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Title
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Kansas QSOS
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Karen Musgrave
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Sharon Bass
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5.4 Interview with Sharon Bass KS66046-001 Quilters' S.O.S. -- Save Our Stories The Kansas QSOS Quilt Alliance Sharon Bass Karen Musgrave 0 https://quiltalliance.net/qsos-audio/KS66046-001 Bass.mp3 Other audio Oral History Karen Musgrave (KM): This is Karen Musgrave and I am doing a Quilters' ; S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview with Sharon Bass. Sharon is in Lawrence, Kansas and I' ; m in Naperville, Illinois so we are conducting this interview by telephone. Today' ; s date is August 19, 2008 ; it is now 11:01 in the morning. Sharon, thank you so much for taking time to do this interview with me. Please tell me about your quilt " ; Wall Series 1: Weather Report," ; which you chose for this interview. Sharon Bass (SB): Thank you for inviting me to participate. I chose this quilt because I, well for about four or five reasons. [laughs.] The one right at the very top of my head was that I wanted to submit something that was relatively current, although I have many favorites that I have done over the past ten years. This one qualified because it was current, but the more important thing is that I felt like this is kind of a culmination and a beginning at the same time. It is the first of a series of what I call " ; Wall Quilts," ; and I' ; m only onto number two right now, so it is a very slim series. [laughs.] I find that I like working in series and I never thought that I would be saying that, but what I like about it is that when I get the idea, a series allows me to do a lot of experiments with that idea and so in that way it is kind of perfect for the way that I work. The second thing that prompted me to submit it is that I' ; ve begun to recognize it as a fusion of traditional quilting (the pieced background) and art quilting and I think this is precisely who I am. I don' ; t quite fit into a traditional quilt mode but I like having these pieced backgrounds that give me a level of complexity or richness sometimes with high contrast or sometimes more nuanced. Then I have my collage items- silk organza and other things. For the surface design: the stamping and what I call thread painting and finally the quilting. The other thing, number three, is that it' ; s somewhat about storytelling in that this comes from the pictographs and petroglyphs that I have seen in the American West on the cave walls. The whole idea of symbols that tell a story, that have been carved and that we run across today, these marks that have been made, seem to me to be the fun part of quiltmaking. I think we always tell stories, sometimes consciously and sometimes less so. The final factor in selecting this quilt, which is important to me about all of my own quilting, is color. I just can' ; t live without color. So those were the four (or five) reasons why I submitted this quilt. KM: Is this typical of your work? SB: It' ; s really hard for me to say what' ; s typical because I have been quilting for ten years. I feel like for the first five years there was a lot looking and experimentation, but I think that it is beginning to be more typical. What is typical is probably the fusion part of it: art quilts with traditional elements. I went to a symposium in Colorado a few years ago called " ; Rooted in Tradition" ; and I don' ; t think that I' ; m very deeply rooted, but I do feel that background. So looking at it traditionally and then taking, tweaking it or taking it in another direction, that is probably pretty typical. KM: Do you think of yourself as an artist or a quiltmaker or do you even make that decision. I mean is it just art quiltmaker? SB: [laughs.] There is so much discussion about being an artist: whether you are an artist, is this art, is this quiltmaking, is it craft? I don' ; t know where I' ; m landing finally on that question. Maybe it needs to be asked, but it is not a question that I really need to ask or to have answered. The more that I get pulled into, or engaged in, conversations like that, means I am talking about stuff and not making quilts. If I' ; m not making quilts and playing around with my fabric I' ; m less happy. Right now it feels like a presumptuous title to describe myself as an artist but I think of what I create as pieces of art. Ultimately it is for somebody else to decide whether this is art or craft. If my pieces find happy homes I' ; m happy. KM: How do you use this quilt? SB: I beg your pardon. KM: How do you use this quilt? SB: I have it on my wall right here in my house right now. It has been in shows but right now it' ; s just sitting right next to, hanging above a cactus on a yellow wall and I enjoy seeing it. It' ; s on the wall. It is a relatively small piece, much like a painting. That' ; s how it is being used. I have to say, maybe this is a little bit of a digression, I' ; m quite a believer in using, seeing that things are out. I do not like (for myself anyway) the idea of quilts in boxes and quilts in trunks that never see the light of day. I rotate my quilts in my house. I tend to look at my house as my gallery. We have rotating shows all the time. [laughs.] KM: How wonderful. Tell me about your interest in quiltmaking. SB: How I got there? KM: You said you have been doing it for ten years. Why did you chose fiber, how did you get started? SB: In the nineties, early nineties I think that quilting came to me rather than I went to it. I can remember in the early nineties traveling a bit and I remember one place in Colorado where I went to a store and bought some fabric. I didn' ; t sew. I had, in my closet deeply buried, a really old Singer machine. It had seen the light of day in twenty years or more perhaps. Nevertheless, I found myself just assembling this little patch of fabrics. I had no idea. At that time I was teaching at the University of Kansas and I was teaching courses in magazine publishing- the business of it, how to edit and how to write. It was all about things that were words and mostly black and white. Even though I had started off in journalism in graphics and photography, I was no longer doing anything that was visual. It was one of those light-bulb moments when I realized that my life was not so joyful because there was no color in it and I was not working with my hands. It was about that time that I saw a group of women quilting and they invited me to a local guild. I went and they had a wonderful speaker who talked about her own work. She is one who keeps journals. Her name is Alma Allen and she allowed us to see these journals. There was just something about it- it was personal and accessible. I thought, ' ; oh my, this is the real deal.' ; This is what I have been waiting for and never knew. So that is where it started. Then I started taking a few workshops. I got my sewing machine back out and within a couple of years the belt broke and couldn' ; t be repaired. I bought another little sewing machine. I never thought that I would be doing this on, at any scale so I went out to a discount store and bought just a cheap machine and within a couple of years I was ready to chuck that machine. Now I have a very fine machine that does almost everything except make the coffee in the morning. KM: Describe your studio. SB: Oh my studio. [laughs.] Well my studio used to be our family room and now I' ; ve managed to move everyone out. My husband is welcome but little by little the little that one corner that I had expanded to half of the room and now I have the whole room. Woohoo! I have good southern light. I have a bookcase that is full of all of the books that I would want. Also embellishments and beads and thread. I have cabinets. I have a fabric stash. It is the most wonderful playroom [laughs.] that I can imagine. And now I have crept into our laundry room where I paint on fabric, taking it over. I' ; m leaving the washing machine and the dryer for the family. [laughs.] It is a great space. I have a big design wall, well it is not big enough, but, I mean, it is big enough but of course one always wants more. KM: Tell me about the groups that you belong to and why they are important to you. SB: In Lawrence I have been for a number of years a member of the Kaw Valley Quilters Guild and it is the place where I started so I feel loyalty to it. But I' ; m not ; I wouldn' ; t call myself an active member. Actually I think with most of my associations I would describe myself as a member who lurks, lurking at the edges. I go to the meetings. I enjoy seeing the people and I go to some of the presentations. It is primarily made up of traditional quilters. I don' ; t think I follow rules so that is why I never feel quite at home. I would rather make up the rules myself or make them up for myself. [laughs.] From that association I heard about the Kansas Art Quilters. It is a small group of about seventy art quilters and although it says Kansas Art Quilters we have members all over the country from Portland, Oregon, to New Jersey, from Florida to California. We are a virtual community of art quilters. Most people join because we have had a number of quilt exhibits over the last few years and that is because we have had a person, Linda Frost, who has really taken that on. I' ; m taking that job over from Linda in the next few months and I don' ; t think that I will live up to what she has done for this group. But that will be my new job. Up to now I' ; ve been the coordinator for workshops. We have had one workshop a year where we bring in a national or international artist to have a one day or two day workshop with us. That group is the one group where I don' ; t lurk. I roll up my sleeves and get to work in that group. I also belong to SAQA, the Studio Art Quilt Associates, and I belong to that group because I' ; m inspired by it and its international make up and because of what it is trying to do. I tried to go to one convention but that was the convention in Little Rock that was canceled, so I haven' ; t been to a meeting. I have no face-to-face experience with this group but SAQA is important to me because of its presence on the Internet, what I can see and what I learn from it. Their publications are good. I really like their journal and get something out of it. One other group that I belong to is the Front Range Contemporary Quilters. I only get to go to perhaps one meeting a year. They are out of the Denver-Boulder area along the Front Range. I am quite excited by the energy in that group. I just walk into their meetings and sense the buzz. There are a lot of people that are working in contemporary quilting out there and it is a marvelous environment. They have been very welcoming and encouraging to me. Those are my groups. Those are my playmates. KM: Whose works are you drawn to and why? SB: I beg your pardon. KM: Whose works are you drawn to and why? SB: Other quilters or? KM: Or artists, I don' ; t care. SB: That is a good question. That has changed over time. At first as a quilter I was really looking at other quilts and other quilt artists and I' ; m influenced by the great pantheon of people that have been working in this area for many years. I feel like I' ; ve been lucky to sometimes be in the same room with a few of them, like Katie Pasquini-Masopust. I remember meeting Jean Ray Laury. Those have been wonderful little moments. But at this conference I was speaking of earlier, the " ; Rooted into Tradition" ; symposium, I remember hearing Robert Shaw admonishing us as quilt artists that we need to look at art broadly and look at people in other fields: furniture makers, ceramists, photographers, painters. He said that only looking at one another' ; s work might be cramping our vision. I thought there is something to what he said. I find myself very interested in contemporary art. Currently I' ; m quite fascinated by the work of a group called color theorists: Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland (I think that' ; s his name). Now I have a legitimate reason to celebrate color in the way I have always wanted to because color is what motivates me and pulls me into every single quilt. To look at the work that they have done, these large canvases, the way they have stained the canvas or painted the canvas is very reminiscent of whole cloth work. When I' ; m looking at a Helen Frankenthaler, I think, oh this is almost perfect, now if there was some stitching on here, if there were some quilt lines it would be absolutely perfect. I think I have something I feel like I can hang my hat on. I know that is where I' ; m heading next. KM: Tell me more about your feelings about color. SB: I guess I see color at many levels. The first level is kind of a visual response, the eye candy. But playing with color to see what it can do is important work. Also I' ; m just drawn to color. Having said that, one of my more successful quilts was one that I called " ; Imagining Spring." ; It is mostly black and white with beige and gray setting off a single tree in a snowfield. One piece of red fruit that can' ; t be any more than two inches, a circle of two inches in diameter is the thing that pulls everyone into that quilt. It was fun to see what you can do when you keep the background as neutral as possible and then you have one place where you use the color. It just seems like it is play to me. I like the contrast. I like the color adjacencies. I like seeing how nuanced you can be and then what do you do to kind of whack myself on the side of the head. KM: Do you have a favorite pallet? SB: No. All. KM: All. SB: All of it. KM: What do you think is the biggest challenge confronting quiltmakers today? SB: That is a very good question. One challenge I think confronting quiltmakers today is finding a way to become more secure and satisfied with what we do. I find a lot of people who don' ; t feel very secure or very confident and I always wonder why, and think it is a shame when they don' ; t feel secure or confident. A lot of the problems in this world are often caused by insecurities. Here is something that we have that is an absolute joy and we sometimes forget to celebrate the joy. We edit ourselves or we second-guess ourselves or we concentrate on our mistakes. Mistakes are fine, but overrated when it comes to learning. I have always wished that I would make one photograph or one quilt or do something right the very first time. I bet I would learn from that too. It doesn' ; t usually work out that way for me. Some things come together well and I just count my lucky stars. Learning from mistakes is one thing. Dwelling on mistakes is another thing. I would like to see the level of joy and positiveness infuse all of our conversations rather than the hand wringing: will it last for the next five hundred years, what to do about copyright, who got into this show or won that prize. There are people who make a living at this and they have to be concerned with some of these bottom-line issues. I understand all of that, but I, sometimes I think we start taking ourselves so seriously that we forget the joy, the fun, the humor. That would be one thing. The other thing is that I think Robert Shaw is right. I heard Wendy Lugg say one time that there are two kinds of quilters, those who quilt to turn on and those who quilt to turn off. By that she meant, I think, that those who quilt to turn on are the ones that are eager to do their own work, make their own designs and patterns, make up things as they go. They turn to quilting as a way of getting their minds turned on. Others have long or hard jobs and they quilt to turn off. They want a pattern or they want a kit or they want to make something that they have seen. Both are fine to do and should be full of joy and not deprecated by other people. I think, however, if you are in the first category, if you quilt to get turned on, then you have to follow Robert Shaw' ; s advice and find something that you are interested in, that you have to look at people' ; s work across the grain, not just what you do, not just what you know. Don' ; t just go to the quilt shows. Go to see something quite a bit different. Go look at what is going on with the jewelry makers because there are lots of great ideas out there that we could translate into fibers wonderfully well. We have to find things that we want to do, find those big ideas for ourselves. KM: What is the appeal of fiber? You chose fiber. SB: I know and it is just so annoying sometimes because I tell you painting would be faster. Photography gets from the idea to the finished product pretty quickly. If I worked in some of these other areas, I know this or that project would be done by the time I' ; m only at the end of the design stages and I have three more months to go. So I wonder why fiber many times myself. Sometimes it is very hard to work with. I mean blending color would sometimes be a lot easier or get me to exactly the mix I want, if I weren' ; t working in fibers. But I like the feel of it. I like the texture and I like what happens to fiber once you start using it in collage and then bring the stitch- the machine stitch and the hand stitch- to it. There are so many levels and layers there. I think it is just luscious. KM: That is a wonderful way to describe it, luscious. I will have to remember that. What are your favorite techniques and materials? SB: When I started off I was a real snob and a purist. I mean I would not have considered putting anything into one of my precious quilts that was not one hundred percent cotton. I was so pure and rigid. Mostly because when I was starting out and I didn' ; t really know. But now it' ; s whatever will work to my end gets in. I love to work with silks. I mean I just adore that fabric. And now I' ; m planning a quilt, (it hasn' ; t come together quite yet in my mind) with linen because I like that fiber. I' ; m painting on silk and I especially like to work with dupioni or a silk that has an edge. I like using fabric paints and painting on them. I like painting on silk more than I like painting on cottons. I also like sometimes the discipline of working with commercial fibers- having to work with a pattern to make it be a contributing element to the overall quilt. Today I will use anything. I can remember when Judith Trager in Boulder suggested one time that I try putting netting over something. I just thought oh there no way, no I can' ; t do that, I don' ; t want to touch it, I don' ; t want it touching the other parts. But I was persuaded to try it and I was amazed. It was perfect for exactly what I was trying to do. I will put polyester sheers or some metallic fabrics with the silk and the cotton. I don' ; t know how I got to the point that I was saying no to something. Now I' ; m trying to remember never say never because that might be indeed what I need to work with. I do, I work with almost everything. KM: How would you like to be remembered? SB: Oh Wow! Now that is the question. [pause.]. I' ; m not sure that I can answer that question. [laughs.] Let me--well all right, I' ; ll take a crack at it. I would like to be remembered for being productive. I would like to be remembered for being positive. I would like to be remembered for encouraging other people. I' ; m basically an optimist so I think I might have a crack at succeeding at some of this. I also know some things about myself. Even though I belong to a few groups, as I said, I' ; m a lurker more than an active member. I like being within but on the edge of the group. One of my art friends is an absolute master at collaboration. I envy what she can do but I don' ; t I can do what she does. I' ; m either a loner or probably too bossy to be a collaborator. So there are some things I wish I would be able to do and be remembered for. Collaboration would be one of them. I don' ; t think that is going to happen. I don' ; t know that I' ; m constitutionally made for that. I' ; m a pretty direct person and sometimes my bluntness gets me in trouble. If people find me, if my legacy is one of being highly productive, optimistic, encouraging, and occasionally funny that would be great. That would be great. If after I die they can look at my quilts and tell stories, even at my expense that would be great too. KM: Is there anything that we have not touched upon that you would like to share? SB: No I think we have pretty--well, I thought that there would be one question about what to me is a good quilt. KM: I was going to ask that, that is good. Okay. So what do you think makes a great quilt? SB: A great quilt I think has three ingredients and I reserve the right to change the order of my three ingredients. [KM laughs.] I think a great quilt has an idea, design, and color. I also don' ; t think that they come in that order because sometimes you might wake up just thinking I really want to do something in pinks and reds and then you know you have color in search of an idea. If you can marry it with the right idea and come up with a good design, it is going to be a success. Sometimes you have an idea that is going to lead you to a design and then the color may be the last part to address. But I think that you have to have a strong conceptual framework, something that you are trying to express or say. I think good design has proportions, the right proportions, and rhythm and contrast. Then the color takes it to that next level as Emeril says in cooking. [laughs.] It kicks it up a notch. KM: How generally do you work? Do you design everything out before you begin or? SB: I don' ; t necessarily plan everything out. Sometimes it' ; s just an idea that is in my head and then I start fiddling. Other times I might have a photograph and from that I might begin developing the idea, making a pattern or templates. Usually at that stage I' ; m already thinking in terms of how I' ; m going to translate this in terms of color. Yeah, it just, it goes back and forth. Sometimes I fiddle and then I end up with a photograph at the end. [laughs.] Sometimes I have a photograph and then it leads to another photograph at the end of the finished product. [laughs.] KM: Are you a messy creator or a neat creator? When you are in the creative process, tidy or messy? SB: There is a time in this process where it, the studio, is pretty messy and but it doesn' ; t necessarily stay that way to the end. There is also a point at which I have too many things out, too many piles, too much stimulation. I' ; ve got to clear it so my mind can clear. I' ; m organized and I have probably a healthy level of tolerance for chaos but it' ; s not very deep. I mean I can only go so far and then I have to kind of pull back, regroup and then create my next mess. KM: Do you work on more than one project at a time? SB: Yes I do. That has been really hard for me to stage because my inclination is that when I start something I want to finish it. Not because I feel that finishing is so great but I just can' ; t wait to see how it turns out. With this kind of work, I have to vary working on the sewing machine with other things. I have to have some work other than machine work because it' ; s hard on my back and shoulders. There needs to be something that I do standing up- cutting or assembling things. I need to work with my hands, doing hand stitching or that kind of work. The ideal situation is to have something, a project or two, at these various stages. It doesn' ; t really work out like that. I have these great ideas but sometimes the execution falls short. [laughs.] KM: I can relate. [SB laughs.] Is there any aspect of quiltmaking that you don' ; t enjoy? SB: I think I' ; m like a lot of people. I find putting the binding on is extremely tedious and I whine most of the time. Then I' ; ve discovered that I can put on a movie that I have already seen and the time goes by pretty quickly. Binding and sleeves on the back, yeah, I' ; m not that thrilled but at least it is near the end. Labels too bug me. You' ; ve got to do them. It is like any project, that last ten percent of the work seems to, at least psychologically for me, loom as large as the first ninety percent. I' ; m so impatient about it. Those finishing up things make a lot of difference and they have to be done. Also I would have to say that I don' ; t like some of the business things, but some days, in a sick way, I enjoy the recordkeeping. I have my little spreadsheet of my inventory. I have to keep the record because if someone asks me what size something is I want to go, if I don' ; t have the quilt anymore, I want to go to the books and tell them what size it is. Some of that administrative work is necessary, I don' ; t mind it. Some people hate it but I think it is important, just like making the label and getting everything ready to hang. You never know. It may be in a show. KM: Very good. I want to thank you for taking time out of your day. SB: My pleasure. As I' ; ve said to you before, I' ; m quite pleased in participating in this project. It is very flattering. KM: You have been wonderful. So we are going to conclude our interview and it is now 11:43. 2020 Quilt Alliance. All Rights Reserved. audio 0 https://quiltalliance.net/ohms-viewer-master/viewer.php?cachefile=KS66046-001.xml KS66046-001.xml
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KS66046-001
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audio
Title
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Sharon Bass
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Kansas QSOS
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewee
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Barbara Brackman
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Meg Cox
Transcriber
Eleanor Wilkinson
Interview Format
audio
Location
The location of the interview
Moda Fabrics Headquarters, Dallas, Texas
Interview Indexed
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Yes
Interview Date
3/5/2011
OHMS Object
http://quiltalliance.net/ohms-viewer-master/viewer.php?cachefile=KS66049-001Brackman.xml
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<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?--> 5 Barbara Brackman KS66049-001Quilters' S.O.S. -- Save Our StoriesKansas QSOSQuilt Alliancereproduction fabricsantique quiltsKansas City Star PatternsSun Sets on Sunbonnet SueBarbara BrackmanMeg Cox1:|8(10)|20(12)|39(5)|53(3)|65(10)|79(4)|93(2)|103(10)|119(10)|138(4)|153(2)|172(7)|184(6)|194(12)|210(7)|222(10)|237(5)|253(4)|264(13)|277(9)|290(13)|305(18)|325(3)|337(8)|350(15)|361(13)|374(6)|386(12)|401(7)|415(14)|433(1)|445(4)|459(12)|474(11)|487(12)|500(1)|516(5)|527(14)|541(3)|552(3)|564(4)|579(1)|597(10)|609(7)|620(12)0http://quiltalliance.net/qsos-audio/KS66049-001Brackman.mp3Otheraudio0 Introduction This is Meg Cox and I am doing a Quilters' S.O.S. Save our Stories interview with Barbara Brackman. We are at the Moda Fabric's Headquarters in Dallas, Texas. The date is March 5, 2011 and the time is 9:32 a.m. The interviewer, Meg Cox introduces herself and shares what project is doing this interview for. The interviewer begins a discussion with Barbara Brackman.Dallas, Texas;Moda Fabric's Headquarters;Quilters's Save our Stories32.928849, -96.91425617Moda Fabric Headquartershttps://storefront.unitednotions.com/storefrontCommerce/redirect.do?page=zCompanyInfoModa Fabrics website41 Tell me about the quilt you brought in today.; I want to bring something that really created some change in my life and so I brought just a few Kansas City Star quilt patterns. They are all newsprint from the 1930's.Brackman recalls discovering Kansas City Star quilt patterns at a thrift store when she was in her twenties. She was enthralled with certain patterns and even drew sketches of the patterns; she found more at thrift and antique stores, and began organizing and categorizing them.Index Cards;Kansas City Star Quilt Patterns;Newsprint;Published work – Patterns;Thrift Store17http://quiltalliance.net/qsos-images/KS66049-001BrackmanA.jpgBarbara Brackman with Kansas City Star quilt patterns157 On making her first quilt So, what was your first quilt that you ever made?Brackman recalls approaching her grandmother about making quilts and they started quilting together. Her grandmother pretended she knew about quilting but did not really, so Barbara went to the library and learned quilting from Carrie Hall's and Rose Kretsinger’s book, “The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt in America.” Brackman made an eight-pointed Lone Star quilt, but made mistakes in measuring it and made six 45 degree diamonds rather than 8 sixty degree diamonds. She then talks about the techniques she used over the years and how she enjoyed it since the beginning.1930s Newspaper Clippings;45 degree diamonds;Carrie A. Hall;college;Fiber – Polyester;Lone Star - quilt pattern;New York City;Polyester double-knits;quiltmaking process;Rob Peter to Pay Paul - quilt pattern;Rotary cutter;Six-Strand Embroidery Thread;Stab Stitch;Templates;Thread;“The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt in America" by Carrie Hall and Rose Kretsinger (1935)17http://quiltalliance.net/qsos-images/Hall_Kretiziner_romance.jpgCarrie A. Hall and Rose G. Kretsinger, “The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt in America" (1935). Brackman drew inspiration from this book in making her first quilt. 350 What do you find pleasing about quiltmaking?; Well it's the fabric. It's all pattern. I just love pattern, whether it's the quilt pattern, whether it's the pattern on the fabric. Brackman recounts how she likes the patterns in quiltmaking, whether the pattern printed on the fabric or the quilt pattern itself. She is inspired by patterns and graphics that are both contemporary and antique. She is less interested in the process of sewing a quilt itself. She mentions that she puts the quilts in her house and gives them away to quilt organizations and charities. She also collects both new and quilts. Adobe Photoshop;American Quilt Study Group (AQSG);Cowboy Boots;Folk Art;Kansas;Karla Menaugh;Kentucky;Moda;Pattern;Quilt Purpose - Charity;quiltmaking process;Religious Iconography;Rotary cutter;Sewing;shrines;St. Thomas;Sunflower Pattern Co-operative;Technology in quiltmaking17https://www.etsy.com/shop/SunflowerPatternCoopSunflower Patter Co-operative, Brackman’s quilt pattern company.670 Inspiration, tools, and technology When it comes to the technology, you mentioned Photoshopping and rotary cutters, what about the other things that you have in your arsenal, the tools that you use, the technology that you use, how do you design, like Corel Draw or EQ, or any of that, and what about your machine? Brackman emphasizes that she is a collector and that among the things she collects are photographs of antique quilts she finds on online auction sites. She has scanned photographs and frequently uses Photoshop. However, she also uses other programs, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Publisher. She tells an amusing account of her effort to Photoshop Zsa Zsa Gabor’s face onto a holy card. Adobe Photoshop;auction;Digital Scanning;Gabor sisters;holy cards;Kansas Quilt Project;Microsoft Publisher;Microsoft Word;Quilt Alliance;Quilt Index;quiltmaking process;religious iconography;scan;State quilt documentation project;Technology in quiltmaking;Zsa Zsa Gabor17http://www.quiltindex.org/search_results.php?collection=Kansas%20State%20Historical%20SocietyKansas Quilt Project on the Quilt Index892 Tell me if you have ever used quilts to get through a difficult time; What makes a great quilt? Of course everyone has difficult times in their lives, so, illnesses, well, see the one, start when my mother was dying and my grandmother was there and we had something to share, whether we were actually sharing anything or not.Brackman talks about that during times of difficulty including illness, death, and divorce, she would sew. When her boyfriend was sick, she sewed paper-pieced pineapples and found it to be therapeutic. Additionally, she talks about in some length how fabric makes a great quilt.1840 Quilt;Amish Quilt;antique quilt;death;divorce;grandmother;grieving;illness;mother;Paper Piecing;Paper-Pieced Pineapples;Photoshop;Rainbow fabric print;recovery;Sewing;solid colored fabric171044 What makes a quilt appropriate for a museum or a special collection; What about your personal collection? I think regionalism for the particular museum. If it's the National Museum of American History it's American. If it's the Lyon County Historical Society, it's Lyon County, Kansas. I think regionalism is very important. If someone's going to give you an English quilt that has no provenance at all that has to do with the county or the area I think the quality of the quilt, the condition, whether or not it's an unusual version of a common style, or else an uncommon style.Brackman goes over the importance of quilts’ provenance for historical society or museum collections, in relation to quilts’ regional origins or historical value. She talks about the issues of museums choosing to accession quilts; they should consider how common or uncommon a quilt is, as well as if it has a relationship to the region or relates to the mission of the museum. Additionally, Brackman talks about how both historical societies and museums handle quilt donations quite differently. For her personal collection, Brackman lives by a $60 maximum rule for quilts, while contrasting her habit of buying fabrics for more. She buys quilts for inspiration for patterns and fabric design, so she can make one herself. Brackman laments the decline of online quilt auctions.1830 Quilts;antique quilts;Charm Quilt;Chintz Quilt;De-accession;English Quilt;Fabric;Kansas Museum of History;Lyon County Historical Society (Lyon County, Kansas);museum;online auction;Provenance;quilt collector;regionalism;Smithsonian National Museum of American History;Spencer Museum of Art (University of Kansas)38.959676, -95.24460417Spencer Museum of Arthttp://collection.spencerart.ku.edu/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalSearch&module=collection&fulltext=quiltThe Spencer Museum of Art’s quilt holdings1331 Do you collect contemporary quilts? No, oh Lord, that would be wonderful though. I have a few contemporary quilts that I've purchased in the charity auctions and things, and I'll pay more than sixty dollars, but they fit on the wall. Brackman states that she does not collect many contemporary quilts because she lives in a small house and storage is an issue. However, she does like contemporary styles, such as Laura Wasilowski's Chicago School of Fusing. However, Brackman specializes in Civil War reproduction fabrics.Bold fabric graphics;Chicago School of Fusing;Civil War;Contemporary quilts;Fabric - Reproduction;Laura Wasilowski;Photograph collections;Quilt Purpose - Charity;Quilt Purpose - Home Decoration;reproduction quilts;Storage issues17http://artfabrik.com/thread-u-cation-thursday-herringbone/Wasilowski, Laura. “Artfabrik | Hand-Dyed Fabrics and Threads and Art Quilts by Laura Wasilowski.” Thread-U-Cation Thursday: Herringbone, October 5, 2017. http://artfabrik.com/.1433 Fascination with Civil War era quilts You mentioned the Civil War thing which you've written a lot about, is it that you're fascinated by that period historically or is it the fabric that speaks to you first and foremost?Brackman remembers she first became interested in the Civil War through living in Lawrence, Kansas, a town central to the conflict with Missourians in 1863. She looked through diaries and letters of women to get an idea of their lifestyles. From the Civil War, Brackman worked backwards to earlier time periods and expressed interest in eras that include the 1840s New England literature and the English Regency. As for her thoughts on technology used today for quilting, she thinks that people can do whatever they want to make great quilts, and does not judge quiltmaking technique.1780s England;1820s English Regency;1840s New England literature;Caryl Bryer Fallert;Civil War fashion;Civil War locations;Dewey Decimal System;Home economics;Lawrence, Kansas;machine quilting;primary sources;Quilters Newsletter Magazine;quiltmaking process;University of Kansas;Women's diaries38.959053, -95.26397517Lawrence, Kansas, Brackman's hometown and the site of the 1863 Lawrence Massacre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_massacreLawrence massacre (Civil War attack in 1863)1831 Why is quiltmaking important to your life? Social, I think if I didn't have my quilting groups I probably would have quit making quilts. I would be still making art but my life is very much built on my women friends.Brackman explains that she makes quilts to help keep a social circle and find methods to improve the quality of quilts. She belongs to three different quilting groups. Brackman mentions that they mostly do “show and tell” of their works in progress, but sometimes there is work for people to do with the quilting group. Brackman brings up that she tries to have hand sewing to do at these meetings.applique;Binding;Circle gluing;Hand applique;hand sewing;Pattern Business;Quilt fabric;quilt guild;social aspects of quiltmaking;technology in quiltmaking172014 In what ways do your quilts reflect your community. That's social life and you know my community and many of the same people I've been sewing with for, I hate to say it, almost forty years, meeting at night every other week. Brackman recounts how her quilting group had been together for decades and how they have made several group quilt projects. The quilt in particular that spoke out to her was the “Sun Sets on Sunbonnet Sue” quilt. The group did not like the ubiquitous Sunbonnet Sue quilt pattern depicting a featureless female character engaged in typically female activities. So they made a quilt that depicted violent deaths of Sunbonnet Sue. Although some speculated that the quilt represented the group's feminism, it actually had more to do with their “un-sentimentaility,” according to Brackman. The quilt is now in the Michigan State University Museum collection. Brackman also talks about how another group project, “Julian Flaming Furniture,” lagged on for thirty years until they finished it recently with another generation of quiltmakers participating. Brackman planned on taking it to the guild show in April and take it to some lectures on quilts. She ends by saying that she enjoys doing community projects.applique;Dada;feminism;Guild activities;Julian Flaming Furniture;Laurie Metzinger;Michigan State University Museum;Personal Blog;Quilt Index;Quilt shows/exhibitions;Sunbonnet Sue -- quilt pattern;talisman;Tom Sawyer -- quilt pattern;Walter Keane Paintings;“Sun Sets on Sunbonnet Sue” quilt42.731550, -84.48173717Michigan State University Museumhttp://www.museum.msu.edu/glqc/collections_2001.158.01.html“The Sun Sets on Sunbonnet Sue,” Seamsters Union Local #500, Lawrence, Kansas, 1979, 62" x 78", Cotton, velvet, polyester batting. MSU Museum Accession 2001:158.1, Photo by Pearl Yee Wong, all rights reserved by MSU Museum.2326 What is the importance of quilts in American life? Zilch. [laughter.] You know, I'm from a social services background. I'm a liberal. There are a lot more problems in American life than quilts. Brackman thinks that even though quilts represent a much smaller role in American life than some of the big problems facing society, quilts allow others to connect people to the past. She recollects recent news involving the turmoil in Tripoli and what she would take with her if she had to leave in a hurry away from danger, since quilts are very hard to transport in life threatening conditions. Thus, Brackman has respect for quilts and does not agree with her grandmother that they are only a reflection of poverty. Brackman emphasizes how we cannot predict the future and she was quite fortunate to be as successful as she has been in the quilt business.current events;Dachshund;Family Genealogy;History;Knitting;pension;Poverty;professional quiltmaker;retirement;Tripoli, Libya172556 On her dreams for her future with quilts Oh, well, my dream with quilts. I would like to have more storage space. Brackman dreams about having more storage space for her quilts. She mentions the studio she rented and she did not like the place. So she moved her quilts to the garage, but her garage is full. If she could do it, she would buy and keep antique swatch books in a room, along with a curator to help her out. However, she stores them in the places she has available in her house and contemplates trying out drawing and painting.1835 Swatch book;Curator;Moda;Storage space;Tempura;Watercolors;Work or Studio space17http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/Barbara Brackman's blog on quiltsOral HistoryBarbara Brackman is a quilt historian who specializes in designing reproduction prints for Moda. She maintains a internet presence through her blog, where she shares her knowledge of historic fabric and quilts. In this interview, she recounts to Meg Cox how she began as a quilter by discovering historical quilt patterns. She has been inspired by Civil War era quilts in part because of the local history of her hometown of Lawrence, Kansas. Quiltmaking has played a significant social role in her life, and she has continued to be active in three different quilting groups, including one that has met for forty years. in addition to collecting quilts as she has room, she also collects digital images of quilts and vintage fabrics.Meg Cox (MC): This is Meg Cox and I am doing a Quilters' S.O.S. Save our Stories interview with Barbara Brackman. We are at the Moda Fabric's Headquarters in Dallas, Texas. The date is March 5, 2011 and the time is 9:32 a.m. [papers shuffle.] So, Barbara, tell me about what you brought to talk about in this interview. Barbara Brackman (BB): I wanted to bring something that really has created some kind of a change in my life, and so I brought just a few Kansas City Star quilt patterns. They're old newsprint from the 1930's. Why I brought them is because I found them in a thrift store when I was probably twenty years old and I went 'Ooh, you could make a lot of different quilts if you had enough patterns.' There were probably fifty in this package and in a plastic bag. I probably paid a quarter and then I just absolutely became enthralled with them. I sorted them in all the ways you can sort things. It's like when you're a little kid and your mother says, 'Here, play with the thread.' And you sort it by color and you sort it by size. I sorted them alphabetically. I sorted them by stars. I sorted them by squares. Pretty soon I became a junkie. [MC laughs.] I had to have more patterns and so I was a thrift store and antique store haunter at that time and so I would find them occasionally, but then I realized I didn't actually have to have the pattern, I just had to have a picture of the pattern. They hadn't invented the photocopy machine so I started putting patterns on index cards and sorting them in the same way I sorted the newsprint. So it really changed my life completely. Had I not found this package of quilt patterns I might have gone on to sort completely different things. [laughter.] The problem is I am a compulsive sorter. [laughter.] MC: That's amazing. Now, were you quilting at the time? BB: Yes, but I was working full time. I taught Special Ed, well, no, I guess I was in college at that time. It was something I kept thinking, 'I'm going to have time to make these quilts in the future. I'm going to get to do that pretty soon.' So this was my file of things I would get to make in the future. MC: So, what was your first quilt that you ever made? BB: It was about that time, let me see, the first one, my mother had been ill and I was nineteen, I was in college and my grandmother came to stay with us to take care of my mother. Everyone in college had quilts, but I was from New York City and so were my mother and grandmother. We were in Kansas and we didn't have quilts in the family and my grandmother was completely confounded by this whole thing, because she was a different-cultural grandmother. So she was living with us and I said, 'We're going to make a quilt because you're a grandma and I'm a granddaughter.' [laughter.] She said, 'Okay, fine with me.' And so she pretended she knew what we were doing, but she didn't, so I got Carrie Hall's book from the library and we picked a very hard pattern called Rob Peter to pay Paul, that probably has forty pieces. She didn't know a thing. I didn't know anything about templates or making the triangles the same size and the best thing was when it came to quilting it. I read Carrie Hall's book. It said she used thread and you did a stab stitch. I used six-strand embroidery thread to quilt it and I didn't split it because my grandmother, honestly, knew nothing. And so she'd watch me and she'd kind of shake her head. She just went, 'Well, just let her do what she wants.' So the whole thing was a horrible grandmother story. [laughter.] My grandmother was a fine woman but not a seamstress. So that was the first one and then the second one, because I didn't have any advice, I did a Lone Star, [laughter.] and that was hysterical because I drafted my own pattern and I didn't realize there are sixty degree diamonds and there also the 45 degree diamonds. I made eight arms for the Lone Star and only six fit together because I'd used the wrong diamond. [laughter.] So, that was the second one and then my sister got that one and she--and, also, Carrie Hall said you use old clothes, in her book and I had a vast assortment of polyester doubleknits [laughter.] in my wardrobe, in my sister's wardrobe and in my grandmother's wardrobe, and so it was a little bit wonky and stretchy. [laughter.] And then people said, 'How did you get into the lecture business?' Someone asked me, one time, to talk about my journey in quilting and I told these stories which are semi-hysterical because they're pathetic. And so people laughed and I thought, 'Well, this is a career, too, telling the true story with a little over dramatization, about my career in quilting.' Well this went on for years and finally other people, who came from a home-ec background and a seamstress background, gave me advice. And then I fell in with, actually, really fabulous quiltmakers and they showed me how to use a rotary cutter and a ruler. Now, I did learn the template thing, but for many, many years I did all my piecing by hand, with a pencil line matching things up, sitting in airports putting little triangles together, and enjoyed that no end. I have not made all the quilts I want to make yet. I still have many patterns that are sort of in my file. I'm going to do that one next. But it all started out with these newspaper clippings that somebody cut out of the newspaper in the 1930's. MC: We see you get a lot of pleasure out of it and still do and there's more you want to make. What do you find pleasing about it, you think? BB: About making quilts, well it's the fabric. It's all pattern. I just love pattern, whether it's the quilt pattern, whether it's the pattern on the fabric. I've done research on cowboy boot patterns. For hobbies I've done vast indexes of folk art in the world. These are my entertainment. I think it's the pattern in the fabric and the pattern in the quilt and balancing them. The sewing is the minor part. I'm not a person who really enjoys sewing. I've never been too coordinated as you can see by the stories of the first quilts, and it's still sometimes a struggle to get things to lay flat and points to meet. It's the planning and the seeing how it turns out, which is always different than the plan. MC: What takes you from one to the next? Is it the research first, like your studying a certain period and you think I want to make that quilt? Or, is it a technique or what is the thing, or is it the fabric, itself? BB: A terrible thing happens to a person when their hobby becomes their job. But, it's still my hobby so I have two sets of quilts and people, when they see my own quilts, they go, 'That doesn't look like you.' Well, that doesn't look like what you think I am, but the real me, my under-graduate degree is in art education so I took a lot of studio art courses and so when I'm making something for myself I'm inspired by pattern around me. I'm inspired by graphics that are contemporary and then graphics that are antique. So, what I'm working on right now, I'm doing a lot of small things, postcards, and I'm doing a lot of visual interpretation of traditional religious iconography. I'm doing a lot of shrines for myself, Photoshopping. I do a lot of digital taking, holy cards, don't tell my grandmother, and making them specifically for quilters. So, St. Thomas is the patron saint of mathematics so I Photoshopped him with a triangle and a ruler and a rotary cutter. I just pray to him every morning that I won't make any mistakes. [laughter.] So, I try to translate those into fabric and make those into things that are maybe twelve inches square. Now, no one ever sees these because-- MC: Where are they? BB: In my house. [both speak at once, inaudible.] I put them up and then I often give them to Alliance [The Alliance for American Quilts.] or to a charitable cause like AQS [American Quilting Society.] when they have an auction. And people go, 'Oh, that doesn't look like the Barbara Brackman I would think of.' Well, that's what I make for fun. We were talking the other day about binding. I don't bind them. I mean I just zig-zag the edges so that they're very free. So then, the person who has to work for a living and loves her job 'll sit all day interpreting an antique quilt in fabrics that we've designed for Moda that are reproductions and I do a lot of interpreting the past and those are very interesting to me, but it's like I'm living two lives. It's a work job and a fun job and I think that the fun job, the night-time, day-off job has to be very different, because I don't think I could be making conventional quilts to entertain myself much, when I make quilts during the day. [unidentified person speaks inaudibly.] Or at least I'm designing quilts. MC: Do you sleep under a quilt that you-- BB: No, I don't. It's because I have a bad dog [laughter.] and I also live in a bad climate, so I sleep under a down coverlet with a very washable duvet cover so when she comes in the house muddy. I did for many years and I have quilts on the wall. I have quite a book collection, of new and old quilts, and storage is always a problem. Quilts kept on the wall mostly. MC: When you toggle back and forth when you make quilts that you make for your own pleasure, so you've also worked on a lot of books and you've done a lot of project books, so do you do the quilting for those? Or do you send those out? BB: Oh, very rarely. MC: Do you just-- BB: I can't get everything done that I would want to. I used to have quite a crew of sewers. I had a pattern company called The Sunflower Pattern Co-operative and it was co-operative in that nearly everybody in my sewing group worked for it. They designed patterns and then they also did contract sewing. But we haven't been selling patterns. My partner moved to Kentucky. My partner, Karla moved to Kentucky and so Kansas and Kentucky are too far to really continue doing business. So we half-heartedly think we're still in business. Nothing's getting done. Through Moda, if I design a quilt, then Moda contracts out the piecing and then the quilting to their contractors here. And it's always such a wonderful thing to design something and then see it finished without having to put a stitch in it. [laughter.] I love that part of it. When I do a book, I haven't done a book in a couple of years, I usually try to put one or two of my own actual quilts in there, that I have finished down to the binding and the sleeve. MC: So, you can do it all. BB: Oh, I can, not well, but I can do it all. MC: When it comes to the technology, you mentioned Photoshopping and rotary cutters, what about the other things that you have in your arsenal, the tools that you use, the technology that you use, how do you design, like Corel Draw or EQ, or any of that, and what about your machine? Do you [both speak at once, inaudible.] BB: Well, I am still a collector. That would be on my grave, obsessive-compulsive, but put it to a good cause. The computer just crashed because I had too many pictures on it, so now I'm collecting pictures. For my entertainment, I will sit for an hour and go through the auctions, look at the quilts. I have certain things I am collecting. One thing is a quilt that actually has a date on it. I have a little routine every day, looking for dated quilts on the on-line auctions. Then I save three photos, the over all, the shot of the date, so I can prove to myself that's actually the date, and then a detail to show the fabrics. And I have hundreds and hundreds of those. I save everything as large as I can, which is the cause of the recent crash, but I also have enormous files of things that amuse me, images that amuse [hisssing sound.] me, religious images, holy cards, icons, things like that. What I do is I manipulate those things and I wanted learn how to get good at Photoshop for two or three reasons. One is I would have to sew less if I could really do a convincing mock-up of a quilt, and so that was one of my early intentions. But, also, I've been scanning photographs for The Alliance, the Kansas Quilt Projects Slides, and they are thirty years old, twenty-five to thirty years old, and they have really shifted color and they've really lost a lot of color. They all shift yellow, don't they, when they, so I have to re-color and then, because they get very thin, I have to work on the contrast and so I wanted to get good at that and I put a hundred up on The Alliance's web site, the Quilt Index, but I have 12,900 to go and I want to get better [hissing sound.] because they don't look good, so I've been on hiatus from scanning. I don't want to do the actual scanning but I probably always would have to be doing the colorizing. So, I wanted to get good at that and then the idea of Photoshopping Zsa Zsa Gabor's head onto a holy card [laughter.] cracked me up. I've a very juvenile sense of humor. I'd always wanted to paint that but I couldn't paint that well [laughter.] and so I continue to amuse myself no end by manipulating photos from different genres, so I did the Gabor sisters as a three-face. Only people over a certain age know who the heck they are. Now, someone said, 'You could have picked the Kardashian sisters.' but I said, 'I don't know who they are.' [laughter.] So I have these enormous files and I'm thinking that's about the major thing I do as far as technology, right now. I do a lot of Word, do a lot of Word Publisher, but it's mostly Photoshop, and now it's to the point where I take the picture off the Index and many times quilt pictures are a slant because you're standing to the side to get the whole thing in and I know now how to square it up and flatten it out and improve it. [snapping sound.] And I look at any photograph in a magazine and I think I can make that square. I [hissing sound.] I can fix that up. So the whole world is all illusional now, to me, [laughter.] so much better than it is in real life. [laughter.] MC: That is true. In terms of the way you use quilting in your life, has quilting ever helped you get through a difficult time. Is there an emotional component? BB: Of course everyone has difficult times in their lives, so, illnesses, well, see the one, start when my mother was dying and my grandmother was there and we had something to share, whether we were actually sharing anything or not. She was just watching. But through divorces, through very bad illness and through my own illnesses, you know, when sometimes you break your ankle and they say no weight on it for six weeks. Sewing certainly gets you through those times. I find I shift in what I'm sewing because my boyfriend was very sick last year and so I found paper piecing. I did paper-pieced pineapples. That's all I did, no thinking, just sew, sew, sew, sew, sew. I started out with four inches and I went to six inches and then I went to eight inches and got better, so I didn't ever get to the twelve inches, which was good. [laughter.] I found paper piecing, which is something I always would have thought of as rather dull, you know to have it all so predictable, was very therapeutic because it didn't take any real thinking, but it occupied your mind. Definitely I think it's therapeutic as many people have said. MC: What do you think makes a great quilt? We could talk a day about that. BB: Oh, what makes a great quilt. For me personally, it's fabric. I love the graphics and I'll look at an Amish quilt and I'll go, 'Wow, that contrast is great. That design, that composition is great.' But then I just move right on because they're solids, who cares? [laughter.] We have a quilt behind us right now and I guess I'm a microscopic focuser here. I focused in on the blue and the brown fabric and thought wait a minute, what's that shift there and color and I thought was that accidental, so I could stand here all day and look at the quilt that's behind us because it's from 1840 and, in fact, that particular piece is a rainbow print, which is deliberately shaded from light to dark and from brown to blue. There I am going oh, man, I've never seen one just like that. I have a very good visual memory. I have a terrible auditory memory but an excellent visual memory. So I try to file those just like the pictures in Photoshop on my computer. I try and file that away in the blues and say now remember that. Remember how that blue absolutely turned to brown and that was not an accident. So for me a great quilt is the great fabric. MC: What makes a quilt appropriate for a museum or a special collection or something like that? BB: An interesting thought. I've written some guidelines for the museums I volunteer at and I think regionalism for the particular museum. If it's a national museum of American history it's American. If it's the Lyon County Historical Society, it's Lyon County, Kansas. I think regionalism is very important. If someone's going to give you an English quilt that has no provenance at all that has to do with the county or the area I think the quality of the quilt, the condition, whether or not it's an unusual version of a common style, or else an uncommon style. That's the thing we always have to be very, in fact sometimes break people's hearts an say, 'It's a lovely yo-yo quilt, but we don't have any room for more than one in our collection and storage is a problem. So I think each museum should have a collecting focus, which they do, and that you'll take a quilt, maybe, that's in very bad condition if it has a connection to the community and a good story that will back it up. I know right now we're going through a difficult time because museums are in such bad shape for funding. When I scan every day when I'm scrolling around for quilts that are for sale, I see that they are being de-accessioned from some pretty impressive collections. It's really heartbreaking, very upsetting, but it's because I know what, if they asked me at the two museums in Kansas that I advise, what should we get rid of, we need money, we don't have storage, I would say, 'It's a pretty quilt, but it has nothing to do with Lyon County, Kansas or Lawrence, Kansas or we know nothing about it and if we sold it, it would bring a better price than one that's in worse condition that has local thing, so let's get rid of the pretty one.' Then it goes back into the community to a collector who pays a nice price and then in twenty-five years it'll go to another museum when she decides she wants to de-accession her collection. So it's a collecting focus that everyone should have, every museum should have, and then it has to be adjusted. But I know at Spencer Museum of Art [University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas.] where I advise, at the Kansas Museum of History were I advise, we have two different goals. One is history and one is art. So I'll say, 'This is a fabulous story but the quilt is not a work of art, it's a common type of quilt. I think it would be better off at the history museum.' And then the other way around, this is a fabulous quilt with no provenance. I think maybe that should go over to the other museum. So, what makes a great museum quilt depends on the museum. MC: What about your personal collection? Do you have certain criteria? BB: Sixty dollars, sixty dollar criterion. [laughter.] I am a sixty-dollar quilt buyer. I have spent, I would guess I've spent up to $500 if it had great fabric. It's mainly I don't have storage. I have a one bedroom house, tiny little Victorian house and so, occasionally I will buy them on impulse if they're under sixty dollars, and then sell them for fifty, buy high, sell low is my theory. [laughter.] What I'm looking for, because I'm in the business of fabric, I'm looking for fabric. I'm looking for a charm quilt, or I'm looking for a chintz quilt that has a large piece of chintz with a whole repeat so I can copy it. MC: So it might be for inspiration for your own-- BB: Mostly for inspiration. That's the only way I can justify it. I buy a lot of fabric in isolation. I buy a lot of blocks and a lot of big repeats of chintz backs or something, [inaudible.] backs that I can then use to make fabric out of. The whole on-line auction thing has really gone down the tubes. People aren't putting stuff up any more because people aren't buying. There was a time, when I stuck to that sixty dollar rule and I could get 1830 quilts for thirty-nine dollars because sometimes they're in terrible shape. Sometimes they're downright ugly and sometimes the person is selling them, often doesn't know what they have, and they take a really terrible picture. So someone that just scrolls through and goes, 'Ooh that looks like it's from the 1950's.' Oddly I don't even want it and I'll be the only bidder. Those days are gone. Those days are gone. So I'm a very, I have to really keep it to what I can store in my house and so it's much better for me to spend my money on yardage. I'll spend a lot more on a piece of fabric than I'll spend on a quilt, which is the converse of most people. MC: Some of the quilts you make, yourself, sound like they're pretty contemporary with the Photoshop and all that, do you collect that type of quilt as well, or not so much? BB: No, oh Lord, that would be wonderful though. I have a few contemporary quilts that I've purchased in the charity auctions and things, and I'll pay more than sixty dollars, but they fit on the wall. They don't require folding up and good storage and tissue stuffing and things like that. Deciding that you're going to live small, which was sort of a political thing for me, and it's a functional thing, too. It means that you do not have storage and you cannot collect what you want, except for pictures. That's another reason why I'm so interested in pictures. MC: Of the contemporary quiltmakers, are there some that really speak to you? BB: Oh, yes. There're many contemporary quiltmakers [inaudible.] who knock me out. Laura Wasilowski, you know, the whole Chicago School of Fusing, with the idea of, just the freedom of that technique, the color that they use. Now, in my fabric business, I'm the reproduction person, so I'm stuck in natural dyes. Black cotton is not something I ever get to do because it's in the future from the Civil War, so lime green, vivid magenta, those are things that I don't ever get to do, so when I buy fabric that's what I buy. And when I look at quilts I'm saving them into an inspiration file. It'll be some of the real bright colors and the real interesting use of some of the bold graphic fabrics people are doing today. MC: You mentioned the Civil War thing which you've written a lot about, is it that you're fascinated by that period historically or is it the fabric that speaks to you first and foremost? BB: Through my life, now I have no history in my background, no history education, I've plenty of history in my background. When I started out I lived in this wonderful little town. One day I realized it was a very important place in the Civil War. I have to put this in--- Missourians came over and burned it in 1863. We're still mad. [laughter.] During the Civil War it was a very important location as to events leading up to the war and then during the war that burning of the [various unidentified noises.] town was just kind of a union rallying point. When I realized the history there I started getting interested in the Civil War because I wanted to know who owned my house. When I bought the house when I was twenty-five I could see the people who had owned it, those were names that I had heard of. So that's how I became interested in the Civil War. Since I have no real historical education, I thought I'm going to work backwards and so I have gradually been working backwards into the Civil War. I want to be able to go out onto the street and know what that street looked like in 1862 before they burned it. I feel pretty confident about that now, in that town and in Kansas I understand it very well. Then I started working backwards. So I was fascinated by the Civil War for many years and I read every woman's diary that I could find for those years and because I'm a compulsive collector I saved notebooks full of any quotes, I would write this down in longhand, any quotes they might refer to something interesting about their lives, their fight with their husband, their bad children, things we can relate to, their depressions, their illnesses, their experiences just in trying to live lives as women that were so constrained, but also about slavery, and about abolition, about political causes from the Civil War, and then any references to textiles and quilting. I got into this, really, thinking I bet these women talked about quilting. Well, they didn't that much but they do talk about fashion, especially in their letters and so I would write those things down. I have probably, well, three feet of notebooks that are full of these papers-full. That's one way I got interested in writing about the Civil War. I knew a lot more about the Civil War and how women lived through it than most formal historians do because they're not reading diaries and letters and they're not reading women's diaries and letters. That's how I got into the Civil War. Now I've been working backwards and I've got into the 1840's. So I spent years reading nothing but New England diaries and literature about the New England literati, the people that were so influential, the Hawthorn's and the Peabody's. Spent years reading them. Then I worked my way back into the 1820's which isn't got a lot of information. Then I jumped over to England and now I'm complete obsessed with the Regency period in England. [hissing sound.] I know every piece of gossip, and I tell you, you want to know gossip, you want to know some baaad lives, bad choices people made, the English Regency [laughter.] is the era. Now I'm stuck in about 1780 in England. I know a lot about, yeah it states although there certainly isn't the documentation, so I guess I have to work back until the colonial period but that looks kind of cold and bleak [laughter.] to me, and so all I can think of is Thanksgiving pictures of cold people eating. [laughter.] very, very small dishes of turkey. That's a prejudice that I want to get over so I'll have to go backwards. I live in a small town which has not a great town library, adequate, but it has a university library and they have great collections, so I'll just go through the number, the Dewey Decimal System or whatever. Some of the books I read are so obtuse they're still on the Dewey Decimal System and when I try to check them out they glare at me and go, you know, 'I have to put this in the system. Nobody's checked it out since 1948.' But we do have wonderful books so I have access to whole worlds and people say, 'You live in a little town, don't you get bored?' No, I live in Regency England right now [laughter.] and I'm never bored. MC: That's wonderful. It sort of prompted me to think about technology and the question of technology and quilts. Because you deal with all these historical quilts, you make them, you study them and you create patterns, how do you feel about the whole thing about making quilts today and hand versus machine versus long-arming and first of all how do you feel about it. And second of all, is it appropriate to use these older materials in these older quilts. Should you be sort of be making them the way they were made at the time they were made? Do you have any thoughts on that? BB: I'm a rebel. You can do whatever you want. I never give it a thought and I never have in my whole life. I started out making quilts. There were people who had, I took Home-ec for one semester, they just suggested I go into something else. [laughter.] My father didn't want me in Home-Ec. anyway. He was really supportive of me anyway, 'I think you should just take a business course. Forget that stuff.' So I just have always just have gone, 'Whatever.' It's functional, do what you want. I've documented, I worked for Quilters Newsletter [Quilter's Newsletter Magazine.] for many years and that was one of our big issues. 'Caryl Bryer Fallert won a prize with a machine-quilted quilt. You know, we have to write an editorial about it. What do you think?' Uh, well, let her do whatever she wants. So, there's just no opinion there. It just seems to me, I'm a visual person and I'm certainly not a nit-picker and people have asked me to judge contests at fairs. 'Oh, no, you don't want me judging, because I'll just go for the visuals. I will not check that binding and make sure that the batting extends to the edge.' MC: Or count the stitches. BB: Yes. I just don't care personally. People want to get into an argument about it and I'm not a very judgmental person, so I don't want anybody throwing stones at me, let me tell you that. MC: This is kind of an over-arching question. Why is quiltmaking important to your life? BB: Why is quiltmaking important to my life? That's a very good question. Social, I think if I didn't have my quilting groups I probably would have quit making quilts. I would be still making art but my life is very much built on my women friends. I have three quilting groups that I belong to, so Wednesday begins a grueling couple of days, Wednesday afternoon, Wednesday night, Thursday morning, three different groups. Now some of them only meet every other week, but what that grew out of, as I say earlier, we used to have a pattern business, these same people and so it was our meetings. It was our business meetings and we'd be sewing and we'd be working on projects together. Then as the business sort of faded away it just became social and we invited more people. As more people retired from their other businesses, we invited other people in. So I always have to have hand sewing for those things. I always have to have something I can be doing by hand and there's prep-work weekend for that grueling Wednesday-Thursday schedule. Then because they're so interested in quilting, many of them, we keep up on the tools and the equipment. We're constantly trying to find things that are going to make our lives easier, better, and of course, the fabric. I can always bring in something or other, something that I'm working on and that keeps everybody talking about fabric. I think it really is mostly social that keeps me in there. I know I would always be doing something artistic, but it's strange how the computer, using the computer graphics, has really replaced a lot of the creativity needs in my life. There's problems with that in that I don't get up and pretty soon, every day, I have to quit because I've stared at it for six hours and you've got to change your eye focus. Time to walk the dog. I think it's mostly social right now. MC: So, these groups that you're in, do you sew when you're there. Is it mostly show-and-tell, is it mostly social-- BB: It's all of those things. Show-and-tell, it's eating, it's champagne. Champagne for breakfast. I have to be busy, keep busy, and many of them do. One friend never does any prep-work and always comes in and says, 'Does anyone have anything for me to do?' So I like to even keep her busy. She's a great binder. If you get it pre-sewn, she'll bind it. She's a circle gluer. [hissing sound.] If she would do her own prep-work she could have made twenty quilts in the past couple of years, but she just can't sit there without having something to do. That's the way I am, too, so I do a lot of hand appliqué right now. We're always looking for the never-ending appliqué because then you won't have to do much prep and it's a tragedy after three years when it's done. [hissing sound, laughter.] MC: In what ways do your quilts reflect your community. BB: Well, that's social life and you know my community and many of the same people I've been sewing with for, I hate to say it, almost forty years, meeting at night every other week. We started out, years ago, the first group, and we made several group quilts, the first that really sticks in my mind is our Sun Sets on Sunbonnet Sue quilt, which is in the Quilt Index, in which we killed her. We hated her. We hated her because we're anti-sentimentalists. We are just not amused by big-eyed children, unless they're real children. We lived in an era of Walter Keane paintings and Sunbonnet Sue just fit right in there. Everybody was gaga over her at our guild meetings so my friend Laurie Metzinger said at one time she'd like to see that little girl dead. [laughter.] So I took her and I drew her and I pushed her over on her side and I put a big rock on her chest and Laurie laughed so hard, this was during a guild meeting that we almost got thrown out. [laughter.] So we just took some Sunbonnet Sue patterns and we turned them over and we turned them on their face, turned them on their head, dropped things on them. That quilt entertained us no end. We got many people to work on it. Then we did a second one and then we said, 'All right, people are starting to attach meaning to this. They're starting to say that we were feminists, which we were, but that we were making this because we [laughter.] were feminist and we wanted to show that Sunbonnet Sue in her traditional role. We weren't thinking that. We were trying to kill her, squash her, flatten her out. It was anti-sentiment. So my friend, Nadra, says, 'Well, maybe should do a quilt that nobody can find any meaning in it at all.' This was in 1975, maybe '80. So she said, 'Every day I drive by a store, in Olathe, Kansas, called the Julian Flaming Furniture. It's been driving me crazy. What do you think they have in there?' Apparently Julian Flaming was someone's name. So then the idea was to imagine what was inside the Julian Flaming Furniture store. That's meaningless. It's total Dada. [laughter.] So we started that thirty years ago and it lagged, but about six months ago I got the blocks out and I said, 'We're finishing this thing, because thirty years is too long.' So here's what I've been working on night and day for the past six months, is trying to get people who were seven years old when we started it the first time, to make a few blocks. They had some things they wanted to set on fire [hissing.] and then we got it to the quilter. It just came back from the quilter last Wednesday. It's beautiful and I wanted to bring it. I thought that could be a good talismanic object, but I knew that my friend, Georgeanne, who never has anything to do it, so I would present it in the proper Tom Sawyer pattern, and she'd say, 'I'll take it. I'll bind it. I'll bring it back.' So she's got it right now. So this is a thirty-year project, so that's the way my quilts reflect my community. The ones that I'm working on as my art is that it's Tom Sawyerism. I try to get everybody involved. MC: Where will that quilt go. BB: Well, I don't know. You're thinking which museum discipline. Now that MSU, Michigan State University does have our first Sunbonnet Sue quilt, now we thought this was so amusing thirty years ago. So now that I can look on the web, you type Flaming Furniture. [laughter.] Every twenty-year old who's got his apartment and a six-pack of beer has poured gasoline on his couch and set it on fire. I've taken a picture of him, sitting there, drinking a beer. That's exactly the same sense of humor. [laughter.] I don't know, it's adolescent and it's like putting Zsa Zsa Gabor, of course, on a holy card. It's adolescent humor. So where would it go. I don't know. It's not even back from the quilter. Once it's back we hope to show it in our guild show this April and then we will undoubtedly will drag it around for a while some people are still out there giving lectures and, of course, I'll put it on my blog. Probably, since they're all invigorated after finishing a thirty-year project, someone will get another idea next week. 'Well, you know, we could do that one we talked about years ago.' I do love community working and I love art group projects. They said, 'We got it out, you know, and I put it together with scraps of stuff we had left from other projects.' They said, 'Did it turn out the way you thought?' and I said, 'No, I really hoped I could make it pretty.' [laughter.] But it's a lot of furnitures, overstuffed furniture with little appliqué flames coming out of it. There's just nothing you can do. [laughter.] It's got an Eames chair and someone did the kitchen sink. There's some very nice things in it. I think it's just downright ugly. Actually it's a concept. [sharp rattle.] We'll see what people can make of this and say, 'Now these women are deeply worried about fire insurance.' [laughter.] It's totally meaningless. MC: I can't wait to see it. What is the importance of quilts in American life? BB: Zilch. [laughter.] You know, I'm from a social services background. I'm a liberal. There are a lot more problems in American life than quilts. I do think the quilts are a touchstone to our ancestors and I am a historian. I'm a family genealogist. I love the way they connect us to the past. It's a luxury to be able to have that kind of touch with the past, to be able to have the money as a nation to save them in museum collections, to have the luxury as women and men to make them, to indulge ones selves in buying that much fabric and putting that much work into something, a handmade object. That's the importance of it, is that it reflects a lot, but I don't know, I'm a myth buster. It's something I can't say, but I can do it. They will come and go, as my grandmother always said, 'We had some of those, but when we had some money we got rid of them.' That attitude's going to come back. We have no family quilts at all and she said, 'As soon as we got two nickels to rub together we went out of the handmade blanket business, Barbara.' So, I think they have importance as to what they mean and how they reflect our ability to appreciate them. When you read world news, you know, and people are leaving countries because, it always breaks my heart and I know if you are collectors you people have to leave Tripoli, you can take what's on your back and one armful. You don't have room for that quilt or anything else that's important to you. So, I always think 'Well, if I had to get out what would I'd take, I guess the dachshund, the fat dachshund that would fill up my arms and I would like to have the hard drive but it's going to have to go, so very little gets to go. So I do think that we are in a unique position and that we are now able to reflect back on all that and to not have the attitude my grandmother has that a handmade blanket is a reflection of poverty. We have the respect for them. MC: So it sounds like you're saying you think that the ebb and flow of quilting, that it's going to run down again, we're going to go through those sallow periods again? BB: It must be inevitable. I don't know. As when my aunt said, and I had an abundance of aunts and when I quit teaching, that reliable job with a pension they kept telling me about, and I said, 'Oh, I'm in the quilt business now, I just go around and lecture.' And they said, 'Oh, you better have a fall-back idea.' I've never needed the fall-back idea but I think we can't predict the future. There was a period about ten years ago everyone was going into knitting, [laughter.] but knitting, there's just so many handmade sweaters a small child can have. [laughter.] And so grandmas, quit mothers, they did it, so I just don't know. I think people will always be doing something creative but what that will be, I can't predict the future. I'm very pleased that it's been going on, I've been in this business for thirty years. That's a luxury, too. I've been able to support myself really well for thirty years. Ebb and flow, I'm a historian. MC: It's not going to ebb in your life, though, for you. BB: No, because I'm retired. I just got my first social security check. MC: So that means more quilting, more-- BB: Well, more time to Photoshop I fear. MC: Well, to wrap up, in terms of your journeys with quilts and your discovery with quilts, what would your dream be, for your next-- BB: Oh, well, my dream with quilts. I would like to have more storage space. That is my [laughter.] eternal, you know, if you live in a small house you look at those people who have those little aluminum barns in their backyard and you go, 'Man, I could fill one of those with something. I wouldn't put the quilts out there, but if I put, like the pantry out there, [laughter.] I could put shelves in the pantry. I could put quilts in there. So my dream would be to have more storage space. I have had a [laughter.] a studio down town which I rented with friends and that's where we kept things for years. We lost our lease. The parking was horrible, the stairs were terrible and so I remodeled my garage to do that, but the garage is full, totally full. That studio was totally full, so more room for a better collection. Recently Moda sent me to look at a beautiful swatch book from 1835 and I thought if I were the richest woman in the world I would buy swatch books and I would have a room to keep them in and a curator to take care of them and I would come in every day and she would, with white gloves, turn the pages for me. [laughter.] What do you think of that one? So that would be my ideal. The realities are, if I had them I'd drop them and the dog would [inaudible.]. I'm very bad. It's not a museum at my house so I really don't want to have those kind of valuable things. I do love the access to them. As far as making quilts, I have time to make quilts. I have time. I have two studios, one in the house, one bedroom, the only bedroom in the house. I'm sleeping in the living room, abandon the dining room because who has people over any more. So that's the living room or the giant TV room and so I have an inside studio and then an outside studio and the outside one tends to be more storage for the swatches that I do have and a lot of the quilts. I do have the time to make the quilts. People say you're going to retire. What are you going to do? I hope to paint and draw more. They're messy. One of the reasons I got into quilting, I think, when I was just out of art school, was you can pick up a quilt and sew. You can't pick up an oil painting. You have to have the outfit on to do the oil painting. You have to have the big area and so I don't think I'll ever oil paint again but I'd love to go back to more watercolor and tempera and things like that. MC: Thank you so much for letting us do this and talk to you and absolutely fascinating and truly fun, so this concludes the interview with Barbara Brackman and the time is now 10:18 a.m. Thank you. 2017 Quilt Alliance. All Rights Reserved.audio0http://quiltalliance.net/cms/http://quiltalliance.net/cms/collections/show/34
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Kay Schroeder
Transcription
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**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.** Meg Cox (MC): This is Meg Cox and I am doing a Quilters' S.O.S. Save our Stories interview with Barbara Brackman. We are at the Moda Fabric's Headquarters in Dallas, Texas. The date is March 5, 2011 and the time is 9:32 a.m. [papers shuffle.] So, Barbara, tell me about what you brought to talk about in this interview.
Barbara Brackman (BB): I wanted to bring something that really has created some kind of a change in my life, and so I brought just a few Kansas City Star quilt patterns. They're old newsprint from the 1930's. Why I brought them is because I found them in a thrift store when I was probably twenty years old and I went 'Ooh, you could make a lot of different quilts if you had enough patterns.' There were probably fifty in this package and in a plastic bag. I probably paid a quarter and then I just absolutely became enthralled with them. I sorted them in all the ways you can sort things. It's like when you're a little kid and your mother says, 'Here, play with the thread.' And you sort it by color and you sort it by size. I sorted them alphabetically. I sorted them by stars. I sorted them by squares. Pretty soon I became a junkie. [MC laughs.] I had to have more patterns and so I was a thrift store and antique store haunter at that time and so I would find them occasionally, but then I realized I didn't actually have to have the pattern, I just had to have a picture of the pattern. They hadn't invented the photocopy machine so I started putting patterns on index cards and sorting them in the same way I sorted the newsprint. So it really changed my life completely. Had I not found this package of quilt patterns I might have gone on to sort completely different things. [laughter.] The problem is I am a compulsive sorter. [laughter.]
MC: That's amazing. Now, were you quilting at the time?
BB: Yes, but I was working full time. I taught Special Ed, well, no, I guess I was in college at that time. It was something I kept thinking, 'I'm going to have time to make these quilts in the future. I'm going to get to do that pretty soon.' So this was my file of things I would get to make in the future.
MC: So, what was your first quilt that you ever made?
BB: It was about that time, let me see, the first one, my mother had been ill and I was nineteen, I was in college and my grandmother came to stay with us to take care of my mother. Everyone in college had quilts, but I was from New York City and so were my mother and grandmother. We were in Kansas and we didn't have quilts in the family and my grandmother was completely confounded by this whole thing, because she was a different-cultural grandmother. So she was living with us and I said, 'We're going to make a quilt because you're a grandma and I'm a granddaughter.' [laughter.] She said, 'Okay, fine with me.' And so she pretended she knew what we were doing, but she didn't, so I got Carrie Hall's book from the library and we picked a very hard pattern called Rob Peter to pay Paul, that probably has forty pieces. She didn't know a thing. I didn't know anything about templates or making the triangles the same size and the best thing was when it came to quilting it. I read Carrie Hall's book. It said she used thread and you did a stab stitch. I used six-strand embroidery thread to quilt it and I didn't split it because my grandmother, honestly, knew nothing. And so she'd watch me and she'd kind of shake her head. She just went, 'Well, just let her do what she wants.' So the whole thing was a horrible grandmother story. [laughter.] My grandmother was a fine woman but not a seamstress. So that was the first one and then the second one, because I didn't have any advice, I did a Lone Star, [laughter.] and that was hysterical because I drafted my own pattern and I didn't realize there are sixty degree diamonds and there also the 45 degree diamonds. I made eight arms for the Lone Star and only six fit together because I'd used the wrong diamond. [laughter.] So, that was the second one and then my sister got that one and she--and, also, Carrie Hall said you use old clothes, in her book and I had a vast assortment of polyester doubleknits [laughter.] in my wardrobe, in my sister's wardrobe and in my grandmother's wardrobe, and so it was a little bit wonky and stretchy. [laughter.] And then people said, 'How did you get into the lecture business?' Someone asked me, one time, to talk about my journey in quilting and I told these stories which are semi-hysterical because they're pathetic. And so people laughed and I thought, 'Well, this is a career, too, telling the true story with a little over dramatization, about my career in quilting.' Well this went on for years and finally other people, who came from a home-ec background and a seamstress background, gave me advice. And then I fell in with, actually, really fabulous quiltmakers and they showed me how to use a rotary cutter and a ruler. Now, I did learn the template thing, but for many, many years I did all my piecing by hand, with a pencil line matching things up, sitting in airports putting little triangles together, and enjoyed that no end. I have not made all the quilts I want to make yet. I still have many patterns that are sort of in my file. I'm going to do that one next. But it all started out with these newspaper clippings that somebody cut out of the newspaper in the 1930's.
MC: We see you get a lot of pleasure out of it and still do and there's more you want to make. What do you find pleasing about it, you think?
BB: About making quilts, well it's the fabric. It's all pattern. I just love pattern, whether it's the quilt pattern, whether it's the pattern on the fabric. I've done research on cowboy boot patterns. For hobbies I've done vast indexes of folk art in the world. These are my entertainment. I think it's the pattern in the fabric and the pattern in the quilt and balancing them. The sewing is the minor part. I'm not a person who really enjoys sewing. I've never been too coordinated as you can see by the stories of the first quilts, and it's still sometimes a struggle to get things to lay flat and points to meet. It's the planning and the seeing how it turns out, which is always different than the plan.
MC: What takes you from one to the next? Is it the research first, like your studying a certain period and you think I want to make that quilt? Or, is it a technique or what is the thing, or is it the fabric, itself?
BB: A terrible thing happens to a person when their hobby becomes their job. But, it's still my hobby so I have two sets of quilts and people, when they see my own quilts, they go, 'That doesn't look like you.' Well, that doesn't look like what you think I am, but the real me, my under-graduate degree is in art education so I took a lot of studio art courses and so when I'm making something for myself I'm inspired by pattern around me. I'm inspired by graphics that are contemporary and then graphics that are antique. So, what I'm working on right now, I'm doing a lot of small things, postcards, and I'm doing a lot of visual interpretation of traditional religious iconography. I'm doing a lot of shrines for myself, Photoshopping. I do a lot of digital taking, holy cards, don't tell my grandmother, and making them specifically for quilters. So, St. Thomas is the patron saint of mathematics so I Photoshopped him with a triangle and a ruler and a rotary cutter. I just pray to him every morning that I won't make any mistakes. [laughter.] So, I try to translate those into fabric and make those into things that are maybe twelve inches square. Now, no one ever sees these because--
MC: Where are they?
BB: In my house. [both speak at once, inaudible.] I put them up and then I often give them to Alliance [The Alliance for American Quilts.] or to a charitable cause like AQS [American Quilting Society.] when they have an auction. And people go, 'Oh, that doesn't look like the Barbara Brackman I would think of.' Well, that's what I make for fun. We were talking the other day about binding. I don't bind them. I mean I just zig-zag the edges so that they're very free. So then, the person who has to work for a living and loves her job 'll sit all day interpreting an antique quilt in fabrics that we've designed for Moda that are reproductions and I do a lot of interpreting the past and those are very interesting to me, but it's like I'm living two lives. It's a work job and a fun job and I think that the fun job, the night-time, day-off job has to be very different, because I don't think I could be making conventional quilts to entertain myself much, when I make quilts during the day. [unidentified person speaks inaudibly.] Or at least I'm designing quilts.
MC: Do you sleep under a quilt that you--
BB: No, I don't. It's because I have a bad dog [laughter.] and I also live in a bad climate, so I sleep under a down coverlet with a very washable duvet cover so when she comes in the house muddy. I did for many years and I have quilts on the wall. I have quite a book collection, of new and old quilts, and storage is always a problem. Quilts kept on the wall mostly.
MC: When you toggle back and forth when you make quilts that you make for your own pleasure, so you've also worked on a lot of books and you've done a lot of project books, so do you do the quilting for those? Or do you send those out?
BB: Oh, very rarely.
MC: Do you just--
BB: I can't get everything done that I would want to. I used to have quite a crew of sewers. I had a pattern company called The Sunflower Pattern Co-operative and it was co-operative in that nearly everybody in my sewing group worked for it. They designed patterns and then they also did contract sewing. But we haven't been selling patterns. My partner moved to Kentucky. My partner, Karla moved to Kentucky and so Kansas and Kentucky are too far to really continue doing business. So we half-heartedly think we're still in business. Nothing's getting done. Through Moda, if I design a quilt, then Moda contracts out the piecing and then the quilting to their contractors here. And it's always such a wonderful thing to design something and then see it finished without having to put a stitch in it. [laughter.] I love that part of it. When I do a book, I haven't done a book in a couple of years, I usually try to put one or two of my own actual quilts in there, that I have finished down to the binding and the sleeve.
MC: So, you can do it all.
BB: Oh, I can, not well, but I can do it all.
MC: When it comes to the technology, you mentioned Photoshopping and rotary cutters, what about the other things that you have in your arsenal, the tools that you use, the technology that you use, how do you design, like Corel Draw or EQ, or any of that, and what about your machine? Do you [both speak at once, inaudible.]
BB: Well, I am still a collector. That would be on my grave, obsessive-compulsive, but put it to a good cause. The computer just crashed because I had too many pictures on it, so now I'm collecting pictures. For my entertainment, I will sit for an hour and go through the auctions, look at the quilts. I have certain things I am collecting. One thing is a quilt that actually has a date on it. I have a little routine every day, looking for dated quilts on the on-line auctions. Then I save three photos, the over all, the shot of the date, so I can prove to myself that's actually the date, and then a detail to show the fabrics. And I have hundreds and hundreds of those. I save everything as large as I can, which is the cause of the recent crash, but I also have enormous files of things that amuse me, images that amuse [hisssing sound.] me, religious images, holy cards, icons, things like that. What I do is I manipulate those things and I wanted learn how to get good at Photoshop for two or three reasons. One is I would have to sew less if I could really do a convincing mock-up of a quilt, and so that was one of my early intentions. But, also, I've been scanning photographs for The Alliance, the Kansas Quilt Projects Slides, and they are thirty years old, twenty-five to thirty years old, and they have really shifted color and they've really lost a lot of color. They all shift yellow, don't they, when they, so I have to re-color and then, because they get very thin, I have to work on the contrast and so I wanted to get good at that and I put a hundred up on The Alliance's web site, the Quilt Index, but I have 12,900 to go and I want to get better [hissing sound.] because they don't look good, so I've been on hiatus from scanning. I don't want to do the actual scanning but I probably always would have to be doing the colorizing. So, I wanted to get good at that and then the idea of Photoshopping Zsa Zsa Gabor's head onto a holy card [laughter.] cracked me up. I've a very juvenile sense of humor. I'd always wanted to paint that but I couldn't paint that well [laughter.] and so I continue to amuse myself no end by manipulating photos from different genres, so I did the Gabor sisters as a three-face. Only people over a certain age know who the heck they are. Now, someone said, 'You could have picked the Kardashian sisters.' but I said, 'I don't know who they are.' [laughter.] So I have these enormous files and I'm thinking that's about the major thing I do as far as technology, right now. I do a lot of Word, do a lot of Word Publisher, but it's mostly Photoshop, and now it's to the point where I take the picture off the Index and many times quilt pictures are a slant because you're standing to the side to get the whole thing in and I know now how to square it up and flatten it out and improve it. [snapping sound.] And I look at any photograph in a magazine and I think I can make that square. I [hissing sound.] I can fix that up. So the whole world is all illusional now, to me, [laughter.] so much better than it is in real life. [laughter.]
MC: That is true. In terms of the way you use quilting in your life, has quilting ever helped you get through a difficult time. Is there an emotional component?
BB: Of course everyone has difficult times in their lives, so, illnesses, well, see the one, start when my mother was dying and my grandmother was there and we had something to share, whether we were actually sharing anything or not. She was just watching. But through divorces, through very bad illness and through my own illnesses, you know, when sometimes you break your ankle and they say no weight on it for six weeks. Sewing certainly gets you through those times. I find I shift in what I'm sewing because my boyfriend was very sick last year and so I found paper piecing. I did paper-pieced pineapples. That's all I did, no thinking, just sew, sew, sew, sew, sew. I started out with four inches and I went to six inches and then I went to eight inches and got better, so I didn't ever get to the twelve inches, which was good. [laughter.] I found paper piecing, which is something I always would have thought of as rather dull, you know to have it all so predictable, was very therapeutic because it didn't take any real thinking, but it occupied your mind. Definitely I think it's therapeutic as many people have said.
MC: What do you think makes a great quilt? We could talk a day about that.
BB: Oh, what makes a great quilt. For me personally, it's fabric. I love the graphics and I'll look at an Amish quilt and I'll go, 'Wow, that contrast is great. That design, that composition is great.' But then I just move right on because they're solids, who cares?
[laughter.] We have a quilt behind us right now and I guess I'm a microscopic focuser here. I focused in on the blue and the brown fabric and thought wait a minute, what's that shift there and color and I thought was that accidental, so I could stand here all day and look at the quilt that's behind us because it's from 1840 and, in fact, that particular piece is a rainbow print, which is deliberately shaded from light to dark and from brown to blue. There I am going oh, man, I've never seen one just like that. I have a very good visual memory. I have a terrible auditory memory but an excellent visual memory. So I try to file those just like the pictures in Photoshop on my computer. I try and file that away in the blues and say now remember that. Remember how that blue absolutely turned to brown and that was not an accident. So for me a great quilt is the great fabric.
MC: What makes a quilt appropriate for a museum or a special collection or something like that?
BB: An interesting thought. I've written some guidelines for the museums I volunteer at and I think regionalism for the particular museum. If it's a national museum of American history it's American. If it's the Lyon County Historical Society, it's Lyon County, Kansas. I think regionalism is very important. If someone's going to give you an English quilt that has no provenance at all that has to do with the county or the area I think the quality of the quilt, the condition, whether or not it's an unusual version of a common style, or else an uncommon style. That's the thing we always have to be very, in fact sometimes break people's hearts an say, 'It's a lovely yo-yo quilt, but we don't have any room for more than one in our collection and storage is a problem. So I think each museum should have a collecting focus, which they do, and that you'll take a quilt, maybe, that's in very bad condition if it has a connection to the community and a good story that will back it up. I know right now we're going through a difficult time because museums are in such bad shape for funding. When I scan every day when I'm scrolling around for quilts that are for sale, I see that they are being de-accessioned from some pretty impressive collections. It's really heartbreaking, very upsetting, but it's because I know what, if they asked me at the two museums in Kansas that I advise, what should we get rid of, we need money, we don't have storage, I would say, 'It's a pretty quilt, but it has nothing to do with Lyon County, Kansas or Lawrence, Kansas or we know nothing about it and if we sold it, it would bring a better price than one that's in worse condition that has local thing, so let's get rid of the pretty one.' Then it goes back into the community to a collector who pays a nice price and then in twenty-five years it'll go to another museum when she decides she wants to de-accession her collection. So it's a collecting focus that everyone should have, every museum should have, and then it has to be adjusted. But I know at Spencer Museum of Art [University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas.] where I advise, at the Kansas Museum of History were I advise, we have two different goals. One is history and one is art. So I'll say, 'This is a fabulous story but the quilt is not a work of art, it's a common type of quilt. I think it would be better off at the history museum.' And then the other way around, this is a fabulous quilt with no provenance. I think maybe that should go over to the other museum. So, what makes a great museum quilt depends on the museum.
MC: What about your personal collection? Do you have certain criteria?
BB: Sixty dollars, sixty dollar criterion. [laughter.] I am a sixty-dollar quilt buyer. I have spent, I would guess I've spent up to $500 if it had great fabric. It's mainly I don't have storage. I have a one bedroom house, tiny little Victorian house and so, occasionally I will buy them on impulse if they're under sixty dollars, and then sell them for fifty, buy high, sell low is my theory. [laughter.] What I'm looking for, because I'm in the business of fabric, I'm looking for fabric. I'm looking for a charm quilt, or I'm looking for a chintz quilt that has a large piece of chintz with a whole repeat so I can copy it.
MC: So it might be for inspiration for your own--
BB: Mostly for inspiration. That's the only way I can justify it. I buy a lot of fabric in isolation. I buy a lot of blocks and a lot of big repeats of chintz backs or something, [inaudible.] backs that I can then use to make fabric out of. The whole on-line auction thing has really gone down the tubes. People aren't putting stuff up any more because people aren't buying. There was a time, when I stuck to that sixty dollar rule and I could get 1830 quilts for thirty-nine dollars because sometimes they're in terrible shape. Sometimes they're downright ugly and sometimes the person is selling them, often doesn't know what they have, and they take a really terrible picture. So someone that just scrolls through and goes, 'Ooh that looks like it's from the 1950's.' Oddly I don't even want it and I'll be the only bidder. Those days are gone. Those days are gone. So I'm a very, I have to really keep it to what I can store in my house and so it's much better for me to spend my money on yardage. I'll spend a lot more on a piece of fabric than I'll spend on a quilt, which is the converse of most people.
MC: Some of the quilts you make, yourself, sound like they're pretty contemporary with the Photoshop and all that, do you collect that type of quilt as well, or not so much?
BB: No, oh Lord, that would be wonderful though. I have a few contemporary quilts that I've purchased in the charity auctions and things, and I'll pay more than sixty dollars, but they fit on the wall. They don't require folding up and good storage and tissue stuffing and things like that. Deciding that you're going to live small, which was sort of a political thing for me, and it's a functional thing, too. It means that you do not have storage and you cannot collect what you want, except for pictures. That's another reason why I'm so interested in pictures.
MC: Of the contemporary quiltmakers, are there some that really speak to you?
BB: Oh, yes. There're many contemporary quiltmakers [inaudible.] who knock me out. Laura Wasilowski, you know, the whole Chicago School of Fusing, with the idea of, just the freedom of that technique, the color that they use. Now, in my fabric business, I'm the reproduction person, so I'm stuck in natural dyes. Black cotton is not something I ever get to do because it's in the future from the Civil War, so lime green, vivid magenta, those are things that I don't ever get to do, so when I buy fabric that's what I buy. And when I look at quilts I'm saving them into an inspiration file. It'll be some of the real bright colors and the real interesting use of some of the bold graphic fabrics people are doing today.
MC: You mentioned the Civil War thing which you've written a lot about, is it that you're fascinated by that period historically or is it the fabric that speaks to you first and foremost?
BB: Through my life, now I have no history in my background, no history education, I've plenty of history in my background. When I started out I lived in this wonderful little town. One day I realized it was a very important place in the Civil War. I have to put this in--- Missourians came over and burned it in 1863. We're still mad. [laughter.] During the Civil War it was a very important location as to events leading up to the war and then during the war that burning of the [various unidentified noises.] town was just kind of a union rallying point. When I realized the history there I started getting interested in the Civil War because I wanted to know who owned my house. When I bought the house when I was twenty-five I could see the people who had owned it, those were names that I had heard of. So that's how I became interested in the Civil War. Since I have no real historical education, I thought I'm going to work backwards and so I have gradually been working backwards into the Civil War. I want to be able to go out onto the street and know what that street looked like in 1862 before they burned it. I feel pretty confident about that now, in that town and in Kansas I understand it very well. Then I started working backwards. So I was fascinated by the Civil War for many years and I read every woman's diary that I could find for those years and because I'm a compulsive collector I saved notebooks full of any quotes, I would write this down in longhand, any quotes they might refer to something interesting about their lives, their fight with their husband, their bad children, things we can relate to, their depressions, their illnesses, their experiences just in trying to live lives as women that were so constrained, but also about slavery, and about abolition, about political causes from the Civil War, and then any references to textiles and quilting. I got into this, really, thinking I bet these women talked about quilting. Well, they didn't that much but they do talk about fashion, especially in their letters and so I would write those things down. I have probably, well, three feet of notebooks that are full of these papers-full. That's one way I got interested in writing about the Civil War. I knew a lot more about the Civil War and how women lived through it than most formal historians do because they're not reading diaries and letters and they're not reading women's diaries and letters. That's how I got into the Civil War. Now I've been working backwards and I've got into the 1840's. So I spent years reading nothing but New England diaries and literature about the New England literati, the people that were so influential, the Hawthorn's and the Peabody's. Spent years reading them. Then I worked my way back into the 1820's which isn't got a lot of information. Then I jumped over to England and now I'm complete obsessed with the Regency period in England. [hissing sound.] I know every piece of gossip, and I tell you, you want to know gossip, you want to know some baaad lives, bad choices people made, the English Regency [laughter.] is the era. Now I'm stuck in about 1780 in England. I know a lot about, yeah it states although there certainly isn't the documentation, so I guess I have to work back until the colonial period but that looks kind of cold and bleak [laughter.] to me, and so all I can think of is Thanksgiving pictures of cold people eating. [laughter.] very, very small dishes of turkey. That's a prejudice that I want to get over so I'll have to go backwards. I live in a small town which has not a great town library, adequate, but it has a university library and they have great collections, so I'll just go through the number, the Dewey Decimal System or whatever. Some of the books I read are so obtuse they're still on the Dewey Decimal System and when I try to check them out they glare at me and go, you know, 'I have to put this in the system. Nobody's checked it out since 1948.' But we do have wonderful books so I have access to whole worlds and people say, 'You live in a little town, don't you get bored?' No, I live in Regency England right now [laughter.] and I'm never bored.
MC: That's wonderful. It sort of prompted me to think about technology and the question of technology and quilts. Because you deal with all these historical quilts, you make them, you study them and you create patterns, how do you feel about the whole thing about making quilts today and hand versus machine versus long-arming and first of all how do you feel about it. And second of all, is it appropriate to use these older materials in these older quilts. Should you be sort of be making them the way they were made at the time they were made? Do you have any thoughts on that?
BB: I'm a rebel. You can do whatever you want. I never give it a thought and I never have in my whole life. I started out making quilts. There were people who had, I took Home-ec for one semester, they just suggested I go into something else. [laughter.] My father didn't want me in Home-Ec. anyway. He was really supportive of me anyway, 'I think you should just take a business course. Forget that stuff.' So I just have always just have gone, 'Whatever.' It's functional, do what you want. I've documented, I worked for Quilters Newsletter [Quilter's Newsletter Magazine.] for many years and that was one of our big issues. 'Caryl Bryer Fallert won a prize with a machine-quilted quilt. You know, we have to write an editorial about it. What do you think?' Uh, well, let her do whatever she wants. So, there's just no opinion there. It just seems to me, I'm a visual person and I'm certainly not a nit-picker and people have asked me to judge contests at fairs. 'Oh, no, you don't want me judging, because I'll just go for the visuals. I will not check that binding and make sure that the batting extends to the edge.'
MC: Or count the stitches.
BB: Yes. I just don't care personally. People want to get into an argument about it and I'm not a very judgmental person, so I don't want anybody throwing stones at me, let me tell you that.
MC: This is kind of an over-arching question. Why is quiltmaking important to your life?
BB: Why is quiltmaking important to my life? That's a very good question. Social, I think if I didn't have my quilting groups I probably would have quit making quilts. I would be still making art but my life is very much built on my women friends. I have three quilting groups that I belong to, so Wednesday begins a grueling couple of days, Wednesday afternoon, Wednesday night, Thursday morning, three different groups. Now some of them only meet every other week, but what that grew out of, as I say earlier, we used to have a pattern business, these same people and so it was our meetings. It was our business meetings and we'd be sewing and we'd be working on projects together. Then as the business sort of faded away it just became social and we invited more people. As more people retired from their other businesses, we invited other people in. So I always have to have hand sewing for those things. I always have to have something I can be doing by hand and there's prep-work weekend for that grueling Wednesday-Thursday schedule. Then because they're so interested in quilting, many of them, we keep up on the tools and the equipment. We're constantly trying to find things that are going to make our lives easier, better, and of course, the fabric. I can always bring in something or other, something that I'm working on and that keeps everybody talking about fabric. I think it really is mostly social that keeps me in there. I know I would always be doing something artistic, but it's strange how the computer, using the computer graphics, has really replaced a lot of the creativity needs in my life. There's problems with that in that I don't get up and pretty soon, every day, I have to quit because I've stared at it for six hours and you've got to change your eye focus. Time to walk the dog. I think it's mostly social right now.
MC: So, these groups that you're in, do you sew when you're there. Is it mostly show-and-tell, is it mostly social--
BB: It's all of those things. Show-and-tell, it's eating, it's champagne. Champagne for breakfast. I have to be busy, keep busy, and many of them do. One friend never does any prep-work and always comes in and says, 'Does anyone have anything for me to do?' So I like to even keep her busy. She's a great binder. If you get it pre-sewn, she'll bind it. She's a circle gluer. [hissing sound.] If she would do her own prep-work she could have made twenty quilts in the past couple of years, but she just can't sit there without having something to do. That's the way I am, too, so I do a lot of hand appliqué right now. We're always looking for the never-ending appliqué because then you won't have to do much prep and it's a tragedy after three years when it's done. [hissing sound, laughter.]
MC: In what ways do your quilts reflect your community.
BB: Well, that's social life and you know my community and many of the same people I've been sewing with for, I hate to say it, almost forty years, meeting at night every other week. We started out, years ago, the first group, and we made several group quilts, the first that really sticks in my mind is our Sun Sets on Sunbonnet Sue quilt, which is in the Quilt Index, in which we killed her. We hated her. We hated her because we’re anti-sentimentalists. We are just not amused by big-eyed children, unless they're real children. We lived in an era of Walter Keane paintings and Sunbonnet Sue just fit right in there. Everybody was gaga over her at our guild meetings so my friend Laurie Metzinger said at one time she'd like to see that little girl dead. [laughter.] So I took her and I drew her and I pushed her over on her side and I put a big rock on her chest and Laurie laughed so hard, this was during a guild meeting that we almost got thrown out. [laughter.] So we just took some Sunbonnet Sue patterns and we turned them over and we turned them on their face, turned them on their head, dropped things on them. That quilt entertained us no end. We got many people to work on it. Then we did a second one and then we said, 'All right, people are starting to attach meaning to this. They're starting to say that we were feminists, which we were, but that we were making this because we [laughter.] were feminist and we wanted to show that Sunbonnet Sue in her traditional role. We weren't thinking that. We were trying to kill her, squash her, flatten her out. It was anti-sentiment. So my friend, Nadra, says, 'Well, maybe should do a quilt that nobody can find any meaning in it at all.' This was in 1975, maybe '80. So she said, 'Every day I drive by a store, in Olathe, Kansas, called the Julian Flaming Furniture. It's been driving me crazy. What do you think they have in there?' Apparently Julian Flaming was someone's name. So then the idea was to imagine what was inside the Julian Flaming Furniture store. That's meaningless. It's total Dada. [laughter.] So we started that thirty years ago and it lagged, but about six months ago I got the blocks out and I said, 'We're finishing this thing, because thirty years is too long.' So here's what I've been working on night and day for the past six months, is trying to get people who were seven years old when we started it the first time, to make a few blocks. They had some things they wanted to set on fire [hissing.] and then we got it to the quilter. It just came back from the quilter last Wednesday. It's beautiful and I wanted to bring it. I thought that could be a good talismanic object, but I knew that my friend, Georgeanne, who never has anything to do it, so I would present it in the proper Tom Sawyer pattern, and she'd say, 'I'll take it. I'll bind it. I'll bring it back.' So she's got it right now. So this is a thirty-year project, so that's the way my quilts reflect my community. The ones that I'm working on as my art is that it's Tom Sawyerism. I try to get everybody involved.
MC: Where will that quilt go.
BB: Well, I don't know. You're thinking which museum discipline. Now that MSU, Michigan State University does have our first Sunbonnet Sue quilt, now we thought this was so amusing thirty years ago. So now that I can look on the web, you type Flaming Furniture. [laughter.] Every twenty-year old who's got his apartment and a six-pack of beer has poured gasoline on his couch and set it on fire. I've taken a picture of him, sitting there, drinking a beer. That's exactly the same sense of humor. [laughter.] I don't know, it's adolescent and it's like putting Zsa Zsa Gabor, of course, on a holy card. It's adolescent humor. So where would it go. I don't know. It's not even back from the quilter. Once it's back we hope to show it in our guild show this April and then we will undoubtedly will drag it around for a while some people are still out there giving lectures and, of course, I'll put it on my blog. Probably, since they're all invigorated after finishing a thirty-year project, someone will get another idea next week. 'Well, you know, we could do that one we talked about years ago.' I do love community working and I love art group projects. They said, 'We got it out, you know, and I put it together with scraps of stuff we had left from other projects.' They said, 'Did it turn out the way you thought?' and I said, 'No, I really hoped I could make it pretty.' [laughter.] But it's a lot of furnitures, overstuffed furniture with little appliqué flames coming out of it. There's just nothing you can do. [laughter.] It's got an Eames chair and someone did the kitchen sink. There's some very nice things in it. I think it's just downright ugly. Actually it's a concept. [sharp rattle.] We'll see what people can make of this and say, 'Now these women are deeply worried about fire insurance.' [laughter.] It's totally meaningless.
MC: I can't wait to see it. What is the importance of quilts in American life?
BB: Zilch. [laughter.] You know, I'm from a social services background. I'm a liberal. There are a lot more problems in American life than quilts. I do think the quilts are a touchstone to our ancestors and I am a historian. I'm a family genealogist. I love the way they connect us to the past. It's a luxury to be able to have that kind of touch with the past, to be able to have the money as a nation to save them in museum collections, to have the luxury as women and men to make them, to indulge ones selves in buying that much fabric and putting that much work into something, a handmade object. That's the importance of it, is that it reflects a lot, but I don't know, I'm a myth buster. It's something I can't say, but I can do it. They will come and go, as my grandmother always said, 'We had some of those, but when we had some money we got rid of them.' That attitude's going to come back. We have no family quilts at all and she said, 'As soon as we got two nickels to rub together we went out of the handmade blanket business, Barbara.' So, I think they have importance as to what they mean and how they reflect our ability to appreciate them. When you read world news, you know, and people are leaving countries because, it always breaks my heart and I know if you are collectors you people have to leave Tripoli, you can take what's on your back and one armful. You don't have room for that quilt or anything else that's important to you. So, I always think 'Well, if I had to get out what would I'd take, I guess the dachshund, the fat dachshund that would fill up my arms and I would like to have the hard drive but it's going to have to go, so very little gets to go. So I do think that we are in a unique position and that we are now able to reflect back on all that and to not have the attitude my grandmother has that a handmade blanket is a reflection of poverty. We have the respect for them.
MC: So it sounds like you're saying you think that the ebb and flow of quilting, that it's going to run down again, we're going to go through those sallow periods again?
BB: It must be inevitable. I don't know. As when my aunt said, and I had an abundance of aunts and when I quit teaching, that reliable job with a pension they kept telling me about, and I said, 'Oh, I'm in the quilt business now, I just go around and lecture.' And they said, 'Oh, you better have a fall-back idea.' I've never needed the fall-back idea but I think we can't predict the future. There was a period about ten years ago everyone was going into knitting, [laughter.] but knitting, there's just so many handmade sweaters a small child can have. [laughter.] And so grandmas, quit mothers, they did it, so I just don't know. I think people will always be doing something creative but what that will be, I can't predict the future. I'm very pleased that it's been going on, I've been in this business for thirty years. That's a luxury, too. I've been able to support myself really well for thirty years. Ebb and flow, I'm a historian.
MC: It's not going to ebb in your life, though, for you.
BB: No, because I'm retired. I just got my first social security check.
MC: So that means more quilting, more--
BB: Well, more time to Photoshop I fear.
MC: Well, to wrap up, in terms of your journeys with quilts and your discovery with quilts, what would your dream be, for your next--
BB: Oh, well, my dream with quilts. I would like to have more storage space. That is my [laughter.] eternal, you know, if you live in a small house you look at those people who have those little aluminum barns in their backyard and you go, 'Man, I could fill one of those with something. I wouldn't put the quilts out there, but if I put, like the pantry out there, [laughter.] I could put shelves in the pantry. I could put quilts in there. So my dream would be to have more storage space. I have had a [laughter.] a studio down town which I rented with friends and that's where we kept things for years. We lost our lease. The parking was horrible, the stairs were terrible and so I remodeled my garage to do that, but the garage is full, totally full. That studio was totally full, so more room for a better collection. Recently Moda sent me to look at a beautiful swatch book from 1835 and I thought if I were the richest woman in the world I would buy swatch books and I would have a room to keep them in and a curator to take care of them and I would come in every day and she would, with white gloves, turn the pages for me. [laughter.] What do you think of that one? So that would be my ideal. The realities are, if I had them I'd drop them and the dog would [inaudible.]. I'm very bad. It's not a museum at my house so I really don't want to have those kind of valuable things. I do love the access to them. As far as making quilts, I have time to make quilts. I have time. I have two studios, one in the house, one bedroom, the only bedroom in the house. I'm sleeping in the living room, abandon the dining room because who has people over any more. So that's the living room or the giant TV room and so I have an inside studio and then an outside studio and the outside one tends to be more storage for the swatches that I do have and a lot of the quilts. I do have the time to make the quilts. People say you're going to retire. What are you going to do? I hope to paint and draw more. They're messy. One of the reasons I got into quilting, I think, when I was just out of art school, was you can pick up a quilt and sew. You can't pick up an oil painting. You have to have the outfit on to do the oil painting. You have to have the big area and so I don't think I'll ever oil paint again but I'd love to go back to more watercolor and tempera and things like that.
MC: Thank you so much for letting us do this and talk to you and absolutely fascinating and truly fun, so this concludes the interview with Barbara Brackman and the time is now 10:18 a.m. Thank you.
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Barbara Brackman is a quilt historian who specializes in designing reproduction prints for Moda. She maintains a internet presence through <a href="http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/" title="Barbara Brackman's Material Culture" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">her blog</a>, where she shares her knowledge of historic fabric and quilts. In this interview, she recounts to Meg Cox how she began as a quilter by discovering historical quilt patterns. She has been inspired by Civil War era quilts in part because of the local history of her hometown of Lawrence, Kansas. Quiltmaking has played a significant social role in her life, and she has continued to be active in three different quilting groups, including one that has met for forty years. in addition to collecting quilts as she has room, she also collects digital images of quilts and vintage fabrics.
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audio
Title
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Barbara Brackman
Civil War
Cowboy Boot patterns
Hand applique
Hand Sewing
Kansas City Star Patterns
legend
Photoshop
Quilt history
quilt revival
reproduction fabric
Sun Sets on Sunbonnet Sue quilt