Amy Smith

Amy Smith

UDEL-001

Amy Smith

Julie Henderson

8/14/02

Moda Fabrics

Newark, Delaware

Julie Henderson

Julie Henderson (JH): Hi, this is Julie Henderson. I'm interviewing Amy Tetlow Smith today. It's August 14th, 2002. It's 10:10. We're in Newark, Delaware and this is for the Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories project for the Alliance for the American Quilt. [Quilts.] Hello.

Amy Tetlow Smith (ATS): Hi.

JH: So, to start off with, why don't we start with the quilt that you brought out to show me. If you just want to talk about it--if there's a title or anything.

ATS: Okay. It doesn't have a title. This is an unfinished wall hanging at this point that'll go over the fireplace at Christmas time. It's hand appliqué. This is the second hand appliqué piece that I have done. I've kind of found my preferred quilting method. I took a hand appliqué quilt class a couple of years ago and I decided that I really liked it; I like the flexibility of the method. I got this pattern to do my first piece after my class and decided to do it as a Christmas quilt. It is a June Colburn pattern of--I guess it's originally a Japanese ribbon pattern. One thing that's special about this is that in her pattern she doesn't define what goes in the center of the ribbons. She has various suggestions. I reached the point of making that decision on the pattern last September. And that's when I decided I wanted to do the dove, because of all the things that were happening at that time. I thought that the dove would be the most appropriate sort of thing and it still went with the Christmas theme as well. So it's all hand stitched, silk thread. That's one of the things my teacher taught me. It will be hand quilted. It's taking a while because then of course I had to take a hand quilting class to learn how to do that because I until this point was always a machine person. Once I started doing the hand appliqué, I realized there was no way in the world, after putting all this effort, handwork, into a nice appliqué piece that I was going to machine quilt it, so it will end up being hand quilted. As soon as I finish the other quilt that I have in the other room for my friend.

JH: Great. Now, hand appliqué, or appliqué in general that's when you take--I'm not sure if this is right – you take this colored cloth here, like this blue ribbon, and you put it right on top of the other--this off-white background fabric.

ATS: On top of the background fabric and sew it down. There are a number of different methods for doing this. I did this with freezer paper. So, you cut the pattern out of the freezer paper and iron it on to the back of these colored fabrics. That gives a little bit of stiffness to it, and it helps you keep from stretching the fabric and things like that as you sew it on. Then you sew the piece in place with the freezer paper underneath – you baste it, the edges under and then you pin it on to the fabric, the background fabric, and then you can sew it. Once you're done sewing it you take the basting threads out and then you can pull the freezer paper out from underneath. Because what you will see with most of these is--not all of them, but most of them have a piece that is going to go--they're going to go under something, mainly under the dove. So, you'll always have an opening there at the end--

JH: Oh!

ATS: --that you can slide the pattern out. For the ones that you don't have an opening--this ribbon end and this ribbon end here [pointing at two areas of the quilt.] you actually can cut a little hole in the back.

JH: Oh!

ATS: But that's so hard! [laughter. JH says something inaudible.] Pull it out through there and it turns out that it sounds worse than it really is. Actually, cut a hole in the back, or something else I've done with another piece I'm working on now is when I get near the end, when I just have maybe an inch or so left, I'll go ahead take out the basting and pull out the freezer paper at that point.

JH: Is that the hard part--to stitch it on without seeing the stitches?

ATS: That's one of the neat things about the silk thread that Sandy Bryant, who taught my appliqué class, taught us. With the silk thread, it's so fine it kind of sinks into the threads of the fabric. So, it hides the stitches. That's the other nice thing about that is that I don't have to have blue thread, and red thread, gold thread, green thread--you don't have to match. You have a light color and a dark color. So here I actually did use a light color silk thread and here I used a dark one. But I didn't have to use cotton thread--you can see the stitches much more easily and then you have to match your threads.

JH: Yes, I just can't see it at all, any of the stitches. And silk is very strong?

ATS: It's strong and it's very fine. Actually, there's a couple little tricks to working with it because it's so fine it'll--you have to tie it to the needle to keep it from sliding out. It slips right through.

JH: It's amazing.

ATS: But it works really well, especially when you're first starting out and your stitches aren't perfect.

JH: You have a picture here of the original [pattern.] and what she [June Colburn.] put in the center and the fabrics June Colburn used.

ATS: That one I bought--if I had seen that one, I never would have ordered this pattern. You can't even see the ribbons particularly well in that one. [spoken as she goes into the next room to get another picture.]

JH: Not really.

ATS But here's the picture from the catalog. This is the one that caught my eye. [brings over a picture showing a different treatment of the pattern.]

JH: Oh, yes.

ATS: You can see it so much more clearly in this one.

JH: It's so interesting to see--usually people mention using a pattern from a book, but we don't usually get to see the original pattern. It's great to see the difference in the fabrics and the way you've put the dove in the center instead of--what looks like holly berries.

ATS: She had a couple of suggestions. She had things like flowers in the middle and a few other things but in the pattern, she pretty much said, you know, pick what's going to work.

JH: I really like this background fabric. It looks--

ATS: It's not pure white or pure off-white--

JH: Yeah!

ATS: --it has a little pattern to it. I like that. I don't like using purely solid colors. I like something with a little--even the red here has some texture to it. Everything has a little bit of texture to it. I think it looks nicer. I'm not exactly what there is about that.

JH: I think it adds a lot of depth. It almost looks like this background fabric has been dyed with tea.

ATS: It does have that look, but it wasn't. This is a line of fabric that I like for backgrounds very much.

JH: It's very nice.

ATS: I'm going to be starting a piece in the fall that has--it's not this exact one but it's from this line that I'd say it gives a little depth or a little texture to what you're looking at.

JH: Yeah, it's terrific. So now this was after your first hand appliqué.

ATS: So, I like the hand appliqué class, I realized, the flexibility of it even though you have the pattern, you change things around, that sort of thing. I decided I really wanted to try to do some more. The other thing about the hand appliqué--I mean there's a lot of people who do the big album quilts. I can't conceive of doing something that big, just because of the amount of time and especially since I have mentally decided that everything has to be hand quilted if it's hand appliquéd. Doing a bed-sized quilt by hand appliqué--I know a lot of people that do them, but that's too much for me to work with.

JH: How long do you think it took you to do this one here?

ATS: It's really hard to judge, because I was working on this--I was probably working on this over a period of a year and a half, perhaps even longer than that, perhaps closer to two years. So, you kind of go in fits and starts with that. I was laughing for a while with the women in the appliqué group that I'm part of that if people would quit having babies, I would get it done a lot faster. Because one of the things I do when my friends have babies is I make a quilt for them. I make a baby quilt. In 2001, I had to stop three times to make baby quilts. [laughter.] Then this spring, well, the only thing that my friend Petra's quilt has held up is the hand quilting of this because I would have started hand quilting this sooner if I weren't working on her quilt.

JH: Sure.

ATS: But she's worth it.

JH: So, when did you start quilting in general, would you say?

ATS The first quilt I made was in high school, near the end of high school. I kind of got oddly motivated. My mother taught home ec, she taught us to sew when we were young. We had always sewn clothing. But when I was in high school, I saw a couple quilts. Particularly Fourth of July one year, my high school sweetheart and I sitting on a quilt that his grandmother had made. It was a nine patch. And that kind of got me motivated to try making a quilt. My first one I did was a nine patch. That's in a box in the basement, in terrible condition. It got worn very heavily. But what I did with that one was all of the fabric I used in the patches there were things, were scraps from the sewing in our house and actually a couple of pieces from my friend next door. I probably can't do it anymore but for many years I could go through and identify--this was the dress my mom made me; this was the skirt that my sister made--I could identify where all the fabric was from. That was really neat, I liked that idea. That was the last time I did a nine patch, or something that was completely from scrap like that. I bought the fabric for the sashing and the backing, but all the blocks were from home, from leftover pieces.

JH: That's great. I think a lot of people wish they had done things like that.

ATS: It's kind of fun. You end up having a little bit more trouble--you know, everything isn't nicely coordinated. Like the green and gold, and the gold and the red's turning and picking up the red here from there [pointing to different ribbons on the quilt.] When you buy the fabrics for a quilt you can coordinate everything; make sure that the fabric picks up this in this other fabric. You don't get that when you make a scrappy quilt. But it has a different kind of meaning.

JH: Oh, yeah, you get all the memories instead, which is nice.

ATS: Which was especially nice then to take that to college to have over me.

JH: So, it sounds like a lot of people in your family sewed.

ATS: My mom makes quilts; in fact, she makes some really beautiful pieces. I have a quilt she made on my bed, and she made a great quilt for my son. The nice thing was that she had been working on the quilt that I now have on my bed when she started to work on the one for my son and that kind of put that other quilt aside. Because that wasn't originally for me. But by the time she was done making the quilt for my son, she had changed her plans for the other quilt. 'Do you want this?' I said, 'Sure.' It's this great Log Cabin quilt. So, I actually got a really nice quilt out of that, as well as my son got a terrific quilt. But she does all different kinds of quilting, and jackets and that type of thing. Some really, really neat pieces, all different kinds of techniques.

JH: Does quilting go further back in your family?

ATS: It does. My mother now has quilts that were made by her grandmother. Actually, she has one that came from her grandmother that she originally thought had been one of her aunt's, but it turns out she's decided that now it was actually her grandmother's quilt. And I have one that she handed down to me then that was made by her grandmother for another aunt. And she has parts of the quilt, because it was so worn out, the parts that were left of the quilt that her grandmother made for her mother, or for her parents. So, it seemed from what we can deduce that my mother's grandmother made quilts for each of her children. We've managed to get our hands on a couple of them.

JH: Wow, that's great.

ATS: So those were done in the--one for herself was probably done before 1900 and the ones for her children over the 1910's/1920's, in that period.

JH: That's great. So, quilting just kind of was naturally part of--does it seem like that?

ATS: I don't know, because when I was young, nobody quilted in our house. My mother only started quilting, in fact after I did, I think. I don't remember her doing anything quilted when I was in the house. So, I don't know if it was when I was in college that she started, or exactly when. It's funny, there is definitely this gap, but things have come back around now I guess and we both quilt. I don't think my sister does. She used to sew here and there but I don't think she sews anymore.

JH: So how did you take up quilting?

ATS: Just seeing a couple quilts in high school and kind of realizing this is a doable thing. I tried it; I made one for myself and one for my sister and one for my parents. I guess I made another one for us later on. It was a nice thing to be able to do. There's only so many clothes you can sew for yourself. Especially when I had friends who started having babies and that was always a really special present to be able to give them. It's a fun thing to do and it allows me to sew but it also kind of settles something in me in the back. I guess to a certain degree, the geometry of it. Putting together pieces and now for me it's an art as well as a craft, now that I've started doing appliqué.

JH: Do you feel like you're better able to express your ideas through the appliqué rather than piecing together--

ATS: Yes. The only piecing, and I've done--like I said, this is only my second appliqué piece. Everything else has been pieced. Those have all been geometric. It's very regular. For me, there wasn't that much creativity in that. It was much more systematic. So, this for me soothes the creativity part. I guess in a sense it kind of fills that need better than pieced quilts. I like piecing quilts, it is kind of fun, but I like the intricacy that I can do with the appliqué better.

JH: When you started quilting, you just picked it up yourself; you're pretty much self-taught? [AS: Mmm.] Then did you go on to take classes?

ATS: I didn't start taking classes until the last three or four years, I started taking classes out of the quilt shop The Quilters Hive. The first couple of classes I took were just piecing techniques and then, like I said, I finally took the hand appliqué class. I've always been kind of hesitant about handwork because it takes so much more time and that kind of thing. I guess maybe you just reach an age where you realize you've got that time and taking time is ok. And like I said, that's when I really felt like I found a method that fulfills me and what I like.

JH: All the quilts that you made before this--were they mostly given as gifts, or do you use them otherwise?

ATS: Almost all of them have been given as gifts. I have only, of the bed sized quilts I guess I've made one, two, three, four, five--five and only two of them do I still have. One was the original one and one was a summer quilt that we use as our picnic blanket now because once it was together, I really didn't like the colors. I think part of it was that one of the--I used a pure solid for something that ended up really standing out. So, it's really good for a beach blanket or a picnic blanket or any of those kinds of things. But the rest, and at this point I've made one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight – I guess I've made eight baby blankets now, or eight baby quilts. Then the, I guess it's not really a lap quilt, it's something that you could get under on the sofa--it's not a full bed sized quilt--for Petra. And I have another one pieced that's about the same size as that one. They're all to be given away. The pieces that I've been keeping lately have been small pieces for wall hangings. Over the fireplace I've decided that I'm going to do just a series of quilts so that I can change them during different seasons.

JH: Oh, that's nice.

ATS: At this point I only have two, one of which my mother made. I think she got tired of seeing the other one up all the time. But with the exception of the small quilt, these pieces I'm making for the walls. Actually, my first hand appliqué piece I realized I had a spot for it, so I hand quilted it so I could practice at that too. That's hanging up upstairs.

JH: Oh, neat.

ATS: Mostly it's just pieces to give away.

JH: Do you belong to any other group? Do you belong to a quilting group at all?

ATS: I guess sort of loosely I do. There's an Appliqué Society group that meets out at The Quilters Hive one night a month and we just basically sit and stitch for the evening and show off what we've done. You can always get help if you're stuck on how to do something and that's always nice. That's a lot of fun; that's a lot of fun sitting and talking with people who are doing the same sorts of things. But that's the only one.

JH: Do you find that's helpful to go to that while you're- -

ATS: It is. It is for getting pointers as well as just for the social aspects of it. It's a lot of fun; there are some very interesting people doing all kinds of things. Some things--different sorts of things gives you an opportunity to see what other people are doing. Besides just what you're doing and I know mom is doing and that kind of thing. So there's a lot of variety that way.

JH: Do you ever sell any of your quilts?

ATS: No. Only ever given them away. I guess I probably could sometime. Emotionally I probably could if it was one that I wasn't really attached to. Of course it would be very flattering to have someone actually want to pay money for something that you made. But almost all the time it's been something for me to do.

JH: So now, the old quilts in your family, possibly that your great-grandmother made--how are you preserving those? Are you?

ATS: The oldest one, sometime in the not to distant future, is actually going to be given to the Schwenkfelder Heritage Center because my family are Schwenkfelders and this is a very nice example of that particular period of quilt. The one that I have that was made for my great-aunt I have used it on my bed when I was younger; but now it's mostly stored. We have a dog that gets up on beds, so only when you're not looking. [laughter.] So you only know he's been there from the nose prints on the window that you can only get to from there. So I don't feel like I can leave it on the bed anymore.

JH: Sure.

ATS: Because I think it's too fragile for that. It's machine pieced and hand quilted. But the fabrics are so old now that I don't want the dog walking around on it.

JH: Sure. The family center was – how do you say it – Schwenk - -it's a - - ?

ATS: Schwenkfelder? It was, well, it is a religious sect that left Silesia [coal mining area mostly in what is now Poland.] in the 1700's and came through Philadelphia to southeastern Pennsylvania and I guess there's probably still five Schwenkfelder churches. But they stayed in this area as farmers and storekeepers and things like that.

JH: Interesting. I'll have to remember afterward to get the spelling from you.

ATS You bet. [laughter.] Actually the quilt that I'm going to start in the fall, it's going to be done as a block of the month--is a fraktur pattern taken from, perhaps not a Schwenkfelder pattern, but a Pennsylvania German style. I'm trying to think of the age of some of that stuff --17 and 1800s. That is an appliqué piece. It will be big. I guess I could ultimately put it together into just about a bed-sized quilt, probably about the size as my great aunt's quilt. But then again, we'll see how long it takes. [laughter.]

JH: That's neat. Now you studied geography. I had talked to you before about working in quilt documentation and how that works with geography. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

ATS: I haven't really done much except reading some of the state heritage books that the Morris Library [at the University of Delaware.] has a pretty good collection of. What I'm interested in is looking at some of the origins of some of the patterns that were done in America in the 17- and early 1800's. And maybe look at some of the diffusion patterns. So far in some of the heritage books I've looked at, particularly in West Virginia, for some of the older patterns they've mentioned a particular pattern having only ever shown up along the old Pennsylvania Pike or certain types of fabrics showing up typical of a certain region because there was a mill that used a particular dyeing process so indigo blue was very typical of this particular mill in West Virginia. So if you see that in a quilt that gives you a geographic connection for that. So that's still very, very early but I'm reading in that area.

JH: I think that's an interesting direction. That's cool.

ATS: The people I've talked to so far like the state heritage projects there have been a number of studies and cataloging that have been done of quilts from Baltimore of a certain period and Quaker Friends quilts from certain periods, but there hasn't been a lot of putting all of those pieces together to look for geographic diffusion or patterns between those so that's kind of where I'm going.

[JH whispers and picks up tape recorder for a second.]

JH: Okay, I was worried about the volume for a second. [laughter.] You mentioned a quilt that was your high school boyfriend's or sweetheart you went on--you remembered that it was a nine patch. Is that one of your earliest quilt memories?

ATS: I think it probably is. Seeing a finished hand done quilt. I remember his grandmother and I never saw her other - any other quilt tops. I mean, this was the one that was thrown in the back of the car to sit on outside. Obviously it wasn't one that was still--it wasn't the 'for nice' quilt. I remember David saying that she had a whole stack of quilt tops that still weren't quilted at that point. She was very old and I'm sure she never finished them. I guess that was one of the very first memories I had of that. Clearly it was something that was done in their family. Although his mother sewed, I never saw her working on a quilt. But his grandmother clearly did. I guess she probably, by the time I knew her, couldn't do that sort of detailed work anymore.

JH: And where was that?

ATS: That was in New Jersey, in Moorestown, New Jersey. And they had lived in that area for a very, very long time. Originally on a farm--David hadn't lived on a farm but his mother, when she was a child, they had had a farm.

JH: Cool. [pause for ten seconds.] Would you ever consider teaching quilting?

ATS: I would if I felt like I was good enough at a particular technique, because I think that's--even at our appliqué meetings, I think that's something nice, being able to share ways of solving problems with other people. So I like that aspect of it: sharing techniques, and if I can't make this work, help me make this work. I think that that kind of community aspect of quilting is important.

JH: What do you think makes a great quilt great?

ATS: I knew that was coming. [laughter.] I think if it makes somebody happy. So thinking of the baby quilts and things like that. They may not be technical masterpieces; I do all machine work on them because the whole goal is that they need to be thrown in the washing machine three times a week or however often something happens--so from I think a lot of people's point of view they wouldn't necessarily think that those were great, but I think that if they really make someone happy you know, the very first one I made--I guess it must have been last year--the mother was trying to convince the little girl that she's getting a little old to still have this one around. The little girl said, 'No I'm not.' So that's clearly very important to her to still have that even though, well, she's twelve now. I think that that one--that was the very first baby quilt I made and oh, it was not a technical masterpiece, shall we say but it clearly is important to her. She took it everywhere with her and I think that kind of thing makes it great.

JH: Definitely.

ATS: So I'll look and there's some really beautiful art quilts and if it makes people happy when they see them and they like them, then I think that makes it great. So it's more the emotional response than the technical aspects.

JH: When you think of quilts and how they've been involved in women's lives for so many years, what are some thoughts you have about that?

ATS: They're an interesting combination of work that had to be done--the hired man had to have something to sleep under and at the same time I think a creative and an emotional outlet that did allow for creativity in a world, particularly in earlier America. I'm thinking of really young America in times where women's lives were very difficult. I don't think there were many opportunities for real creativity. I think they provided an opportunity for that. Also, an opportunity for social contact, when a community would get together to make a wedding quilt for someone or that type of thing, it was an accepted opportunity for social interaction; almost a legitimate excuse for all the women to get together and socialize. Where they didn't have that, we need to do the sewing on this or that kind of thing, I think it would have been harder for the women to justify putting aside the other work they were doing to get together and create something together.

JH: Yeah, I bet.

ATS: So I think probably emotionally it was very important.

JH: That's cool. You mentioned that you thought of the dove during last September. I assume of course that you're referring to September 11th --

ATS: September 11th, yes.

JH: --and everything after that. A question that we always ask people is how do you think quilts are important in American life and so that makes me think of this part of your quilt here. [the dove.]

ATS: I know a lot of people have been making quilts--have been memorializing September 11th with a lot of American flags, and red white and blue and God Bless America and things like that; I guess I wanted to kind of think of the larger picture of a desire for peace and what we need to do in this country and in the world to make people not feel alienated and not have a need to do the kinds of things that were done on September 11th. I had a very hard time coming up with a dove, or a bird that I figured I could make in to a dove. I finally kind of put together three or four different things and made something about the right size. And the hands--these are theoretically supposed to be hands underneath, somebody holding [the dove].

JH: That's nice, yeah.

ATS: I think I'm--I'll have to see how I end up quilting in here to see if I can quilt any feathers into that or at least make it a little bit of detail in the tail. I'm not sure, depending on how I feel about it when it's done, I might embroider an olive branch or something like that in the beak.

JH: That's really nice. I love those little birds, there's one in the dove's wing who is peeking out. [there are small birds in the pattern of one of the fabrics used.]

ATS: And I didn't do any fussy cutting with that. You can see this guy's head is cut off. [pointing to a bird in the fabric.] These birds are more or less upside down. So that's really just kind of by chance. You do get a good view of a couple of fat red birds over there. Red birds are always just great Christmas birds.

JH: That's great. [pause for ten seconds.] Well, we're getting kind of close to the end. Just in the meantime is there anything that hasn't come up yet that is something you've been thinking?

ATS: I don't know.

JH: What sort of--we were talking about how hand appliqué is easier for you to express yourself with. Is there anything that comes to mind, any creative issues or thoughts that are new that have come up since you started to do that? Like stuff you hadn't really even said, oh, I can do this, before.

ATS: Basically being able to do something like the dove and the hands. If I weren't hand appliquéing, that would not have been an option to have been able to come up with that. Everything has to be a lot more--obviously this is generalized but if I were piecing something, there's a couple of crab pillows in the living room, things have to be very stylized when you're piecing something. I think that the detail, small details, I can do better in appliqué and that lets you be a little bit more explicit about what you're doing. The other thing I found out is what a very difficult time I have picking fabrics. I always need a lot of help with that. Hopefully that's something that I will get better at in the future.

JH: I don't know. I think this, in particular this green ribbon in the center, is amazing in the way you found – one has the gold flecks and the other doesn't so it really looks like a ribbon turning.

ATS: Well, this is the clever solution of Sandy Bryant, who helped me pick out the fabrics for this. There are some fabrics where that's actually the fabric flipped over.

JH: Oh!

ATS: This is the backside of that fabric; this is the backside of that one. Looking here, I had done this gold to pick up that gold. [AS and JH speak at the same time.] I'm not sure that one looks quite as good.

JH: I think that works, that works well too.

ATS: But the idea that there are some fabrics that you can turn over and use the backside of as well. That worked really well with, like you said, turning the bottom of the ribbon to make it look like a ribbon that had turned worked very, very well for that. Of course, these colors are perfectly coordinated that way; the only thing that's missing is the gold fleck. So that was a neat trick that I would have never thought of. That was Sandy's suggestion. But even with Petra's quilt, I had to get a lot of help to pick out--I had ideas of what sort of thing I wanted, but I think I end up trying to, well this fabric goes with this fabric and not thinking of it so much as what's going to really make it zing. So the pink fabric in her quilt was one that I would have never picked myself but I think it really ends up pulling that quilt together.

JH: You never know.

ATS: I wouldn't have chosen that one myself, but once I saw it with all of the others, I said, look at that, that really does work well.

JH: Just to clarify, that's a quilt that was given to you?

ATS: No, that's a quilt that I'm making for my friend that's graduating. That one. [pointing to a quilt in the next room.]

JH: Oh. That's really terrific. [laughter.]

ATS: I got a lot of help with that one.

JH: That's great. That pinkish color really does pull it together.

ATS: It brings a lot more life to it. That would have been missing if I had picked out the fabric by myself. The nice thing about going to the quilt shop is that there's always people willing to kibitz with you. You know what, this one over here would go with that and you get a lot of fun help with picking things out. The stripe that's going to be the binding for this piece--

JH: Oh, right.

ATS: --that's another one that Sandy suggested.

JH: Yeah, the stripes really bring in a lot of elements from the other fabrics. It's amazing. Actually, that makes me think of another question. Do you receive a lot of quilts? Do you have people that will give you, as gifts, quilts?

ATS: The only quilts I've been given are the two that – the one that my mother made and then the one she gave me that was great aunt's. And they're the only ones I've gotten as gifts. I do have a quilted jacket that my mother made for me as a gift. But she's the only one, my only source.

JH: It seems like quite a few people I've talked to have that sort of exchange rate. [laughter.]

ATS: I guess a lot of people figure if you make them--

JH: Right.

ATS: --that you would have already made what you wanted. Looking at this, [the Christmas quilt.] I might try to get some gold thread to do some of the quilting. That might be kind of neat.

JH: Oh, that would be a nice touch.

ATS: I'll have to consult with my gurus.

JH: Exactly. [laughter.] Well we're just about out of time now. Is there anything else that you--

ATS: No, I don't think so.

JH: Okay. So, it's 10:55 and this is Julie Henderson talking to Amy Tetlow Smith and I'm winding up our interview now. Thank you very much.

ATS: Thank you.

JH: You're welcome. That's it, thanks.