy new fabric, so buying fabric was cheating, but remnants, that made it okay. I could afford that. If you pieced by hand you were pretty slow, so you know quilting was a craft that I could do because I knew how to sew and I could afford no matter what. PJ: Did you learn from one particular person how to quilt? KB: No. I got a book for Christmas and I muddled through. I learned that bias is tricky [laughs.] I learned that polyester's a problem. I learned that when you try to layer things for appliqué if you put a dark fabric under a light fabric you can see it and it doesn't look good. You know, you just learn how to cope with bias and how to deal with shadowing and not to use sheets as your backing fabric, you know you just evolve over time because I didn't just make a quilt and sit back, I started making quilts like crazy. You just learn as you go along. PJ: How many hours a week do you estimate you quilt? KB: My friend asked me that after she saw that question on the list and I said, ""Hm, maybe ten,"" she looked at me and said, ""No you don't,"" it's like, ""Okay, I'll think about that, twenty to forty."" [laughs.] I don't know it depends, it depends on what else is going on that week. The girls meet on Tuesdays and that's at least six hours that we sit and-- PJ: The girls are? KB: The quilting girls in La Grange [Texas.] we go to the Second Baptist Church and we sew for three hours talking as fast as we can and then we stop and eat lunch then we sew for another three hours talking as fast as we can. So every Tuesday that's you know, that's one day, that's six and a couple hours every night while you watch TV and it all starts adding up. PJ: Do you have a memory of your first quilt? KB: Well yeah, my first two quilts were the grandmother's flower garden and the Baltimore album, neither of which have ever been finished, but that's okay. The top of the flower garden is done and it's half quilted, but it's the ugliest quilt known to man and I used some of the remnants to make a car seat for my daughter and when I washed it, one of the fabrics completely disappeared, so one of the fabrics that I used in the quilt is self disintegrating and so I was always a little worried about finishing it after that because, kind of like an antique quilt that the fabrics just. Well this one when first washing it's just going to be gone, and will kind of ruin the effect of a quilt, so I've always threatened my kids that when they graduated from college or something they were going to get that quilt as a gift, but I never made good with that threat. PJ: Are there any other quiltmakers among your family? KB: My mother started quilting after me kind of I was doing it she started doing it. Apparently my great-great-grandmother was quite the quilter and she lived in a very small town in Missouri and lived in the big house in town, it was the combination of her home and the funeral parlor, and you know it was a big house and so she had a room that was large enough that you could leave a quilt frame set up in, so that's where all the ladies in town went. I grew up under my great-grandmother's quilts because they were considered utility quilts because no one in our family valued them. They weren't utility quilts, they were very nicely done quilts, but both my mother and my grandmother considered it a homemade quilt, you know something that the help used rather than the family used, so they were a little bit embarrassed by them. We just, we used them and washed them and used them and washed them and you know some of my earliest memories are the double wedding ring that was on my bed and trying to play games with the patterns of how many of these reds can I find and how many blues and is there another arc somewhere in the quilt that's exactly like this arc and I just, I think quilts are wonderful and I think I always have. Maybe it's in the blood. PJ: How does quiltmaking impact your family? KB: Well there's economically [laughs.] especially after I buy the longarm that I plan to this week. I live, breathe and eat quilts. I go to quilt shows, I hang out with quilting people, I have quilts hanging in my house. We have a quilt museum now that's four blocks away from mine so I am docent and assistant volunteer at that. Since at this point in time it's just my husband and I that live at my house that pretty much has an impact. My children sleep under quilts in their homes in the states where they live, so I create an impact further away. My granddaughter sent me a card, she's almost six, for Halloween and inside it said, ""I love you, Grandma. I love you, Grandma, pajama girl, you are the best quilter."" So as she thinks of me, that's obviously one of the adjectives that she uses to describe me, even when nobody's brought it up. I think when you do something as much as I do quilting, it has an impact [laughs.] I was at the bank a couple of weeks ago, for my church, arranging for monies to be transferred from one place to another and in the middle of doing all of this the lady looked at me and she said, ""Oh, you're the quilter,"" because I live in a little town and you know after we've had a fair, after we've had a quilt show, and the pictures go in the paper, my picture's in the paper. I, it's kind of part of my aura now. I like that. PJ: Tell us, have you ever used quilts to get through a difficult time? KB: Probably not. I, for the last twenty-five years I've always quilted, so whether I was going through difficult times or good times I was using quilting, so not specifically, no. PJ: Tell us about an amusing experience that has occurred from your quiltmaking or your teaching. KB: That's one of those thing you would have had to prime me for in advance, because I'm not just thinking of anything. PJ: You would like to pass and we'll get back to it if you think of something? KB: If I think of something, that's a good idea. PJ: Okay. What do you find pleasing about quiltmaking? KB: I like a lot of things. I like, even if I did it in a vacuum, obviously I like fabric. I like pattern. I like the process. I'm a little bit of a A.D.D. kind of girl, I have a lot of energy and I've always, I've always used things like knitting or things as a way of calming myself down. I watch television better if I have something in my hands because otherwise I hop up and down a lot. The social aspects have been a whole another wonderful part of it, I do a lot of internet friendship group type things that have been a lot of fun. You come to festival in Houston [Texas.] and you meet up with the lady from Australia that you've been chatting with online for years and she introduces you to this lady from England that she's friends with and so that sort of friendship. The accolades are not too bad when quilts are for picked up for exhibits and you know, you get that call from Karey Bresenhan that says that your quilt is going to be in the book. Those kind of things have been, have been a lot of fun. If it wasn't the quilting itself, the manipulating of fabric, the seeing what it looks like when you put those colors together, if that part wasn't fun, then the rest of it wouldn't follow. PJ: What aspects of quiltmaking do you not enjoy? KB: Putting on a sleeve [laughs.] I pretty much like all of it. I think I always want to be done right after I start and so sometimes, sometimes the lag time as you get something done is a little hard to put up with but I like pretty much all of it. PJ: You said you belong to a group that meets at the Baptist church; do you have any other groups that you belong to? KB: La Grange [Texas.] is a very, for the size of the town La Grange [Texas.] is it's a multi-town guild in La Grange [Texas.] that I belong to and have had some [inaudible.] since I've been in that particular town and I've sought out guilds as I've moved. My husband was in the army so we did a little bit of that. The little Tuesday group is just kind of a social group, from the larger guild. PJ: Have advances in technology influenced your work, and if so, how? KB: Well, you know the first stuff I did, I cut templates out of the bottom of a Kleenex box and traced with a ink pen because I didn't even know about things like pigmas so I, it's come a long way baby. I have a longarm in my living room and I prefer machine quilting to handquilting because I can make more and make more faster, so technology has had a lot to do with it. I love machine quilting and I don't think anybody can look at some of the amazing quilts that are here and go, ""Oh that's machine quilted, oh no it's not really a quilt unless it's hand quilted."" It just, the technological perfection that you can achieve, it just, I think machine quilting is wonderful and so I like, I embrace technology even though I use the sewing machine that my mom bought as I was born as my machine piece of sewing equipment. I still like, that's still technology right? It's not a needle and thread; I'm not much of a handwork girl. PJ: What are your favorite techniques and materials? KB: I'm pretty much a reproduction fabric, I'm a nineteenth century old time girl and although I did just say I don't do much handwork, I love hand applique. I think the best quilts combine a little bit of applique and a little bit of piecing because I think it just, it's kind of like curves need straight lines to compliment them I think. I think the piecing and the appliqué go really well together and the more you put into a quilt, the more interesting it is. I pretty much machine quilter, I like things small, part of that is because you know that whole turning twenty type quilt pattern that you can finish in a day. At the rate I sew, if I sewed like that, I'd have more quilts than I knew what to do with. So I've had to slow down and start getting smaller and more intricate and try to, try to strive for something that's technically difficult and a little bit, a little bit hard just to kind of slow down so that I'm not producing a quilt every three months. After a while, it really does become a question, ""What are you going to do with that one?"" PJ: Describe how your studio or your family or the place that you create? KB: Well I live in an old house, 1894, and back them they built houses, my style of house, has a parlor and a living room and I sew in the parlor, which is basically a large room that doesn't have a closet, so it doesn't have a bedroom, right? It's got my longarm on one side and it's got an armoire with quilts piled in one corner and it's got my desk with my sewing machine on the other and it's got the roll-top desk with a computer on the other side and it's pretty well stuffed to the gills with fabric. It's not tidy, you will never see it tidy I promise and there's always at least three projects going on and it's draped over poles and piled here and it's chaotic and that's how I work. PJ: Tell us how you balance your time. KB: Well I don't have a job. I don't have to work because I'm well taken care of by a spouse who's doing that for me so I don't have to balance a work life. I, if there's a volunteer organization in town, my name's on their list so I balance my life pretty much like everybody else does. There's the things you got to do and there's the things you want to do and you try and squeeze as many want to do's into the what you got to do's as you do, and my husband knows that there's not going to be a hot cooked meal every night for dinner and that at lunch he's on his own and I sew as much as I can. PJ: Do you use a design wall? KB: Rarely. The room that I sew in has seven windows, a door, and pocket doors that no longer open to anything but it still cuts the room up and there's no wall space for a design wall. My longarm's in the room and the closest I come to being able to have a design wall is that I hang things off the pole that stretches across it. I have a homemade little accordion thing that I can fold out if I'm doing something with blocks that I really need to be careful, but usually it's just the floor. You know, I've tried like drawing things out and using design walls and things, and maybe it's because I never plan far enough ahead, you know I'm always just kind of the next border, the next six inches, I've never, I don't have one so I can't use one and I don't think that way because I don't think far enough in advance. PJ: What do you think makes a great quilt? KB: Good design. We talk about that a lot as we walk around festival and like a quilt. Then there's some that look good up close and there's some that look good far away and there's some that are both and I think that's a key element that it has to look good both ways. That the fabrics that are used have to speak to you when you get up close enough to start noticing the details and the overall design of it. It has to look good enough when you step back away and you don't see the small details that you like both. I have this thing about quilts that are flat, I know that the workmanship that does into it shows in that overall flatness of a quilt and so when they hang straight and true, that always makes my heart sing. I appreciate a well hand quilted quilt. I appreciate a well machine quilted quilt. These Japanese ladies with their taupes and their intricate details, wow, those are pretty awesome. You know even when I go into areas that I don't appreciate quite as much, like art quilts, I still think that good design, use of color, balanced imagery, I think all of that I could appreciate those as well. PJ: What makes a quilt appropriate for a museum or a special collection? KB: Well, gosh special collections could be a whole different thing because I can understand a special collection being representing a certain period of time, and so anything that fell into that certain period of time would be appropriate, no matter how ugly or poorly made, I mean if that's what you're collecting. I think a museum piece would need to be something that, that spoke maybe to the greatest number of people. I've never understood opera, myself, and I think there are a lot of us out there, and I think in the same way that there are some art quilts that are so poorly understood or appreciated by, or may be appreciated by a smaller segment of the person who would be coming to see a museum that, it seems to me that a work that anybody coming in off the street, whether they were a quilter or quilt aficionado or just a museum go-er, would be able to look at and say, ""Wow,"" would be the best kind of quilts to include. My quilts, those would be the good, no [laughs.] PJ: [laughs.] KB: In a museum, I'd love it. It was, it was, it was at the DAR. I mean when they called, you know when they call you up and they say, ""Would it be alright if we used your quilt,"" it's like, ""Oh yeah, oh yeah."" PJ: Whose works are you drawn to and why? KB: Gosh. It's changed over the years. In my, in my, in the early nineties when I discovered that there were stores that sold quilt fabric, oh my goodness, and I gave up life as I know it to do quilting pretty much around the clock. I checked out every book that the library had and I was a giant Jinny Beyer fan, she was doing neat things with border prints and mitered corners and I wanted to be Jinny Beyer when I grew up. Then I went through a phase that I was pretty folk arty and red wagon and Linda Brannock and Jan Patek were my heroes. I think I've pretty much come along and I think it's a narrowed focus but it's also a comfort zone, I like antique quilts and I like, and so I probably am not so much focused anymore on any particular maker or artist as I am on antique quilts and some of the things that people are replicating and that sort of design style. I'm looking at each state has had it's quilt days and they come up with a book from those days, those are probably more of what I collect and buy in terms of books than specific authors or quilters. PJ: Do your quilts reflect your community or your region? KB: Nope, nope [laughs.] My part of town, the ladies that I quilt with, no one is interested in doing reproduction-y stuff. I'm not mainstream in that way at all. I had to; I've kind of found my comfort, my circle of friends, my peers in the international community through the internet more than through my part of the world. PJ: What do you think about the importance of quilts in American life? KB: Well, gosh I don't know. Are quilts important in American life? They're, I think, I think it's important that we preserve any heritage that we have. I'm glad that quilts continue to grow in value and are recognized as an art form and not just the way my family regarded our family quilts as just you know, useful. I'm glad that they're popular enough that somebody decided they needed to put a museum in La Grange, Texas. But if there's somebody out there that doesn't think they're very important, that's okay with me too. PJ: In what ways do you think quilts have special meaning for women's history in America? KB: I think that women in America have been given the roll of provider of for the home and so we did the sewing, we did the practical tasks of the home and I think it's wonderful to see how just providing for the home some women did more than just sew a few pieces of fabric together to keep their family warm, but did elevate it. Unfortunately those tended to be the women who had the means, who had the free time that could spend it doing that. PJ: What do you think is the biggest challenge confronting quiltmakers today? KB: I'm sorry the first answer that comes to my head is finding enough storage space to stash their fabrics. PJ: [laughs.] KB: [laughs.] Took an Australian lady through my house yesterday and she asked me where my fabric was [laughs.] I was like, ""Well, pick a room,"" [laughs.] ""It's everywhere."" I think keeping it fresh, keeping it interesting, I think that all crafts go through a saturation phase, you know I had a grandmother that did needlepoint after a while, all needlepoints started to kind of look the same and every surface in her house was covered in a needlepointed something or other and you kind of ran out of room for your craft. I think that to attract younger people and to keep the people that are doing it still interested, you need teachers that are coming up with new ideas and fabric makers that, you know if the only fabric that was being made was reproduction fabric, I think that we would be losing quilters by the drove so you know, even what I like. I think continually, kind of recreating it in and of itself and there's been kind of a little bit more emphasis it seems lately in the smaller things, like bags and accessory type quilting projects as opposed to making a quilt. I think that's good. I think you know a little bit of something for everybody. PJ: We've covered most of the questions on this. Is there anything else that you would like to have added to this? KB: I think it's wonderful that there is a forum like Save Our Stories. I don't know that Kathi Babcock is the person whose quilts need to be in the Library of Congress but there are people that are going to be interviewed through this process that people will some day be researching and it will be good to have their words recorded. I think making that history available is a wonderful thing and I'm glad that that was a component of this book and festival this year and it continues to be a part of it. PJ: Well I'd like to thank Kathi Babcock, with a ""I,"" for allowing me to interview her today for the Quilter's S.O.S.-Save Our Stories oral history project. Our interview concluded at 4:54.",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Alana Zaskowski",http://quiltalliance.net/ohms-viewer-master/viewer.php?cachefile=TX77010_055Babcock.xml,audio,11/5/2001,,,,,,"Kay Schroeder",,"design process,France,Published work - Quilts,Quilt Purpose - Home decoration,quilt shows/exhibitions",http://qsos.quiltalliance.org/files/original/ce536e72a7651422051d0e244e2e296f.jpg,"Oral History","Texas QSOS",1,0
"Barbara Ann Bauer Barrett",,"Barbara Barrett is a quilter in Bastrop, Texas who began quilting in the mid 1990s. She's known how to sew since a young age, and moved to quilting when she took a class. She is an active member of many groups and guilds including the Austin Area Quilt Guild, the Night Bloomers Quilt Bee, the Blockettes Quilt Bee, Loose Threads Quilt Bee and the In Stitches Bee. She also is a member of the International Quilt Association (IQA). ",,,,"November 4, 2011","Melanie Grear",,,audio,,,TX77010-037,,,"Shelly Pagliai","Barbara Ann Bauer Barrett","Houston, Texas","**This transcript was created by QSOS volunteers and was reviewed and, in some cases, edited by the interviewee. It may not exactly match the audio recording. For citations and interview quotations, please refer to the audio-recorded interview.** <strong>This transcript was created by QSOS volunteers and was reviewed and, in some cases, edited by the interviewee. It may not exactly match the audio recording. For citations and interview quotations, please refer to the audio-recorded interview.</strong><br />Shelly Pagliali (SP): Barbara, will you tell me about the quilt you brought today? Barbara Barrett (BB): 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. SP: Why did you choose to bring this quilt to the interview today? BB: This is one of the more recent ones I've made. 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. SP: At what age did you start quiltmaking? BB: Seriously, about the mid 1990's. I've always sewn. I do know as a little girl, my next door neighbor friend and I one summer sewed probably about 100 yards of patchwork, maybe two feet wide. It seemed like miles of it at the time. Then I went on to other sorts of handwork. I found those recently and gave them to her for Christmas and we made a quilt out of them the next year. I didn't start really seriously quilting until about 20 years ago. SP: Did someone teach you or did you learn on your own like that? BB: I took a class. I gave myself a class for my birthday one year. It was hand piecing very traditional blocks. I came home from the class and said 'I'm not going to do this'. Then my parents came to visit once. My mom and I walked outside and it was spring. There were daffodils coming up in the yard and I looked back at the house and I said 'I could make a quilt out of that'. I went back to the shop and bought all of the fabric for that quilt. I put my house in the middle with some flower blocks around it. That was enough to get me hooked and I haven't looked back. Now it's my main passion. SP: How many hours a week do you spend on your quiltmaking? BB: Sometimes none. But a good week is when I can spend about four to five hours a day. I always do handwork at night. Every day I'm doing something, but during the day I'm at the machine or the design wall. A good day would be four to five hours. Some weeks go by where that doesn't happen. SP: Do you belong to any art groups or quilting groups? BB: I belong to the Austin [Texas] Area Quilt Guild and I have for a long time. I belong to a bee with a small group of women that meets on some frequency. For us, it's a month. I belong to the Night Bloomers Quilt Bee [Austin, Texas]. I belong to the Blockettes Quilt Bee, which is a block exchange group [ Austin, Texas]. [inaudible.] About six years ago I moved to Bastrop [Texas] from Austin [Texas]. I belong to the Loose Threads Quilt Bee [Bastrop, Texas] and to the In Stitches Bee [Bastrop, Texas]. I think that's all. SP: Do advances in – BB: - and IQA. I belong to IQA [International Quilt Association]. SP: Have advances in technology influenced your work? BB: To some extent, I've always been a gadget person. I must own about 40 rulers. I did invest in a good sewing machine. I would love to invest in something to make machine quilting better. Someday I will. That's an advancement that I haven't taken advantage of yet. On the computer, I have Electric Quilt 6 and use it sometimes for portions of the design of a quilt, and of course using the computer to communicate, for online research, and even lessons and things like that. It's been a great tool. I'm also trying new threads, which I think have been made better for quilting. SP: What do you think makes a great quilt? BB: I've thought about that one for a long time. At the basic, you have to have excellent workmanship. That's a given. And visual impact. Without that, it's not a great quilt. Beyond that, I think it needs to have a unique or fresh view. I got to thinking because music has been a big part of my life too, how you'll be in the car and hear a song and some songs you just listen to and others you start singing to. As soon as you start singing, your whole mood lifts up and you feel like you've been given a gift. Singing that song makes you joyful inside. I think a great quilt triggers a similar response in you. That's hard to quantify, but you walk by and wonder 'How did she do that? What made her think of that?' It's a fresh approach, a fresh view. Then there are things that make a great quilt to me. It always has to have wonderful color. I don't think that's necessarily true for everyone. For me, I love color. I love symmetry. I love organic things and designs, but those three are more personal. SP: Are there any artists or quiltmakers works that you are particularly drawn to or that influence you in particular? BB: I've been influenced by the artists that pioneered studies of color, like Jinny Beyer and Joen Wolfrom. [loud noise in background.] I've always admired Sally Collins' attention to detail and her precision work. I love Gabrielle Swain's organic, nature-inspired graphic themes. I love Karen Stone's precision piecing and her idea that every block should be beautiful on its own. I like folk art, so Becky Goldsmith has been an influence. Those are ones that come to mind. SP: What's your favorite – BB:- [inaudible name-Ruth McDowell?] because of her organic, nature, joyful, simple creations. Her work makes you wonder 'How'd she do that? What made her think of that?'. SP: What's your favorite technique? BB: I think people would say about me, I love precision piecing. I like folk art. I like wool appliqué. I love hand quilting. Those are my favorites. SP: Why is quiltmaking in your life? BB: The first reason is how social it is. Most of my friends are involved in quiltmaking. Not all, but most. Without those friends, my life would be a lot emptier. The social aspect of quilting and sharing it with friends is super important to me. I guess the second thing would be that it lets me be an artist, or at least be artistic. I think that's in everybody to some extent, but its hard to express with all of the pressures we have today. People don't think of themselves as artistic, and with quilting anyone can be expressive to some extent. It gives me that. SP: Are there any aspects of quilting that you don't particularly enjoy? BB: I hate to baste a quilt [laughing.] Starting a new project is hard. When I'm into it, I'm in the swing of it. Getting off the paper and into the fabric is sometimes hard. Making the commitment to the design is sometimes hard. I think part of that is being trained to visualize the entire piece. I'm trying to un-train myself, to look at individual elements and let them tell you what to do next. I enjoy quilting. Machine quilting is difficult. I'm getting better, but it's still a challenge and sometimes frustrating. But I pretty much enjoy all aspects of it, starting with buying the fabric. SP: Describe your studio or your work space. BB: I'm lucky to have my own space. It's a 20' by 20' foot room. It's got a smooth, easy to use floor. I have a fireplace at one end with two rocking chairs. I have my computer in a corner and a tv in another corner. My sewing machine is in the center with an ironing board at an L to the side. I have a large cutting table with usually too much stuff on it to cut anything out. I have a big design wall. I have a wall of plastic shelving bins that I store all of my fabric in by color. I have tall ceilings, 10'. Pretty high up above the fabric storage I have a clothes rack that runs 20' feet long. I hang my quilts on that above my fabric storage, so I can see them. There's a shelf above that. I collect wooden shelf-sitter animals of all funky types and they're sitting up there looking down at me. I have a door onto a screened in porch that looks out into the back of the property. It's very nice and I'm very lucky to have it. SP: Do you think that having the design wall helps a lot with your creative process? BB: It's absolutely essential. I use it all the time. I use it even before I've cut out the fabric to put things up to see how the colors look. I try to keep most of it available, unlike my cutting table which is almost always unavailable. I put notices along the side, but I try to keep about six by eight feet always open. I put up all of my blocks. I use it constantly. I don't know how anybody could see their project well without one. It's a simple design wall. It's not permanent. I covered two insulation boards with fleece fabric and leaned them up against the wall. It can be taken down or moved if I have to. SP: How do you feel about machine quilting versus hand quilting? BB: I think they're both wonderful. I enjoy hand quilting more than machine quilting. I think machine quilting has changed the art form on two levels. One, it has changed the type of quilting that people do and made quilting take off in a new direction, more intricate and certainly more intense and part of the design. Another thing is, it's helped people finish quilts. I hand quilt some quilts, I machine quilt some quilts, and I send some of my quilts to a good long arm quilter. There's a role for each of those in your life and it's great to have that much choice. I use what makes sense and I think without machine quilting, a lot fewer quilts would be made. It's put it into people's hands. It's made it more achievable. Because of that, there are more quilts. I think that's great. SP: Are there other quiltmakers in your family? BB: Yes, my sister quilts. My mother quilts. I'm trying to get some of my nieces to quilt. They have taken to it. One, who is an adult, makes some quilts. She has a baby so not as many. The others that are in school have all tried their hand in it from time to time. We're always trying to convert people to quilting. SP: So your habit of quilting doesn't impact your family in a negative way? BB: No. I think that for me and my husband, we each have hobbies we're very involved in. That's good in a marriage, to have individual pursuits. Then to come together at the end of the day and be able to share it. I love sharing it with my mother and sister. It's fun to get my nieces involved. It's been nothing but good, I would say. SP: Have you ever used quilting to get through a difficult time? BB: Yes I have. The first time I remember is after my younger brother died in 1998. I made quilts for his four daughters out of his t-shirts and neckties. That was very healing. They love having something of his to cuddle with. We recently had a big wildfire in Bastrop County [Texas], where I live. It took me awhile to want to sew again. But it was through deciding to sew things for other people in my community that I could enjoy sewing again. That was very healing. I think from everyone I've talked to, and me too, when a tragedy happens, it takes away your desire to quilt for a while, for whatever reason. Usually, the first steps out involve doing something for another person with your quilting. That gives you some purpose in what you're doing, while reawakening the passion you have still hidden in you for it. Then you're back in the groove and can go on from there. SP: Have you ever taken any really long breaks from your quilting? BB: No more than a few months. SP: You mentioned making things for people in your community. Was it quilts or quilted items after the fire or other projects? BB: Sometimes. Right now I'm making a quilt for a firefighter who lost his home. I'm making some placemats for the people who loaned us a place to live. SP: Do any of your quilts reflect your community or where you live? BB: Not specifically. I don't set out to make a Texas quilt. I do tend to make a lot of quilts about trees. I've always loved leaves and the look of forests. Several of my quilts that I think are some of my favorite quilts explore that. I find myself more and more focusing on elements of nature to be expressed somehow in my quilts. I recently made a quilt for one of my nieces that was a garden quilt and had a path going off in the distance. I've made a quilt with trees, called The Forest and The Trees. This one has a lot of leaves quilted in the background. It has the birds and the branches. I've had two quilts in the IQA Show here. They were both nature oriented. I've made a tree quilt for another niece. I find myself drawn to those subjects quite a bit lately. SP: I think that it's interesting, and a lot of other people have commented on it that you've used the woven scraps around the edge of this quilt. Do you use materials like that a lot or do you mainly stick with cotton? BB: I mainly stick with cotton. That was a new experiment for me. When I saw them and touched them, I knew I had to do something with them that could be touched. Color and texture is what turns me on about a quilt. I have done some work in silk, which is beautiful. I learned the hard way some of the lessons about silk. The first block I ever made of silk literally dissolved into a puddle of threads in my lap because I didn't know how to use the grain to cut in the right direction. It just fell apart on me. Silk is beautiful, but I mostly deal with cottons. SP: What do you think makes a quilt appropriate for museum or a special collection? BB: I think museums serve a role to capture the major things happening at a time period. They are a historical tool. I think collecting well-known artists is an appropriate focus for museums, especially now when there is so much to choose from. SP: How do you think that quilts have special meaning for women's history in America? BB: There's a lot written about how quilts have reflected the times that women have lived through. For me, it's a story of evolution and that's what makes quilting so exciting, that it does change. It's always been a way for women to express themselves separate from what they do everyday and to give a voice to what is inside of them. A lot of people in the past have used it to comment on history. That's never been a big thing for me. Quilts are more emotional to me, rather than historical or documentary. I really don't like sad quilts. I don't like quilts that capture a sad event. Quilts should make you feel good. There are enough other ways to remember the tragic events in our life. I think that quilts are to remember the happy things and to bring joy to the people that see them. I'm not personally one to use them to document my times. I'm using them as an expression. SP: Is there anything else you'd like to add to your story before we conclude? What do you think someone viewing the quilt you brought today might conclude about you? BB: On the surface level, they would see what a lot of people see when they first meet me, that I'm kind of meticulous and I pay a lot of attention to detail. I think that if they had never met me, they might say some things that would be different. They don't know me at all, but they would look at this quilt and they would say, 'That person is adventurous. That person has a lot of passion and joy for color and living things. That person takes chances.' People that meet me on a different level, in a different context, might not ever say that, because I think that I am usually thought of as a pretty quiet and reserved person. Yet those things are inside. People that know me a long time know they're there, but quilting gives me a way to express those things. I think that a really healthy thing that other quilters can do with their work, is let it show what they know is inside but may not be so obvious. SP: What do you think is the biggest challenge confronting quiltmakers today? BB: For me, it's been finding my own voice and my own style. There is so much diversity in quilting. You go to a major show like this and you're overwhelmed with the talent that you see. You think you can never do it. I hear so many people walking the show saying 'Well I'm not going to make another quilt again. I could never be this good.' But there's some artist in everybody. If you quilt everyday, you get a daily dose of beauty and it can't help but let you free yourself to take more chances. I think that's what pulls people more than anything, is letting themselves take chances with their work, not knowing where it's going to end up. They may feel like they are uncomfortable or don't have a sense of style. I struggle with that. I'm going to try to focus on smaller pieces and let them grow a little bit more on their own and a little bit less under the control of my brain. I admire organic design and nature designs and I think nature is a pretty strong force, a pretty strong power. You can't control it. Maybe opening yourself up by tackling smaller things and letting them tell you what they want to be. It's a challenge to find your own voice and to feel like you can do it. SP: I'd like to thank Barbara for allowing me to interview her today for the Quilters' S.O.S. Save Our Stories. Our interview concluded at 4:27 pm.",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Katie Demery","http://quiltalliance.net/ohms-viewer-master/viewer.php?cachefile=TX77010-037Barrett.xml ",audio,,,"<!--?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""UTF-8""?--> <root><record id=""00021263"" dt=""2017-05-24""><version>4</version><date format=""yyyy-mm-dd"">2011-11-04</date><date_nonpreferred_format></date_nonpreferred_format><cms_record_id></cms_record_id> 
<title>Barbara Ann Bauer Barrett</title>
<accession>TX77010-037Barrett</accession><duration></duration><collection_id></collection_id><collection_name>Quilters' S.O.S. -- Save Our Stories</collection_name><series_id></series_id><series_name>The International Quilt Festival QSOS</series_name><repository>Quilt Alliance</repository><funding></funding><repository_url></repository_url><keyword>nature</keyword><keyword>Austin Area Quilt Guild</keyword><keyword>design process</keyword><keyword>technology in quiltmaking</keyword><interviewee>Barbara Ann Bauer Barrett</interviewee><interviewer>Shelly Pagliali</interviewer><file_name></file_name><sync>1:|8(9)|19(3)|28(5)|41(10)|50(11)|66(8)|75(10)|85(8)|93(7)|101(6)|113(9)|123(10)|132(3)|140(11)|147(6)|158(1)|166(13)|172(3)|181(14)|190(5)|198(12)|204(10)|218(7)|223(6)|227(13)|238(6)|246(11)|253(14)|261(12)|269(9)|275(11)|286(3)|291(9)|297(10)</sync><sync_alt></sync_alt><transcript_alt_lang></transcript_alt_lang><translate>0</translate><media_id></media_id><media_url>http://quiltalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/TX77010-037Barrett-1.mp3</media_url><mediafile><host>Other</host><host_account_id></host_account_id><host_player_id></host_player_id><host_clip_id></host_clip_id><clip_format>audio</clip_format></mediafile><kembed></kembed><language></language><index><point><time>0</time> 
<title>Interview introduction</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>This is Shelly Pagliali, today's date is November 4th, 2011</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis></synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>International Quilt Festival</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>28</time> 
<title>Will you tell me about the quilt you brought today?</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>I call this quilt 'Sing a New Song'. It features a large bird in the center that happened by accident.</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Shelly Pagliali begins by asking Barbara Ann Bauer Barrett about the quilt she brought to the International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas. Barrett describes her quilt featuring a bird built out of pieces from an abandoned New York Beauty quilt project. She realized the partial blocks looked like bird feathers. The border is made scraps sold by a weaver from Taos, New Mexico.</synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>""Sing a New Song"";arcs;border;fringed border;International Quilt Festival;New York;New York Beauty - quilt pattern;scraps;Taos, New Mexico</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps>29.7604, -95.3698</gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text>Site of the International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas</gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink>http://quiltalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/qsos_TX77010-037_barrett_01.jpg</hyperlink><hyperlink_text>Barbara Ann Bauer Barrett with her quilt, “Sing a New Song.”</hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>95</time> 
<title>Why did you choose to bring this quilt to the interview today?</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>This is one of the more recent ones I've made. It kind of represents the way my quilting is changing since I began. </partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett begins to explain why she decided to bring this quilt to the International Quilt Festival. She goes on to explain how the bird represents joy in nature to her.</synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>bird;country;Fabric - Batiks;freedom;Nature;repurposed fabric;symbolism</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink>http://quiltalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/qsos_TX77010-037_barrett_02.jpg</hyperlink><hyperlink_text>Barbara Ann Bauer Barrett, “Sing a New Song,” detail showing bird constructed from New York Beauty blocks on a batik ground. </hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>162</time> 
<title>At what age did you start quiltmaking?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>Seriously, about the mid 1990's. I've always sewn.</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett explains that she didn't start quilting until later in life. She did however, begin sewing as a child and continued into her teen and adult life.</synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>handwork;Learning quiltmaking;patchwork;quilt;quilting;sewing</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink>http://quiltalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/qsos_TX77010-037_barrett_05.jpg</hyperlink><hyperlink_text> Barbara Ann Bauer Barrett, “Sing a New Song,” detail.</hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>207</time> 
<title>Learning to quilt</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>I took a class. I gave myself a class for my birthday one year. It was hand piecing very traditional blocks. I came home from the class and said 'I'm not going to do this'.</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barbara Ann Bauer Barrett explains how she gave herself classes one year for her birthday and she didn't think she would be able to be a serious quilter. She went on to explain how nature helped inspire her. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>blocks;fabric;hand piecing;Knowledge transfer;Learning quiltmaking;quilt;quilt making classes;traditional blocks</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink>http://quiltalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/qsos_TX77010-037_barrett_03.jpg</hyperlink><hyperlink_text>Barbara Ann Bauer Barrett, “Sing a New Song,” detail showing how nature inspires her work. </hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>257</time> 
<title>How many hours a week do you quilt?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>Sometimes none. But a good week is when I can spend about four to five hours a day. I always do handwork at night.</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett recounts how some weeks she doesn't spend any time making her quilts. But when she does, she spends a good four to five hours working. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>Design Wall;handwork;Home sewing machine;machine;Time management</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>293</time> 
<title>What art or quilt groups do you belong to?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>I belong to the Austin [Texas] Area Quilt Guild and I have for a long time. I belong to a bee with a small group of women that meets on some frequency.</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett lists the quilt groups she is a part of. She also says where they are based. In addition to guild membership, she participates in several quilting bees. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>Austin Area Quilt Guild (Austin, TX);Austin, Texas;Bastrop, Texas;Blockettes Quilt Bee (Austin, TX);International Quilt Association (IQA);Loose Threads Quilt Bee (Bastrop, TX);Quilt Guild;Texas quilting bee;The In Stitches Bee;The Night Bloomers Quilt Bee (Austin, TX)</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps>30.2672, -97.7431</gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text>Meeting site of the Austin Area Quilt Guild</gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>359</time> 
<title>Have advances in technology influenced your work? If so, how?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>To some extent, I've always been a gadget person. </partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett explains how she has many rulers and a good sewing machine. She explains how she uses the computer software Electric Quilt in her design process. She has experimented with some new threads as well.</synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>computer;design process;Electric Quilt;home sewing machine;machine quilting;rulers;Technology in quiltmaking;threads</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>421</time> 
<title>What do you think makes a great quilt?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>I've thought about that one for a long time. </partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett explains what makes a great quilt. She believes that good workmanship and a good visual impact are just a few things that play into making a great quilt.</synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>color;symmetry;visual;workmanship</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>530</time> 
<title>Which artists have influenced you?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>I've been influenced by the artists that pioneered studies of color, like Jinny Beyer and Joen Wolfrom. </partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett describes how various quilt artists have influenced her own work. Barrett lists quilters who have inspired her throughout the years: Jinny Beyer, Joen Wolfram, Karen Stone, Sally Collins, Becky Goldsmith, Gabrielle Swain, and Caryl Bryer Fallert. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>artists;Becky Goldsmith;Caryl Bryer Fallert;detail;folk art;Gabrielle Swain;graphic themes;Jinny Beyer;Joen Wolfram;Karen Stone;precision piecing;precision work;Sally Collins</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>628</time> 
<title>What are your favorite techniques and materials?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>I think people would say about me, I love precision piecing. I like folk art. I like wool appliqué. I love hand quilting. Those are my favorites.</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett explains to Pagliali some of her favorite techniques when it comes to quilting.</synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>applique;Hand quilting;precision piecing;wool</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>661</time> 
<title>Why is quiltmaking important to your life?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>The first reason is how social it is. Most of my friends are involved in quiltmaking. Not all, but most. Without those friends, my life would be a lot emptier. </partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett explains how her life would feel somewhat empty without quilting. She also explains how it has brought important friendships into her life.</synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>artist;artistic;expressive;quilt making;Social quiltmaking activities</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>738</time> 
<title>What aspects of quiltmaking do you not enjoy?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>I hate to baste a quilt [laughing.] </partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett begins to explain a few things she doesn't particularly like about quilting, or things she finds difficult. She has trouble imagining the entire piece as a whole. She mentions the aspects of quiltmaking, including machine quilting, that she finds frustrating. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>baste;design process;fabric;machine quilting;piece;project;shopping for fabric;visualize</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>811</time> 
<title>Describe your studio/the place that you create.;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>I'm lucky to have my own space. </partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett explains what her work space looks like. She seems to feel lucky to have such a beautiful studio. She walks Pagliali through the various furnishings and features of the space. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>cutting table;design wall;fabric;fabric stash;home sewing machine;work or studio space</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>927</time> 
<title>Do you use a design wall? If so, in what way/how does that enhance your creative process? If not, how do you go about designing your quilts?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>It's absolutely essential. I use it all the time. </partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett explains how and why a design wall is essential to creating a quilt. She thinks it helps her see the whole project. The wall is moveable and easily dismantled. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>blocks;cut;cutting table;Design process;Design Wall;fabric;fleece;insulation boards</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>1001</time> 
<title>How do you feel about machine quilting vs. hand quilting? What about long-arm quilting?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>I think they're both wonderful. I enjoy hand quilting more than machine quilting.</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett explains how she enjoys hand quilting more than machine quilting. Although she believes both are wonderful. She thinks the influx of machine quilting has enabled people to finish quilts were more ease, resulting in more completed quilts. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>design;Hand quilting;Long arm quilters;Machine quilting</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>1105</time> 
<title>Are there other quiltmakers among your family or friends? Please tell me about them.;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>Yes, my sister quilts. My mother quilts. I'm trying to get some of my nieces to quilt. </partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett explains how her sister and mother are quilters just like she is. She admits to trying to convert people into quilting, including her nieces. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>family;mother;sister</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>1155</time> 
<title>Impact of quilting on her family</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>No. I think that for me and my husband, we each have hobbies we're very involved in. That's good in a marriage, to have individual pursuits.</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett explains how having different interests in marriage are good for it. Her quilting doesn't have a negative impact on her marriage. Her husband also has hobbies for which he has passion. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>hobbies;mother;nieces;sister</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>1215</time> 
<title>Tell me if you have ever used quilts to get through a difficult time?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>Yes I have. The first time I remember is after my younger brother died in 1998.</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett explains how quilting has helped her get through some difficult times in her life, including the death of her brother and a recent wildfire. By sewing for others, she has been able to heal following tragedies.</synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>Bastrop County,Texas;desire;healing;Mourning/Grief;Quilt Purpose - Gift or presentation;Quilt Purpose – Charity;Quilt Purpose – Mourning;quilts;Quilts as gifts;sew;sewing</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps>30.0459, -97.3517 </gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text>Bastrop County, Texas</gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>1379</time> 
<title>In what ways do your quilts reflect your community or region?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>Not specifically. I don't set out to make a Texas quilt. I do tend to make a lot of quilts about trees.</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett explains that she doesn't specifically make quilts based off of her community. She really makes them based off of her interests, including nature. She describes several quilts she has made with nature motifs including trees and leaves.</synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>background;International Quilt Association (IQA);International Quilt Festival;nature;quilt;Quilt shows/exhibitions;quilted;Texas</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink>http://quiltalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/qsos_TX77010-037_barrett_04.jpg</hyperlink><hyperlink_text>Barbara Ann Bauer Barrett, “Sing a New Song,” detail, showing a leaf motif in the quilting stitches.</hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>1514</time> 
<title>On her fabric choices</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>I think that it's interesting, and a lot of other people have commented on it that you've used the woven scraps around the edge of this quilt. Do you use materials like that a lot or do you mainly stick with cotton?</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett talks about the fabrics she likes to use when quilt making. She prefers cotton, but has experimented with silk.</synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>block;cotton;cut;grain;quilt;silk;texture;threads</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>1593</time> 
<title>What makes a quilt appropriate for a museum or special collection?</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>I think museums serve a role to capture the major things happening at a time period. They are a historical tool.</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett explains how quilts play an important role in our history. And with museums displaying them, we get to experience that history. She thinks it is appropriate for museums to collect quilts. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>artists;collecting;museums;Quilt history</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>1643</time> 
<title>In what ways do you think quilts have special meaning for women's history in America?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>There's a lot written about how quilts have reflected the times that women have lived through.</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett explains how she sees a lot of history when she looks at a quilt, but she prefers to express herself in a quilt rather than tell a story about a past event. She does not like sad quilts, but wants quilts to express joy, rather than sorrow. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>evolution;historical;Quilt history;Quilt Purpose – Personal expression;quilts;story;women</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>1767</time> 
<title>What do you think someone viewing your quilt might conclude about you?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>On the surface level, they would see what a lot of people see when they first meet me, that I'm kind of meticulous and I pay a lot of attention to detail. I think that if they had never met me, they might say some things that would be different. </partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett goes on to explain the kind of person she is: meticulous. She tells Pagliali what she hopes people would be able to tell about her when looking at one of her quilts. She thinks her quilts reveal aspects of her personality that some may not see on the surface, but are expressed through quiltmaking. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>adventurous;color;meticulous;nature;passion;Quilt Purpose – personal expression;quilters;quilting</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>1899</time> 
<title>What do you think is the biggest challenge confronting quiltmakers today?;</title>
<title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>For me, it's been finding my own voice and my own style. There is so much diversity in quilting. You go to a major show like this and you're overwhelmed with the talent that you see. You think you can never do it.</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Barrett explains how the most difficult thing for her is trying to find her own voice and style when creating a quilt. It's challenging to have a voice but if you keep working at it you can find it. She encourages quiltmakers to take chances with their work in order to develop their own personal style. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>artist;challenge;diversity;nature;nature designs;organic design;pieces;quilt;Quilt shows/exhibitions;quilting;style;talent;work</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point></index><type>Oral History</type><description>Barbara Barrett is a quilter in Basrop, Texas who began quilting in the mid 1990s. She's known how to sew since a young age, and moved to quilting when she took a class. She is an active member of many groups and guilds including the Austin Area Quilt Guild, the Night Bloomers Quilt Bee, the Blockettes Quilt Bee, Loose Threads Quilt Bee and the In Stitches Bee. She also is amember of the International Quilt Association (IQA).</description><rel></rel><transcript>Shelly Pagliali (SP): Barbara, will you tell me about the quilt you brought today? Barbara Barrett (BB): 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. SP: Why did you choose to bring this quilt to the interview today? BB: This is one of the more recent ones I’ve made. 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. SP: At what age did you start quiltmaking? BB: Seriously, about the mid 1990’s. I’ve always sewn. I do know as a little girl, my next door neighbor friend and I one summer sewed probably about 100 yards of patchwork, maybe two feet wide. It seemed like miles of it at the time. Then I went on to other sorts of hand work. I found those recently and gave them to her for Christmas and we made a quilt out of them the next year. I didn’t start really seriously quilting until about 20 years ago. SP: Did someone teach you or did you learn on your own like that? BB: I took a class. I gave myself a class for my birthday one year. It was hand piecing very traditional blocks. I came home from the class and said 'I’m not going to do this’. Then my parents came to visit once. My mom and I walked outside and it was spring. There were daffodils coming up in the yard and I looked back at the house and I said 'I could make a quilt out of that’. I went back to the shop and bought all of the fabric for that quilt. I put my house in the middle with some flower blocks around it. That was enough to get me hooked and I haven’t looked back. Now it’s my main passion. SP: How many hours a week do you spend on your quiltmaking? BB: Sometimes none. But a good week is when I can spend about four to five hours a day. I always do handwork at night. Every day I’m doing something, but during the day I’m at the machine or the design wall. A good day would be four to five hours. Some weeks go by where that doesn’t happen. SP: Do you belong to any art groups or quilting groups? BB: I belong to the Austin [Texas] Area Quilt Guild and I have for a long time. I belong to a bee with a small group of women that meets on some frequency. For us, it’s a month. I belong to the Night Bloomers Quilt Bee [Austin, Texas]. I belong to the Blockettes Quilt Bee, which is a block exchange group [ Austin, Texas]. [inaudible.] About six years ago I moved to Bastrop [Texas] from Austin [Texas]. I belong to the Loose Threads Quilt Bee [Bastrop, Texas] and to the In Stitches Bee [Bastrop, Texas]. I think that’s all. SP: Do advances in -- BB: - and IQA. I belong to IQA [International Quilt Association]. SP: Have advances in technology influenced your work? BB: To some extent, I’ve always been a gadget person. I must own about 40 rulers. I did invest in a good sewing machine. I would love to invest in something to make machine quilting better. Someday I will. That’s an advancement that I haven’t taken advantage of yet. On the computer, I have Electric Quilt 6 and use it sometimes for portions of the design of a quilt, and of course using the computer to communicate, for online research, and even lessons and things like that. It’s been a great tool. I’m also trying new threads, which I think have been made better for quilting. SP: What do you think makes a great quilt? BB: I’ve thought about that one for a long time. At the basic, you have to have excellent workmanship. That’s a given. And visual impact. Without that, it’s not a great quilt. Beyond that, I think it needs to have a unique or fresh view. I got to thinking because music has been a big part of my life too, how you’ll be in the car and hear a song and some songs you just listen to and others you start singing to. As soon as you start singing, your whole mood lifts up and you feel like you’ve been given a gift. Singing that song makes you joyful inside. I think a great quilt triggers a similar response in you. That’s hard to quantify, but you walk by and wonder 'How did she do that? What made her think of that?' It’s a fresh approach, a fresh view. Then there are things that make a great quilt to me. It always has to have wonderful color. I don’t think that’s necessarily true for everyone. For me, I love color. I love symmetry. I love organic things and designs, but those three are more personal. SP: Are there any artists or quiltmakers works that you are particularly drawn to or that influence you in particular? BB: I’ve been influenced by the artists that pioneered studies of color, like Jinny Beyer and Joen Wolfrom. [loud noise in background.] I’ve always admired Sally Collins’ attention to detail and her precision work. I love Gabrielle Swain’s organic, nature-inspired graphic themes. I love Karen Stone’s precision piecing and her idea that every block should be beautiful on its own. I like folk art, so Becky Goldsmith has been an influence. Those are ones that come to mind. SP: What’s your favorite -- BB:- [inaudible name-Ruth McDowell?] because of her organic, nature, joyful, simple creations. Her work makes you wonder 'How’d she do that? What made her think of that?'. SP: What’s your favorite technique? BB: I think people would say about me, I love precision piecing. I like folk art. I like wool appliqué. I love hand quilting. Those are my favorites. SP: Why is quiltmaking in your life? BB: The first reason is how social it is. Most of my friends are involved in quiltmaking. Not all, but most. Without those friends, my life would be a lot emptier. The social aspect of quilting and sharing it with friends is super important to me. I guess the second thing would be that it lets me be an artist, or at least be artistic. I think that’s in everybody to some extent, but its hard to express with all of the pressures we have today. People don’t think of themselves as artistic, and with quilting anyone can be expressive to some extent. It gives me that. SP: Are there any aspects of quilting that you don’t particularly enjoy? BB: I hate to baste a quilt [laughing.] Starting a new project is hard. When I’m into it, I’m in the swing of it. Getting off the paper and into the fabric is sometimes hard. Making the commitment to the design is sometimes hard. I think part of that is being trained to visualize the entire piece. I’m trying to un-train myself, to look at individual elements and let them tell you what to do next. I enjoy quilting. Machine quilting is difficult. I’m getting better, but it’s still a challenge and sometimes frustrating. But I pretty much enjoy all aspects of it, starting with buying the fabric. SP: Describe your studio or your work space. BB: I’m lucky to have my own space. It’s a 20’ by 20’ foot room. It’s got a smooth, easy to use floor. I have a fireplace at one end with two rocking chairs. I have my computer in a corner and a tv in another corner. My sewing machine is in the center with an ironing board at an L to the side. I have a large cutting table with usually too much stuff on it to cut anything out. I have a big design wall. I have a wall of plastic shelving bins that I store all of my fabric in by color. I have tall ceilings, 10’. Pretty high up above the fabric storage I have a clothes rack that runs 20’ feet long. I hang my quilts on that above my fabric storage, so I can see them. There’s a shelf above that. I collect wooden shelf-sitter animals of all funky types and they’re sitting up there looking down at me. I have a door onto a screened in porch that looks out into the back of the property. It’s very nice and I’m very lucky to have it. SP: Do you think that having the design wall helps a lot with your creative process? BB: It’s absolutely essential. I use it all the time. I use it even before I’ve cut out the fabric to put things up to see how the colors look. I try to keep most of it available, unlike my cutting table which is almost always unavailable. I put notices along the side, but I try to keep about six by eight feet always open. I put up all of my blocks. I use it constantly. I don’t know how anybody could see their project well without one. It’s a simple design wall. It’s not permanent. I covered two insulation boards with fleece fabric and leaned them up against the wall. It can be taken down or moved if I have to. SP: How do you feel about machine quilting versus hand quilting? BB: I think they’re both wonderful. I enjoy hand quilting more than machine quilting. I think machine quilting has changed the art form on two levels. One, it has changed the type of quilting that people do and made quilting take off in a new direction, more intricate and certainly more intense and part of the design. Another thing is, it’s helped people finish quilts. I hand quilt some quilts, I machine quilt some quilts, and I send some of my quilts to a good long arm quilter. There’s a role for each of those in your life and it’s great to have that much choice. I use what makes sense and I think without machine quilting, a lot fewer quilts would be made. It’s put it into people’s hands. It’s made it more achievable. Because of that, there are more quilts. I think that’s great. SP: Are there other quiltmakers in your family? BB: Yes, my sister quilts. My mother quilts. I’m trying to get some of my nieces to quilt. They have taken to it. One, who is an adult, makes some quilts. She has a baby so not as many. The others that are in school have all tried their hand in it from time to time. We’re always trying to convert people to quilting. SP: So your habit of quilting doesn’t impact your family in a negative way? BB: No. I think that for me and my husband, we each have hobbies we’re very involved in. That’s good in a marriage, to have individual pursuits. Then to come together at the end of the day and be able to share it. I love sharing it with my mother and sister. It’s fun to get my nieces involved. It’s been nothing but good, I would say. SP: Have you ever used quilting to get through a difficult time? BB: Yes I have. The first time I remember is after my younger brother died in 1998. I made quilts for his four daughters out of his t-shirts and neckties. That was very healing. They love having something of his to cuddle with. We recently had a big wildfire in Bastrop County [Texas], where I live. It took me awhile to want to sew again. But it was through deciding to sew things for other people in my community that I could enjoy sewing again. That was very healing. I think from everyone I've talked to, and me too, when a tragedy happens, it takes away your desire to quilt for a while, for whatever reason. Usually, the first steps out involve doing something for another person with your quilting. That gives you some purpose in what you're doing, while reawakening the passion you have still hidden in you for it. Then you're back in the groove and can go on from there. SP: Have you ever taken any really long breaks from your quilting? BB: No more than a few months. SP: You mentioned making things for people in your community. Was it quilts or quilted items after the fire or other projects? BB: Sometimes. Right now I'm making a quilt for a firefighter who lost his home. I'm making some placemats for the people who loaned us a place to live. SP: Do any of your quilts reflect your community or where you live? BB: Not specifically. I don't set out to make a Texas quilt. I do tend to make a lot of quilts about trees. I've always loved leaves and the look of forests. Several of my quilts that I think are some of my favorite quilts explore that. I find myself more and more focusing on elements of nature to be expressed somehow in my quilts. I recently made a quilt for one of my nieces that was a garden quilt and had a path going off in the distance. I've made a quilt with trees, called The Forest and The Trees. This one has a lot of leaves quilted in the background. It has the birds and the branches. I've had two quilts in the IQA Show here. They were both nature oriented. I've made a tree quilt for another niece. I find myself drawn to those subjects quite a bit lately. SP: I think that it's interesting, and a lot of other people have commented on it that you've used the woven scraps around the edge of this quilt. Do you use materials like that a lot or do you mainly stick with cotton? BB: I mainly stick with cotton. That was a new experiment for me. When I saw them and touched them, I knew I had to do something with them that could be touched. Color and texture is what turns me on about a quilt. I have done some work in silk, which is beautiful. I learned the hard way some of the lessons about silk. The first block I ever made of silk literally dissolved into a puddle of threads in my lap because I didn’t know how to use the grain to cut in the right direction. It just fell apart on me. Silk is beautiful, but I mostly deal with cottons. SP: What do you think makes a quilt appropriate for museum or a special collection? BB: I think museums serve a role to capture the major things happening at a time period. They are a historical tool. I think collecting well-known artists is an appropriate focus for museums, especially now when there is so much to choose from. SP: How do you think that quilts have special meaning for women’s history in America? BB: There’s a lot written about how quilts have reflected the times that women have lived through. For me, it’s a story of evolution and that’s what makes quilting so exciting, that it does change. It’s always been a way for women to express themselves separate from what they do everyday and to give a voice to what is inside of them. A lot of people in the past have used it to comment on history. That’s never been a big thing for me. Quilts are more emotional to me, rather than historical or documentary. I really don’t like sad quilts. I don’t like quilts that capture a sad event. Quilts should make you feel good. There are enough other ways to remember the tragic events in our life. I think that quilts are to remember the happy things and to bring joy to the people that see them. I’m not personally one to use them to document my times. I’m using them as an expression. SP: Is there anything else you’d like to add to your story before we conclude? What do you think someone viewing the quilt you brought today might conclude about you? BB: On the surface level, they would see what a lot of people see when they first meet me, that I’m kind of meticulous and I pay a lot of attention to detail. I think that if they had never met me, they might say some things that would be different. They don’t know me at all, but they would look at this quilt and they would say, 'That person is adventurous. That person has a lot of passion and joy for color and living things. That person takes chances.' People that meet me on a different level, in a different context, might not ever say that, because I think that I am usually thought of as a pretty quiet and reserved person. Yet those things are inside. People that know me a long time know they’re there, but quilting gives me a way to express those things. I think that a really healthy thing that other quilters can do with their work, is let it show what they know is inside but may not be so obvious. SP: What do you think is the biggest challenge confronting quiltmakers today? BB: For me, it’s been finding my own voice and my own style. There is so much diversity in quilting. You go to a major show like this and you’re overwhelmed with the talent that you see. You think you can never do it. I hear so many people walking the show saying 'Well I’m not going to make another quilt again. I could never be this good.' But there’s some artist in everybody. If you quilt everyday, you get a daily dose of beauty and it can’t help but let you free yourself to take more chances. I think that’s what pulls people more than anything, is letting themselves take chances with their work, not knowing where it’s going to end up. They may feel like they are uncomfortable or don’t have a sense of style. I struggle with that. I’m going to try to focus on smaller pieces and let them grow a little bit more on their own and a little bit less under the control of my brain. I admire organic design and nature designs and I think nature is a pretty strong force, a pretty strong power. You can’t control it. Maybe opening yourself up by tackling smaller things and letting them tell you what they want to be. It’s a challenge to find your own voice and to feel like you can do it. SP: I’d like to thank Barbara for allowing me to interview her today for the Quilters’ S.O.S. Save Our Stories. Our interview concluded at 4:27 pm. </transcript><transcript_alt></transcript_alt><rights>2015 Quilt Alliance. All Rights Reserved.</rights><fmt>audio</fmt><usage></usage><userestrict>0</userestrict><xmllocation></xmllocation><xmlfilename></xmlfilename><collection_link></collection_link><series_link></series_link><translate>0</translate></record></root>",yes,,,"Lisa Ellis",,"Austin Area Quilt Guild,Becky Goldsmith,Blockettes Quilt Bee,blocks,design wall,guilds,In Stitches Bee,International Quilt Association (IQA),Karen Stone,Loose Threads Quilt Bee,Night Bloomers Quilt Bee,pictorial quilts,quiltmaking classes,Sally Collins,social quiltmaking activities,Technology in quiltmaking","http://qsos.quiltalliance.org/files/original/34602f9880929e355ade2507e6fcdc3f.jpg,http://qsos.quiltalliance.org/files/original/36aec577890749c7a74362d0ecacf25e.jpg,http://qsos.quiltalliance.org/files/original/9cd4fdbb59e1a38c4911dd4aa47ebaf7.jpg","Oral History","International Quilt Festival QSOS",1,0