1 20 2 http://qsos.quiltalliance.org/files/original/d72b387f3163c0a7ba1e7f76fafe5ce6.jpg 2e28be45e3c0223742fb01554f2f1389 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 A name given to the resource Kansas QSOS Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed 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 Specifies if OHMS index has been completed [Yes/no] Yes Interview Date 3/5/2011 OHMS Object http://quiltalliance.net/ohms-viewer-master/viewer.php?cachefile=KS66049-001Brackman.xml OHMS Object Text Raw full-text of the OHMS Object. Used for full-text searching. <!--?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&amp;module=collection&amp;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 Interview sponsor Name of interview sponsor Kay Schroeder Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound **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. 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/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KS66049-001 Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource 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.&nbsp; 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. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio Title A name given to the resource 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 http://qsos.quiltalliance.org/files/original/cdd73f76e341ffed197efe404f756ac5.jpg 8e2bfe628de9d9adca55adf1a9c2d8fa 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 A name given to the resource Modern Quilt Guild QSOS Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Victoria Findlay Wolfe Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Meg Cox Interview Format audio Location The location of the interview Manhattan, New York City, New York Interview Indexed Specifies if OHMS index has been completed [Yes/no] Yes Transcriber Ellen November Interview Date 08-05-2011 OHMS Object http://quiltalliance.net/ohms-viewer-master/viewer.php?cachefile=NY10018-001Wolfe.xml OHMS Object Text Raw full-text of the OHMS Object. Used for full-text searching. <!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?--> <root xmlns="https://www.avpreserve.com/nunncenter/ohms" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemalocation="https://www.avpreserve.com/nunncenter/ohms/ohms.xsd"><record id="00041356" dt="2017-12-05"><version>5</version><date value="2011-08-05" format="yyyy-mm-dd"></date><date_nonpreferred_format></date_nonpreferred_format><cms_record_id></cms_record_id> <title>Victoria Findlay Wolfe</title> <accession>NY10018-001</accession><duration></duration><collection_id></collection_id><collection_name>Quilters' S.O.S. -- Save Our Stories</collection_name><series_id></series_id><series_name>Modern Quilt Guild QSOS</series_name><repository>Quilt Alliance</repository><funding></funding><repository_url></repository_url><keyword>Quiltmaking purpose - charity</keyword><keyword>Modern Quilt Guild</keyword><keyword>Manhattan, New York City, New York</keyword><keyword>Fifteen Minutes of Play</keyword><interviewee>Victoria Findlay Wolfe</interviewee><interviewer>Meg Cox</interviewer><file_name></file_name><sync>1:|2(4)|6(10)|17(3)|34(2)|45(2)|60(11)|74(8)|91(8)|104(10)|116(14)|130(17)|144(9)|160(13)|172(2)|187(5)|198(8)|212(4)|227(9)|239(13)|252(11)|266(5)|281(6)|290(13)|304(7)|317(10)|327(3)|340(9)|352(19)|374(13)|389(2)|406(2)|414(13)</sync><sync_alt></sync_alt><transcript_alt_lang></transcript_alt_lang><translate>0</translate><media_id></media_id><media_url>http://quiltalliance.net/qsos-audio/NY10018-001FindlayWolfe.mp3</media_url><mediafile><host>Other</host><host_account_id></host_account_id><host_player_id></host_player_id><host_clip_id></host_clip_id><clip_format>audio</clip_format></mediafile><kembed></kembed><language></language><index><point><time>5</time> <title>Introduction</title> <title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>Everybody can hear me ok?</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Interviewer Meg Cox introduces the Quilters S.O.S. interview, which is being recorded live at Wolfe's home in Manhattan, in front an audience comprised of the New York Modern Quilt Guild. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>Modern Quilt Guild;New York City, New York</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>110</time> <title>Discussion of quilt titled "Everything but the Kitchen Sink"</title> <title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>Tell us about the quilt your brought here to talk about</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Wolfe discusses her first quilt, "Everything But the Kitchen Sink". She explains how she slowly learned how to quilt by branching off from children's clothes that she would make for her daughter, and how she drew inspiration from her grandmother's quilts. This quilt is the one that has great meaning to Wolfe because it is comprised of "orphan" blocks she acquired along the way, which shows her improvisational quiltmaking roots and many techniques she has learned over the years. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>"Y" seams;Antique quilts;applique;children's clothing;Color theory;Crazy quilts;daughter;first quilt;grandmother;hobby;Knowledge transfer;Learning quiltmaking;Painting;Scrap quilts</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>301</time> <title>Wolfe's use of her first quilt; involvement in Modern Quilt Guild</title> <title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>How do you use this quilt in your life?</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Wolfe explains that she continues to use her first quilt on her bed. She shares her Minnesota roots, growing up on a farm, where her father worked as an upholsterer and her mother was employed as a seamstress. She recalls learning to sew as a child, making Barbie clothes and stealing scraps from her father. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>Art quilts;Barbies;blind stitch;father;Fiber - Polyester;Finger Hut;Learning quiltmaking;Minnesota;Modern Quilt Guild;New York City Modern Quilters;polyester double knit;Quilt guild;Quilt Purpose - Bedcovering;Quilt Purpose - Utilitarian;seamstress;upholsterer;use</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink>http://www.nycmetromodquilters.com/</hyperlink><hyperlink_text>New York City Modern Quilters</hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>716</time> <title>Challenging preconceived tastes towards quilts</title> <title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>So you challenge yourself? </partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Wolfe discusses how she works on a commission basis making quilts to sell. She uses unlikely colors together or colors she wouldn't normally use in order to challenge herself. Wolfe explains that she became inspired through her friend, and the fact that she and many of her friends/colleagues had collections of quilts that were actually too large for them. She offered to donate some to her friend, and to her surprise he said he needed 700 of them. She proceeded to ask people on her block to help her collect them.</synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>Challenge;commission;Quilt Purpose - Charity;Quilt Purpose - Personal income</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps>40.837048, -73.865433</gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text>Garment District, Manhattan, New York City</gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink>http://bumblebeansbasics.com/</hyperlink><hyperlink_text>Bumble Beans Basics, Wolfe's charity which gives quilts to people in need. </hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>981</time> <title>Modern technology and work space</title> <title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>Have advances in technology affected your work, I mean, what about the tools that you use?</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Wolfe explains that modern technology hasn't really changed her quilt making process. The most "modern" technology she uses is her rotary cutter and her scissors. She has also designed custom fabric through the online vendor, Spoonflower. She also describes her work space in her New York City loft, which she characterizes as a "mess."</synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>applique;Garment District, New York City;Quiltmaking process;Rotary cutter;Scissors;Spoonflower;Sweatshop;Technology in quiltmaking;Work or Studio space</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink>http://quiltalliance.net/qsos-images/NY10018-001FindlayWolfeC.jpg</hyperlink><hyperlink_text>Detail, "Everything but the Kitchen Sink," by Victoria Findlay Wolfe</hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>1155</time> <title>Quilting as a coping mechanism</title> <title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>Have you ever used quilts and quilting to get through a difficult time? What makes a great quilt? What kinds of quilt makers are you drawn to?</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Wolfe explains that her quilting mostly comes from joyous times. For example, whenever a baby is born or a friend gets married a quilt in being made in celebration. However, Wolfe states that eventually she wants to make a quilt for when she dies, citing a Native American tradition. In Wolfe's opinion, every quilt is great and there are no ugly quilts. Again, she references the process of quilt making being just as important as the end result. She also mentions how she will buy virtually any antique quilt, because someone put so much love and work into it. Wolfe loves finding quilts in flea markets, because those quilts contain a mystery about how, when, and where they were made and who they were made by.</synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>Celebration;Coping Mechanism;Creativity;death;Native American;Quilt Purpose - Gift or presentation;Quilt Purpose - Mourning;Quilt Purpose - Wedding</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink></hyperlink><hyperlink_text></hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>1284</time> <title>Inspirations for her quilts/ thoughts on hand vs machine quilting</title> <title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>What are the other works and quilt makers you are drawn to? Do you like to finish quilts on your own?</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Wolfe loves finding quilts in flea markets, because those quilts contain a mystery about how, when, and where they were made and who they were made by. Wolfe has also been highly influenced by painters such as Monet and Matisse. Wolfe states that she is a "hesitant" machine quilter, in that she needs it because she doesn't have the time to hand sew all of her quilts. She enjoys using a long arm quilting machine, but she prefers to hand sew. For example, when creating a favorite quilt she feels the need to hand sew the entire quilt.</synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>Amish quilts;Antique quilts;Claude Monet;Ellsworth Kelly;Flea Markets;Hand quilting;Henri Matisse;Long arm quilting;Long arm quilting machine;modern art;Mystery;Wassily Kandinsky</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink>http://quiltalliance.net/qsos-images/NY10018-001FindlayWolfeB.jpg</hyperlink><hyperlink_text>Detail, "Everything but the Kitchen Sink," by Victoria Findlay Wolfe</hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>1479</time> <title>Importance of quilt making in life</title> <title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>Why is quilt making important to your life? How do you think you have influenced the quiltmaking community? What is the effect quilts have on American life? Where do you see yourself going as a quilter?</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>To Wolfe, quilts will leave a legacy behind her and that they provide a positive influence in her daughter's life by creating memories around these quilts. Wolfe explains that she doesn't know how her quilts affect the community. This shows that quilters probably focus on the art much more than they focus on the effect of it. Wolfe explains that quilts are popular due to their utilitarian aspect and that they can be used with whatever resources are available. She also appreciates that the function and purpose of quilts is as true now as it was in the past. Wolfe explains that she takes quilting on a day-by-day basis, and that she prefers to use each quilt as a learning experience and not necessarily as a constant striving for perfection.</synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>American Quilter's Society (AQS);daughter;Generational quiltmaking;legacy;mother;quilting goals</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink>http://quiltalliance.net/qsos-images/NY10018-001FindlayWolfeA.jpg</hyperlink><hyperlink_text>Victoria Findlay Wolfe in front of her quilt, "Everything but the Kitchen Sink."</hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>1638</time> <title>Teaching quilting and online collaboration</title> <title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>Are you teaching others as well? I have 100 players on the site and we're constantly challenging one another and giving each other feedback and just playing and seeing what happens.</partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Wolfe explains that she created a website, "15 Minutes of Play," that helps people learn how to quilt and share their projects among each other. She enjoys seeing others enjoy the process of quilting as well. </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>Online quilt communities;Quilt tutorials;Quilt Website;Teaching quiltmaking</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink>www.15minutesplay.com</hyperlink><hyperlink_text>Wolfe's "15 Minutes of Play" website</hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point><point><time>1891</time> <title>Biggest challenge facing quiltmakers today</title> <title_alt></title_alt><partial_transcript>So what do you think is the biggest challenge affecting quilt makers today? </partial_transcript><partial_transcript_alt></partial_transcript_alt><synopsis>Wolfe explains that there are personal obstacles for every quiltmaker individually, and that there seems to be an issue with people being labeled as a certain type of quilter, such as "modern" or "art quilter." </synopsis><synopsis_alt></synopsis_alt><keywords>Art quilts;Challenge;Modern Quilt Guild;quilt styles;Quiltmaking</keywords><keywords_alt></keywords_alt><subjects></subjects><subjects_alt></subjects_alt><gps></gps><gps_zoom>17</gps_zoom><gps_text></gps_text><gps_text_alt></gps_text_alt><hyperlink>https://vfwquilts.com/</hyperlink><hyperlink_text>Wolfe's website</hyperlink_text><hyperlink_text_alt></hyperlink_text_alt></point></index><type>Oral History</type><description>In this interview with quiltmaker and philanthropist, Victoria Findlay Wolfe and interviewer Meg Cox discuss how her upbringing in Minnesota attracted her to quilts, as well as how she uses quilts to connect with the community. Wolfe runs an online collaborative quilting website called Fifteen Minutes of Play, and discusses the use of quilting as a charitable resource. Wolfe also explains her love of the process of quilting, and how the her community projects and the process of quiltmaking provide her with fulfillment. The interview was recorded live at a meeting of the NYC Metro Modern Quilters Guild at Wolfe's home in Manhattan.</description><rel></rel><transcript>Meg Cox (MC): This is the Quilters’ S.O.S. – Save Our Stories interview with Victoria Findlay Wolfe. We are at her loft apartment in New York City. Tell me about the quilt you’ve brought today to talk about. Victoria Findlay Wolfe (VFW): The quilt that I’d like to talk about is the one hanging over here behind us called “Everything but the Kitchen Sink.” I started it about 15 years ago. I was an occasional quilter, and then I became a mother. There was at a point where I was making a lot of quilts and children’s clothes for my daughter Beatrice. I wanted to make her quilts when she was a baby. But I would never make the perfect quilt for her. I ended up making her about 20 quilts. None of the quilts were ever good enough for my daughter, so I cut them all up and accumulated many orphan blocks along the way from doing so. I was looking at quilts but not really knowing much about making a quilt. The only quilts I had in my house were the crazy quilts my grandmother made. And so that’s how this quilt started, I was trying to mimic what my grandmother did. Mimicking what her process was. Because it was the only thing I knew, from watching her quilt as a child. MC: So you brought this because it speaks to how you became involved with quilting? VFW: It was definitely the start of the obsession with quilting. I had started, if you look at the bottom of that quilt, there is a 14″ strip across the bottom, where I was looking at my grandmother’s work and I was trying to duplicate what she did by using the sewing machine instead of by hand. I got so bored and frustrated trying to do it. It wasn’t my way, so I needed to figure out how to do what she did, but in my own way, so I couldn’t I get frustrated. I couldn’t at the time, and so I put it away in a box for about 12 years. In 2009 I pulled it out and that’s when I had accumulated so many more orphan blocks and then just started playing with it, adding them all into one quilt. MC: What do you think that this quilt says about you? If someone came upon this quilt, what do you think it says about you as a quilter? VFW: That’s kind of hard. I hope they see the learning curve and passion. When I look at that quilt, I see everything that I have learned for about 15 years. I learned techniques that I have never done before. There’s probably about a hundred Y seams in that quilt. Difficult seams. That’s the only way to do it, just go for it. Applique is something that I had not done since junior high school. It’s my learning process, in that quilt, trying to do letters, applique, using up antique blocks I’ve collected. Everything I had went into it, along with my everyday life. Maybe it says, I’m open to the life throws at me? I’m a painter by trade previously so I was trying to figure out the color balance and make it all work. It’s been a complete learning experience so it kind of sums up a wide portion of my life including getting married, having a family, moving to New York, it accumulates everything. MC: How do you use this quilt? VFW: It sits on my bed. It’s the one quilt that I am so attached to, I’d garb it from a burning building. It’s not going anywhere, it’s staying here, it wont’ be sold. It gets used and loved. MC: So your interest in quilting was originally sparked by your grandmother? VFW: Yes, definitely, and by the basic needs of growing up on a farm. My father had an upholstery business in Minnesota and I grew up on a farm in MN. My mother was a seamstress for Fingerhut for a while. I don’t know if anyone knows Fingerhut out here. But that’s why my grandma had all theses quilts made out of polyester double-knit. My grandmother was a crazy-quilter. In MN you had about five of these quilts on your bed, because it’s cold and we did not have heat in our house. We heated our house with wood stoves. So we would have about five of these quilts on our bed and they stayed there all night long. The weight of them is unforgettable and comforting. MC: Was she the only family member who quilted? VFW: No, My mother would make quilts periodically, only after a relative got married, but then she was more of a seamstress. When I started sewing, I had one of those Barbie sewing machines that had a glue cartridge that you would put in and it would put glue dots on the fabric. That really worked well (laughter). Then I moved up from there gradually and would steal my father’s scraps and upholstery sample books. I’d sew them together on my mother’s Singer. I remember him teaching me how to do a blind stitch and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world because you couldn’t tell there was a seam on the outside finishing it up. I thought it was pretty cool cause it looked like my Dad’s work then. MC: Did you ever make a quilt for the Barbie? VFW: I’m sure I did but I don’t remember. MC: So your first quilt memory was probably the polyester quilts on the bed? VFW: Yes and they were heavy. MC: So how much time do you spent quilting now? How big a part of your life is it? VFW: All day all night. My husband’s up in Canada right now, so I would stay up all night if I could. No, really, I sew all day. All day long. I sew when my daughter goes to school, I sew, when she comes home, I quilt when she goes to bed. It’s an obsession, I know and accept that. it is all related to my need to create. MC: Would you talk a little bit about the modern quilt movement and how you seemed to be involved with that? VFW: That’s kind of interesting. I was a little bit clueless to it. It had been around for about six months. Hadn’t heard anything about it. And a friend of mine Amy Drucker, said how come we don’t have this in New York. We need a guild. Let’s do this. Want to do this? Okay and 20 minutes later our site was up and within an hour we had like 20 members. That was 1-1/2 years ago. So within 20 minutes we got all these people on the site and it has grown very rapidly. We have been meeting here in the apt. We have over 150 members on line. We are working on a new web site, The challenge has not been getting more people, new people come each meeting, and community is a big part of it. MC: How do you define, for you, what is it about? VFW: For me personally it’s keeping all the rules open. I consider myself a very traditional quilter. I’ve done it since I was very young. I know patchwork and how to sew by hand but at the same time, as an artist, I want to try different things and I think maybe the modern movement is incorporating that more for everybody, that it’s okay to do your own thing. I think it is all-inclusive, it includes the art quilter, the beginner quilter, the traditional quilter who wants to try something new. The fabric designers are a big part of it, the more color I can get, the happier I am. MC: Can you talk a little bit about your creative process. Were you conscious of that for a long time? VFW: Yeah. We had a talk the other day about how or about why the process was more important to you or the finished object was more important. To me as an artist it is definitely the process. It’s all about starting the quilt, and discovering where it’s going. I rarely have a plan when I start something. I start with one little piece and I let it grow organically. I don’t ever now where I’m going with it, the adventure of it is what excited me. It’s like when I’m working on a painting I’ll start small in the center, and then it gets big as I fill in the canvas… MC: So with a quilt do you start with the color, do you start with the pattern. What is your impulse? VFW: It could be anything. Sometimes it’s a memory of somebody, a memory of my grandmother. This quilt, “Grandmother’s Rocking Chair”, This quilt actually started out as a traditional style quilt with squares, and the orange blocks. I couldn’t make it just be that traditional quilt, I had to see what would happen if I… then played out all the options that made me think of my grandmother. It was just too normal, so I started playing and the next thing I knew I had something completely different. About my grandmother, from watching her sew, sitting in her rocking chair. That would be the inspiration. Or like I said, looking at my grandmother’s quilt for inspiration, a color combination or Anytime I’d say I would never do a purple and gold quilt, those are my high school colors, I hated those colors, as soon as I said that, I made five quilts with those colors. So that is a great inspiration or a starting off point to a great challenge. MC: So you challenge yourself? VFW: Always challenge. I love a challenge. That’s one of the things I love to do most. Sometimes if I’m doing a commissioned quilt, I ask people to give me a word and that will send me off on a tangent. MC: That’s a great segue. How did you get involved in the commission business and do you have your own personal style or how does it work? VFW: It’s been mostly word of mouth. A lot of my painting commissions have spilled over into quilts because they want to know what I am doing with quilts. They are confused at first until they see them and then they want one. I don’t always get a lot of information. I had one person wanted a red quilt. That was the inspiration. So I cleaned all my stash of every red I had. When I do a commission, there’s no deposit required. If after I make the quilt, if they want to purchase it after it’s made, great! It’s okay with me! but I’m just as happy to keep it if they don’t. It’s a win/win either way. MC: And I know as well that you started a community project for quilts. You really are living and breathing quilting. Could you talk a little bit about that? How that got started and where that is now? VFW: That was kind of funny. The blog world is a very interesting place. Those of us who quilt have more quilts than we need. I had some extra quilts lying here and I had a friend who worked with a program called Basics, in the Bronx, who worked with getting homeless families back into transitional housing here in the city. I asked him one day: Do you need any quilts? Thinking I could give him two or three that I had lying around. And he turned around and said: Do you have 700? That was not what I expected him to say, not in my wildest dreams. . So I said, hmmm, I don’t know, let me see what I can do. So I designed a house block and asked people on my blog to make them and send them to me and I would make a couple quilts for them. well a couple blocks turned into, 500 quilt blocks and that turned into 60 quilts, which we then auctioned off and raised over $30,000 for them. MC: You auctioned them of for the organization? VFW: Yes, basically by auctioning off the quilts for them at an organization fundraiser. Then, that had been so successful, that we turned it into an ongoing quilt drive. And so now, we opened it up where you could send in completed quilts. We’ve received over 350 quilts. And we’ve had event days where we go up to the Bronx to each of the different housing units and we hand the quilts to the families in the program. It’s an extremely emotional and fabulous day. We have another round of that coming up, to collect more quilts. And it turns into something bigger than I had set out to do. One needs to always think bigger. MC: Would you talk about, what is the most pleasing aspect of quilting to you? VFW: It’s the process and giving back. It’s just so fun watching all these little pieces come together. I can’t throw anything away. So I save all my little pieces and they grow from nothing into something. That’s what I love. It’s not even so much the finished product. I think by the time I put it on my lap and fix the binding I’m done and I’m onto the next project. From the beginning to the end. And giving them away is even better, good for the soul. MC: Have advances in technology affected your work? What about the tools that you use? VFW: Not much other than my rotary cutter and my scissors. I’ve dabbled a bit on Spoonflower, working with fabric design and that’s always interesting. I’m happy to participate and try a new tool. I feel kind of traditional with my quilts so I have to push myself further into other areas yet. Just when I say I will never do something, I need that boost to try something new, new technology can help me do that. MC: What about fabrics? Where are you looking for fabric? VFW: Anywhere. Clothes. Fabric shops. All the stores. All my friends. MC: What are you favorite techniques? VFW: I used to think that I would never pick up applique ever ever again in my life, but I actually love it. So I’ve been tending to do even more of that, but scrap piecing, my heart belongs to scrap piecing… MC: We are in this big loft in your living area that we’ve taken over and so people cannot really tell that behind this wall and behind this quilt is your studio space where you work. So since we can’t see it, would you describe it for us? VFW: It’s a mess. That sums it up. It’s a couple tables set up in the space, set up for working with all these quilts. I have my tall cutting table and lots of windows all around and lots of fabrics. And one Juki sewing machine. MC: Now you were talking earlier about this building being in the garment district and what it was like when you got here. Would you share some of that? VFW: When we moved into this building the neighboring building that we looked into was still a sweat shop. The history of this area is that is all it was, it was all the sweat shops, as we are part of the garment center. Our building once was also. It just seems kind of funny now that I sit here sewing all day, I joke, that I get so much done because of the spirits of past garment workers. So when people come here and see all the quilts, it’s not me, it’s all the sewing energy of the workers, it’s kind of interesting. MC: Would you tell me if you’ve ever used quilts or quilting to get through a difficult time in your life? VFW: Not specifically…It’s mostly joyous times. Anytime there is a baby in the family there is a quilt being made. Anytime I can share and give something away. I do obsess over a particular quilt I’d like to make. I haven’t made this yet, but I do want to make a quilt for when I die. Is that terrible? MC: Why is that? VFW: Growing up in MN I attended a Native American funeral. Their tradition is to sit with the body for a three days and the body is always wrapped in a quilt. And I thought it would be incredibly personal and special if I made that quilt. I’m happy with a pine box and a quilt. That’s it. I don’t know what that quilt would be. I cannot even decide what to quilt for own my bed, but I think about it all the time. MC: I want to talk a little bit about aesthetics in your work and beyond. What do you think makes a great quilt? VFW: I think all quilts are great. I think that whatever process anyone takes to make something, that’s their process to be respected. We all make for different reasons, and with different processes. There are no ugly quilts. It depends if you are making it for some particular reason that you think you have to strive to do something. If someone doesn’t like what I’ve done. It’s ok. I like that it can just be what it is. Anytime I see a quilt top in an antique store I know someone poured everything they had into it. They worked so hard to make it. And I usually come home with those quilts. I respect the person and their process for making it. MC: What are the works you are drawn to? Are there quilt makers that you admire or are there other types of quilts that you might see in a museum that might pull you in? VFW: I think it’s the ones in the flea markets that I am crazy about. The ones that get passed on out of the family. I love thinking about who that was who sat and put all those pieces together. I find I want to know the story behind the quilt. A quilt needs to be loved. MC: What artists have influenced you? VFW: I am doing a Matisse quilt right now. It’s not the first one I’ve done. So he is the biggest inspiration. Monet, the colors. Kandinsky, the bright colors. And a lot of modern art. I like the parallel a lot between some of the modern quilting now and some of the more traditional modern contemporary painters such as Ellsworth Kelly. Big bold patterns. Amish quilts are modern and contemporary no matter when they were made. Simple. Elegant. MC: How do you start with that? Is it looking at a painting. Are you inspired by that? Is it kind of a cut out? VFW: The cut outs are the easiest thing. It’s just a challenge. I don’t plan, drawing it all out. I just start cutting fabric. Picking up little pieces and just star sewing bits together to resemble whatever it is I’m looking at. They are always free form, whatever happens with them happens. They are what they are. It’s a work in progress and it is fun to do. MC: How do you feel about machine quilting? Do you do your own machine quilting? How do you finish quilts? VFW: Yes I do machine quilt. I struggle a bit with it, But I find it’s building my patience as my skills grow. I don’t have time to hand quilt all my own quilts. I do use long armers. If I have a quilt I really, really love, I have to quilt it myself. It’s not my favorite thing to do, but I’m learning slowly to add new designs each time I quilt a quilt. I just have a regular straight stitch home machine. No long arm. MC: So you’re not one of those dedicated quilters____________? VFW: They are all straight stitch, My Juki’s are fast, simple, and great work horse machines! MC: Why is quilt making important to life? VFW: I like that they (quilts) are going to be around for a lot longer than I am. I like that my daughter is watching me. I know that I am passing it onto her. I enjoy that the quilts will stay in the family. She is 11, which may change later in life! MC: In what ways do you think your quilts reflect your community or your region? VFW: I don’t know. I haven’t thought about that. I don’t know. MC: What do you think is the importance of quilts in American life? VFW: The utilitarian aspect of them, from what they’ve grown from out of necessity, using what they have been to begin with. It’s all true now again. Whether it’s being green, using up what you have and not being wasteful. Everything that quilts started with is as true then as it is now. We must be resourceful not wasteful. MC: Where do you see yourself going as a quilter? Do you have goals, do you take it as it comes? VFW: I take it as it comes. I don’t obsess on making a perfect quilt. I’m not sure I can do that, I’m not sure I want to do that. I prefer to learn from each quilt that I do and move onto the next and see what happens. I have felt recently that my work is sort of changing, or perhaps I’m just growing. But I think it’s just being more open to more possibilities and going back and learning and trying other things that I haven’t done before. Building my tool set of quilter skills. I let it happen and see where it will lead me I am doing a lot more handwork than I ever have done before. I’m curious to see where that goes. MC: Are you teaching others as well? I have started teaching a little bit, yes. I have a teaching website where I show what I do. I show my process, what I do and a lot of people have enjoyed playing along with that and using that also as a way of building something from nothing and using that to start them and that’s been fun to watch other people get enjoyment from that as well. MC: Would you like to be a style maker, a taste maker, a leader in the art of quilting? VFW: I don’t think so, I just want to be a quilter. I just love to do it. I have to “make” being an artist. Whether I’m painting or drawing or making a quilt, or making dinner or learning how to do something else. It’s always about making. I need to do that. It’s all about the process to me. Being a tastemaker or leader in quilting seems less important, I just need to make. If that other stuff comes with what I’m doing, then that tells me I’m in the right place doing what I need to be doing. One of my sites, 15 minutes of play started from that. Being a mom when you have no time for yourself sometimes you only have 15 minutes, just for your sanity as an artist. I needed to do something at least 15 minutes a day for myself. So that is a constant that I keep with me all the time. I do need to make constantly. If I have 15 minutes, I’ll take it. MC: Constitutional imperative. So is that 15 minutes to play, is that what it’s called? VFW: www.15minutesplay.com MC: And that is still active? VFW: Yes, very much so. We have about 100 players on the site. We are constantly challenging each other and giving each other inspiration and supporting each other. Giving each other feedback. Just playing and seeing what happens. You don’t always have to have a plan where you’re going, it’s fine if you have a plan, but often it’s been when people are trying to find a new way, that they tap into their creative process. If you’re looking at something in a different way, you may find new answers to the What if questions… That’s kind of what we’ve been doing. MC: That’s interesting because you are about the making but you are also about making of communities. Are the players, have they become your community? VFW: Definitely. It’s become my community as well as the Modern Guild. It’s all about community. People come together and want to share what they’re doing and get feedback and get praise for all the hard work they’ve put into something. The amount of people that I’ve met through blogs and the amount of friends through the guild, finding like minded people, there is just nothing better than that. Having people around who get what you’re doing and want to do the same thing. You see the same spark in their eye. And you know that they get it. It’s great. MC: So 15 minutes play is not just quilting? VFW: Yes, it is just quilting. Well, quilting and community. Sharing, bonding…and different challenges to work in different ways. MC: Could you share some of those challenges that you think were the most interesting? VFW: Well we just had a solids, strictly solids challenge. Some people had not done that! We used artwork &amp; paintings as inspiration, and they used only solid fabrics and made quilts from the swapped fabric, that was one of the challenges recently. We also challenged people to come up with a tutorial for a quilt block, and focused on specific color challenges as well. MC: It sounds like fun. How much time do they have to complete the challenge? VFW: Usually about a month. MC: What do you think is the biggest challenge that is affecting quilters today? VFW: I don’t know how to answer that. It’s is such a personal thing for everybody. People are having issues with being labeled a certain type of quilter instead of just being inclusive and appreciating craft. I think that’s what I hear the most of all now, especially in the modern quilt world now. Everyone is trying to find their place. It’s all mixed up, it’s awkward. Can’t we all just be quilters? </transcript><transcript_alt></transcript_alt><rights>2017 Quilt Alliance. All Rights Reserved.</rights><fmt>audio</fmt><usage></usage><userestrict>0</userestrict><xmllocation></xmllocation><xmlfilename></xmlfilename><collection_link>http://quiltalliance.net/cms/</collection_link><series_link>http://quiltalliance.net/cms/collections/show/48</series_link></record></root> Interview sponsor Name of interview sponsor Meg Cox Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound **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 the Quilters’ S.O.S. – Save Our Stories interview with Victoria Findlay Wolfe. We are at her loft apartment in New York City. Tell me about the quilt you’ve brought today to talk about. Victoria Findlay Wolfe (VFW): The quilt that I’d like to talk about is the one hanging over here behind us called “Everything but the Kitchen Sink.” I started it about 15 years ago. I was an occasional quilter, and then I became a mother. There was at a point where I was making a lot of quilts and children’s clothes for my daughter Beatrice. I wanted to make her quilts when she was a baby. But I would never make the perfect quilt for her. I ended up making her about 20 quilts. None of the quilts were ever good enough for my daughter, so I cut them all up and accumulated many orphan blocks along the way from doing so. I was looking at quilts but not really knowing much about making a quilt. The only quilts I had in my house were the crazy quilts my grandmother made. And so that’s how this quilt started, I was trying to mimic what my grandmother did. Mimicking what her process was. Because it was the only thing I knew, from watching her quilt as a child. MC: So you brought this because it speaks to how you became involved with quilting? VFW: It was definitely the start of the obsession with quilting. I had started, if you look at the bottom of that quilt, there is a 14″ strip across the bottom, where I was looking at my grandmother’s work and I was trying to duplicate what she did by using the sewing machine instead of by hand. I got so bored and frustrated trying to do it. It wasn’t my way, so I needed to figure out how to do what she did, but in my own way, so I couldn’t I get frustrated. I couldn’t at the time, and so I put it away in a box for about 12 years. In 2009 I pulled it out and that’s when I had accumulated so many more orphan blocks and then just started playing with it, adding them all into one quilt. MC: What do you think that this quilt says about you? If someone came upon this quilt, what do you think it says about you as a quilter? VFW: That’s kind of hard. I hope they see the learning curve and passion. When I look at that quilt, I see everything that I have learned for about 15 years. I learned techniques that I have never done before. There’s probably about a hundred Y seams in that quilt. Difficult seams. That’s the only way to do it, just go for it. Applique is something that I had not done since junior high school. It’s my learning process, in that quilt, trying to do letters, applique, using up antique blocks I’ve collected. Everything I had went into it, along with my everyday life. Maybe it says, I’m open to the life throws at me? I’m a painter by trade previously so I was trying to figure out the color balance and make it all work. It’s been a complete learning experience so it kind of sums up a wide portion of my life including getting married, having a family, moving to New York, it accumulates everything. MC: How do you use this quilt? VFW: It sits on my bed. It’s the one quilt that I am so attached to, I’d garb it from a burning building. It’s not going anywhere, it’s staying here, it wont’ be sold. It gets used and loved. MC: So your interest in quilting was originally sparked by your grandmother? VFW: Yes, definitely, and by the basic needs of growing up on a farm. My father had an upholstery business in Minnesota and I grew up on a farm in MN. My mother was a seamstress for Fingerhut for a while. I don’t know if anyone knows Fingerhut out here. But that’s why my grandma had all theses quilts made out of polyester double-knit. My grandmother was a crazy-quilter. In MN you had about five of these quilts on your bed, because it’s cold and we did not have heat in our house. We heated our house with wood stoves. So we would have about five of these quilts on our bed and they stayed there all night long. The weight of them is unforgettable and comforting. MC: Was she the only family member who quilted? VFW: No, My mother would make quilts periodically, only after a relative got married, but then she was more of a seamstress. When I started sewing, I had one of those Barbie sewing machines that had a glue cartridge that you would put in and it would put glue dots on the fabric. That really worked well (laughter). Then I moved up from there gradually and would steal my father’s scraps and upholstery sample books. I’d sew them together on my mother’s Singer. I remember him teaching me how to do a blind stitch and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world because you couldn’t tell there was a seam on the outside finishing it up. I thought it was pretty cool cause it looked like my Dad’s work then. MC: Did you ever make a quilt for the Barbie? VFW: I’m sure I did but I don’t remember. MC: So your first quilt memory was probably the polyester quilts on the bed? VFW: Yes and they were heavy. MC: So how much time do you spent quilting now? How big a part of your life is it? VFW: All day all night. My husband’s up in Canada right now, so I would stay up all night if I could. No, really, I sew all day. All day long. I sew when my daughter goes to school, I sew, when she comes home, I quilt when she goes to bed. It’s an obsession, I know and accept that. it is all related to my need to create. MC: Would you talk a little bit about the modern quilt movement and how you seemed to be involved with that? VFW: That’s kind of interesting. I was a little bit clueless to it. It had been around for about six months. Hadn’t heard anything about it. And a friend of mine Amy Drucker, said how come we don’t have this in New York. We need a guild. Let’s do this. Want to do this? Okay and 20 minutes later our site was up and within an hour we had like 20 members. That was 1-1/2 years ago. So within 20 minutes we got all these people on the site and it has grown very rapidly. We have been meeting here in the apt. We have over 150 members on line. We are working on a new web site, The challenge has not been getting more people, new people come each meeting, and community is a big part of it. MC: How do you define, for you, what is it about? VFW: For me personally it’s keeping all the rules open. I consider myself a very traditional quilter. I’ve done it since I was very young. I know patchwork and how to sew by hand but at the same time, as an artist, I want to try different things and I think maybe the modern movement is incorporating that more for everybody, that it’s okay to do your own thing. I think it is all-inclusive, it includes the art quilter, the beginner quilter, the traditional quilter who wants to try something new. The fabric designers are a big part of it, the more color I can get, the happier I am. MC: Can you talk a little bit about your creative process. Were you conscious of that for a long time? VFW: Yeah. We had a talk the other day about how or about why the process was more important to you or the finished object was more important. To me as an artist it is definitely the process. It’s all about starting the quilt, and discovering where it’s going. I rarely have a plan when I start something. I start with one little piece and I let it grow organically. I don’t ever now where I’m going with it, the adventure of it is what excited me. It’s like when I’m working on a painting I’ll start small in the center, and then it gets big as I fill in the canvas… MC: So with a quilt do you start with the color, do you start with the pattern. What is your impulse? VFW: It could be anything. Sometimes it’s a memory of somebody, a memory of my grandmother. This quilt, “Grandmother’s Rocking Chair”, This quilt actually started out as a traditional style quilt with squares, and the orange blocks. I couldn’t make it just be that traditional quilt, I had to see what would happen if I… then played out all the options that made me think of my grandmother. It was just too normal, so I started playing and the next thing I knew I had something completely different. About my grandmother, from watching her sew, sitting in her rocking chair. That would be the inspiration. Or like I said, looking at my grandmother’s quilt for inspiration, a color combination or Anytime I’d say I would never do a purple and gold quilt, those are my high school colors, I hated those colors, as soon as I said that, I made five quilts with those colors. So that is a great inspiration or a starting off point to a great challenge. MC: So you challenge yourself? VFW: Always challenge. I love a challenge. That’s one of the things I love to do most. Sometimes if I’m doing a commissioned quilt, I ask people to give me a word and that will send me off on a tangent. MC: That’s a great segue. How did you get involved in the commission business and do you have your own personal style or how does it work? VFW: It’s been mostly word of mouth. A lot of my painting commissions have spilled over into quilts because they want to know what I am doing with quilts. They are confused at first until they see them and then they want one. I don’t always get a lot of information. I had one person wanted a red quilt. That was the inspiration. So I cleaned all my stash of every red I had. When I do a commission, there’s no deposit required. If after I make the quilt, if they want to purchase it after it’s made, great! It’s okay with me! but I’m just as happy to keep it if they don’t. It’s a win/win either way. MC: And I know as well that you started a community project for quilts. You really are living and breathing quilting. Could you talk a little bit about that? How that got started and where that is now? VFW: That was kind of funny. The blog world is a very interesting place. Those of us who quilt have more quilts than we need. I had some extra quilts lying here and I had a friend who worked with a program called Basics, in the Bronx, who worked with getting homeless families back into transitional housing here in the city. I asked him one day: Do you need any quilts? Thinking I could give him two or three that I had lying around. And he turned around and said: Do you have 700? That was not what I expected him to say, not in my wildest dreams. . So I said, hmmm, I don’t know, let me see what I can do. So I designed a house block and asked people on my blog to make them and send them to me and I would make a couple quilts for them. well a couple blocks turned into, 500 quilt blocks and that turned into 60 quilts, which we then auctioned off and raised over $30,000 for them. MC: You auctioned them of for the organization? VFW: Yes, basically by auctioning off the quilts for them at an organization fundraiser. Then, that had been so successful, that we turned it into an ongoing quilt drive. And so now, we opened it up where you could send in completed quilts. We’ve received over 350 quilts. And we’ve had event days where we go up to the Bronx to each of the different housing units and we hand the quilts to the families in the program. It’s an extremely emotional and fabulous day. We have another round of that coming up, to collect more quilts. And it turns into something bigger than I had set out to do. One needs to always think bigger. MC: Would you talk about, what is the most pleasing aspect of quilting to you? VFW: It’s the process and giving back. It’s just so fun watching all these little pieces come together. I can’t throw anything away. So I save all my little pieces and they grow from nothing into something. That’s what I love. It’s not even so much the finished product. I think by the time I put it on my lap and fix the binding I’m done and I’m onto the next project. From the beginning to the end. And giving them away is even better, good for the soul. MC: Have advances in technology affected your work? What about the tools that you use? VFW: Not much other than my rotary cutter and my scissors. I’ve dabbled a bit on Spoonflower, working with fabric design and that’s always interesting. I’m happy to participate and try a new tool. I feel kind of traditional with my quilts so I have to push myself further into other areas yet. Just when I say I will never do something, I need that boost to try something new, new technology can help me do that. MC: What about fabrics? Where are you looking for fabric? VFW: Anywhere. Clothes. Fabric shops. All the stores. All my friends. MC: What are you favorite techniques? VFW: I used to think that I would never pick up applique ever ever again in my life, but I actually love it. So I’ve been tending to do even more of that, but scrap piecing, my heart belongs to scrap piecing… MC: We are in this big loft in your living area that we’ve taken over and so people cannot really tell that behind this wall and behind this quilt is your studio space where you work. So since we can’t see it, would you describe it for us? VFW: It’s a mess. That sums it up. It’s a couple tables set up in the space, set up for working with all these quilts. I have my tall cutting table and lots of windows all around and lots of fabrics. And one Juki sewing machine. MC: Now you were talking earlier about this building being in the garment district and what it was like when you got here. Would you share some of that? VFW: When we moved into this building the neighboring building that we looked into was still a sweat shop. The history of this area is that is all it was, it was all the sweat shops, as we are part of the garment center. Our building once was also. It just seems kind of funny now that I sit here sewing all day, I joke, that I get so much done because of the spirits of past garment workers. So when people come here and see all the quilts, it’s not me, it’s all the sewing energy of the workers, it’s kind of interesting. MC: Would you tell me if you’ve ever used quilts or quilting to get through a difficult time in your life? VFW: Not specifically…It’s mostly joyous times. Anytime there is a baby in the family there is a quilt being made. Anytime I can share and give something away. I do obsess over a particular quilt I’d like to make. I haven’t made this yet, but I do want to make a quilt for when I die. Is that terrible? MC: Why is that? VFW: Growing up in MN I attended a Native American funeral. Their tradition is to sit with the body for a three days and the body is always wrapped in a quilt. And I thought it would be incredibly personal and special if I made that quilt. I’m happy with a pine box and a quilt. That’s it. I don’t know what that quilt would be. I cannot even decide what to quilt for own my bed, but I think about it all the time. MC: I want to talk a little bit about aesthetics in your work and beyond. What do you think makes a great quilt? VFW: I think all quilts are great. I think that whatever process anyone takes to make something, that’s their process to be respected. We all make for different reasons, and with different processes. There are no ugly quilts. It depends if you are making it for some particular reason that you think you have to strive to do something. If someone doesn’t like what I’ve done. It’s ok. I like that it can just be what it is. Anytime I see a quilt top in an antique store I know someone poured everything they had into it. They worked so hard to make it. And I usually come home with those quilts. I respect the person and their process for making it. MC: What are the works you are drawn to? Are there quilt makers that you admire or are there other types of quilts that you might see in a museum that might pull you in? VFW: I think it’s the ones in the flea markets that I am crazy about. The ones that get passed on out of the family. I love thinking about who that was who sat and put all those pieces together. I find I want to know the story behind the quilt. A quilt needs to be loved. MC: What artists have influenced you? VFW: I am doing a Matisse quilt right now. It’s not the first one I’ve done. So he is the biggest inspiration. Monet, the colors. Kandinsky, the bright colors. And a lot of modern art. I like the parallel a lot between some of the modern quilting now and some of the more traditional modern contemporary painters such as Ellsworth Kelly. Big bold patterns. Amish quilts are modern and contemporary no matter when they were made. Simple. Elegant. MC: How do you start with that? Is it looking at a painting. Are you inspired by that? Is it kind of a cut out? VFW: The cut outs are the easiest thing. It’s just a challenge. I don’t plan, drawing it all out. I just start cutting fabric. Picking up little pieces and just star sewing bits together to resemble whatever it is I’m looking at. They are always free form, whatever happens with them happens. They are what they are. It’s a work in progress and it is fun to do. MC: How do you feel about machine quilting? Do you do your own machine quilting? How do you finish quilts? VFW: Yes I do machine quilt. I struggle a bit with it, But I find it’s building my patience as my skills grow. I don’t have time to hand quilt all my own quilts. I do use long armers. If I have a quilt I really, really love, I have to quilt it myself. It’s not my favorite thing to do, but I’m learning slowly to add new designs each time I quilt a quilt. I just have a regular straight stitch home machine. No long arm. MC: So you’re not one of those dedicated quilters____________? VFW: They are all straight stitch, My Juki’s are fast, simple, and great work horse machines! MC: Why is quilt making important to life? VFW: I like that they (quilts) are going to be around for a lot longer than I am. I like that my daughter is watching me. I know that I am passing it onto her. I enjoy that the quilts will stay in the family. She is 11, which may change later in life! MC: In what ways do you think your quilts reflect your community or your region? VFW: I don’t know. I haven’t thought about that. I don’t know. MC: What do you think is the importance of quilts in American life? VFW: The utilitarian aspect of them, from what they’ve grown from out of necessity, using what they have been to begin with. It’s all true now again. Whether it’s being green, using up what you have and not being wasteful. Everything that quilts started with is as true then as it is now. We must be resourceful not wasteful. MC: Where do you see yourself going as a quilter? Do you have goals, do you take it as it comes? VFW: I take it as it comes. I don’t obsess on making a perfect quilt. I’m not sure I can do that, I’m not sure I want to do that. I prefer to learn from each quilt that I do and move onto the next and see what happens. I have felt recently that my work is sort of changing, or perhaps I’m just growing. But I think it’s just being more open to more possibilities and going back and learning and trying other things that I haven’t done before. Building my tool set of quilter skills. I let it happen and see where it will lead me I am doing a lot more handwork than I ever have done before. I’m curious to see where that goes. MC: Are you teaching others as well? I have started teaching a little bit, yes. I have a teaching website where I show what I do. I show my process, what I do and a lot of people have enjoyed playing along with that and using that also as a way of building something from nothing and using that to start them and that’s been fun to watch other people get enjoyment from that as well. MC: Would you like to be a style maker, a taste maker, a leader in the art of quilting? VFW: I don’t think so, I just want to be a quilter. I just love to do it. I have to “make” being an artist. Whether I’m painting or drawing or making a quilt, or making dinner or learning how to do something else. It’s always about making. I need to do that. It’s all about the process to me. Being a tastemaker or leader in quilting seems less important, I just need to make. If that other stuff comes with what I’m doing, then that tells me I’m in the right place doing what I need to be doing. One of my sites, 15 minutes of play started from that. Being a mom when you have no time for yourself sometimes you only have 15 minutes, just for your sanity as an artist. I needed to do something at least 15 minutes a day for myself. So that is a constant that I keep with me all the time. I do need to make constantly. If I have 15 minutes, I’ll take it. MC: Constitutional imperative. So is that 15 minutes to play, is that what it’s called? VFW: www.15minutesplay.com MC: And that is still active? VFW: Yes, very much so. We have about 100 players on the site. We are constantly challenging each other and giving each other inspiration and supporting each other. Giving each other feedback. Just playing and seeing what happens. You don’t always have to have a plan where you’re going, it’s fine if you have a plan, but often it’s been when people are trying to find a new way, that they tap into their creative process. If you’re looking at something in a different way, you may find new answers to the What if questions… That’s kind of what we’ve been doing. MC: That’s interesting because you are about the making but you are also about making of communities. Are the players, have they become your community? VFW: Definitely. It’s become my community as well as the Modern Guild. It’s all about community. People come together and want to share what they’re doing and get feedback and get praise for all the hard work they’ve put into something. The amount of people that I’ve met through blogs and the amount of friends through the guild, finding like minded people, there is just nothing better than that. Having people around who get what you’re doing and want to do the same thing. You see the same spark in their eye. And you know that they get it. It’s great. MC: So 15 minutes play is not just quilting? VFW: Yes, it is just quilting. Well, quilting and community. Sharing, bonding…and different challenges to work in different ways. MC: Could you share some of those challenges that you think were the most interesting? VFW: Well we just had a solids, strictly solids challenge. Some people had not done that! We used artwork & paintings as inspiration, and they used only solid fabrics and made quilts from the swapped fabric, that was one of the challenges recently. We also challenged people to come up with a tutorial for a quilt block, and focused on specific color challenges as well. MC: It sounds like fun. How much time do they have to complete the challenge? VFW: Usually about a month. MC: What do you think is the biggest challenge that is affecting quilters today? VFW: I don’t know how to answer that. It’s is such a personal thing for everybody. People are having issues with being labeled a certain type of quilter instead of just being inclusive and appreciating craft. I think that’s what I hear the most of all now, especially in the modern quilt world now. Everyone is trying to find their place. It’s all mixed up, it’s awkward. Can’t we all just be quilters? MC: Well, I would like to thank Victoria for letting us conduct this interview today. We are concluding this interview at 8:25 pm. 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/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context NY10018-001 Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Title A name given to the resource Victoria Findlay Wolfe Description An account of the resource In this interview with quiltmaker and philanthropist, Victoria Findlay Wolfe and interviewer Meg Cox discuss how her upbringing in Minnesota attracted her to quilts, as well as how she uses quilts to connect with the community. Wolfe runs an online collaborative quilting website called Fifteen Minutes of Play, and discusses the use of quilting as a charitable resource. Wolfe also explains her love of the process of quilting, and how the her community projects and the process of quiltmaking provide her with fulfillment. The interview was recorded live at a meeting of the NYC Metro Modern Quilters Guild at Wolfe's home in Manhattan. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio 15 minutes of play charity Hand applique hand quilting improvisation Manhattan Modern Quilt Guild New York quilt donations