Karla Schreffler

Karla Schreffler

BOQ-051

Karla Schreffler

Karen Musgrave

6/2/09

Artistic Artifacts

Concord, California

Kim Greene

Karen Musgrave (KM): This is Karen Musgrave, and I am conducting a Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview with Karla Schreffer. Karla is in Concord, California and I'm in Naperville, Illinois so we are conducting this interview over the telephone. Today's date is June 2, 2009. It is now 1:03 in the afternoon. Karla, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to do this interview with me. Please tell me about your quilt "Obama."

Karla Schreffer (KS): My "Obama" quilt is made out of 5/8-inch squares. I hand dyed the fabric and my motivation was first of all it was just a big deal, Barack Obama being the first African American running for president, and I thought it would be kind of fun to do the quilt. I also thought it would be kind of fun to do this particular type of quilt which is a pixilation. I've done other pixilation or as those of us in crafting call it cross stitch patterns. I had taken the cross-stitch pattern for the governor's mansion of Iowa that the first lady, Billy Rayhad, commissioned done and did it was in 1-¼ inch squares. When I did it, I just wasn't thinking clearly, I guess and when I held up the first strip it was so huge, and it didn't dawn on me that I was going to have to rent the hog barn at the state fair to actually have a place to hang it and have it so people could stand far enough away to actually see what it was. I did do the Hubble Mansion in 1-¼ inch squares from the cross-stitch pattern, so I had done this once before. I got cross stitch software and pixilated Barack Obama's picture and knocked it down to about ten colors and I had some help with tone because I have such a problem with getting tone right. I was having a friend of mine, Phil Hellsten who is an artist and a real expert with tone help me identify what colors were going to be my tones, because when you go light to dark that is how you get the real great impression of the face. He helped me chose dark to light in these ten colors that were blues and browns and greens, and we were set to go. What I had forgotten or didn't realize was that I had mixed up the numbers on my paperwork so instead of it going light to dark one through ten, they were sort of mixed up in the middle a little bit. It didn't go light to dark one to ten. There were some out of order so I got through about the first seven, ten, twelve inches of the top of the quilt and my friend said, 'Those colors shouldn't be going together.' Meaning they shouldn't be side by side because the colors should be graduating from light to dark in some places. I went back and checked my numbers and realized I had made a huge fatal mistake in the pattern and at that point I would just sit. I wasn't making a quilt that was going to be readable so I just sort of set it aside and was kind of despondent because I had already put so much time into it. My friend said, 'Karla, you couldn't fuck it up on purpose like that so why don't you just keep going?' So, I did. I figured I could go a little bit further and see what happens.

I started doing the top, so I was working my way down. You have to remember I work at an artist studio. I don't work with quilters. I work with artists so that is why the crude language. I kept going down and I had a digital camera so I started taking pictures and I sent you the picture, you could start to see eyes looking back and at that point I knew that it wasn't going to matter and that it maybe was going to be better because the colors weren't in the right order. I just kept going and I got to the bottom, and it was good. It turned out good and so there were a couple of things that were just a little not right and one of them was that his forehead was this kind of bright blue. I went back and I went over that, and I changed it a little bit and made a few changes, but otherwise it turned out really very modern looking. I mean you have to work a little bit to see the Obama. It is not just a passive quilt. You have to stand back, and you have to study it and you have to look at it and then, because people get so involved in looking at it they start to notice that his right check sort of comes out looking like the Continent of Africa, which was unintentional, but because they work so hard to get the picture, they see that. It really was a labor because there was a lot of times when it was just going to the scrap heap. It really earned its batting.

One of my famous says is that 'not every quilt top earns its batting.' Sometimes it goes straight to a holding pattern in the garage in a box because some quilt tops just aren't that great and this one finally earned its batting. It's kind of fun. It is fun to experiment, and it is fun when they come out with something that is worthy. It hung in a fine art gallery and to me that's, that's the great crossover is when a quilt has the dignity and the strength of being a good quilt and it also has the dignity and strength of being a good piece of art. I knew I had really made it when I hung it and I still had a few threads hanging off it and a fine artist said, 'Don't cut those that is really part of the quilt, you need to leave the threads hanging,' and I'm so bad at getting all my threads cut off and I take such a hit for that sometimes. [laughs.] I was like, 'Ah right.' They let me keep my threads hanging on my quilt. That quilt was kind of a real pinnacle for me. It was a real fun, fun experiment and fun experience because it was a crossover into the fine art world.

KM: What are your plans for this quilt?

KS: Right now, it is kind of hanging over my bookshelves in my house. I'm staring at it right now. I don't have any plans for it. I don't know, I mean I'm open to suggestions if somebody wants to use it for something. I did try a little bit of self-promoting. I sent it to Willy Brown because I thought in California Willy might be able to get a copy of it to the Obama campaign. It was before the inauguration. I thought maybe they would, maybe somebody would want to use it for some part of the inauguration. I did get kind of a cool image. I think, in modesty, it is a cooler image than the image that got to be kind of the star image of the Obama campaign with the red, white and blue image, I think my image is a little bit more interesting. Maybe for the second round, maybe the second election they can use this one. I don't know. I don't know. I'm not very good at self-promoting so I don't know.

KM: It is 39 ½ inches by 43 ½ inches. Is that a typical size for you? You talked about your other piece being huge.

KS: This is a pretty big quilt when you consider that the pieces are just slightly over a half inch, then you start to recognize that is a lot of pieces and sometimes I think when you are talking about a quilt, physical size isn't always. To answer your question, no. I work all over the place. The piece before was 100 [inches.] by 100 [inches.]. I get a picture in my head; I get an idea in my head of what I want it to do or say or be and it just kind of goes. I'm not smart enough to think ahead of time, oh my god that is going to be 100 inches. Fortunately, with Obama because of the software I could look and see how big that is going to be and so I could kind of tweak things and change things and with the pixilation I could say, 'Okay wait a minute. Let's make this picture be 100 squares by 120 squares,' or whatever it was. You get to play with how defined the picture is. That was kind of fun with that software because you the computer just gives it a whole different way of playing with squares. You get to make it either a much finer or, you've played with it. [KM hums.] You play with it, how that works. You get to do a lot more stuff a lot quicker than you do with graph paper and colored pencils.

KM: Isn't that the truth.

KS: [laughs.] Yeah. Not that color pencils and graph paper aren't fun because they really are. That is the "Obama." He is standing right here and I keep thinking the next one that I do like that is going to be; do you remember the movie White Christmas [KM hums.] with Rosemary Clooney when she got tired of being up at the cabin with the kids playing, let's put on a show, she went back to the city and she sang with the big band and she was wearing "the dress." It was the dress that I think Barbie ended up wearing, the dress that we all grew up thinking we wanted. It was called "In the Spotlight" and it was a black strapless dress that had a big flare at the knees and that was Rosemary Clooney was wearing that dress in that movie and there is a couple of great shots of her wearing that dress. I think that might be the next pixilated picture, Rosemary Clooney. I content that every woman has a movie dress that they look at and they say, 'Yep, that is the one,' and I know that Marilyn Monroe's pink dress in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is one and that Rosemary Clooney dress is one, so it might be kind of fun to do some Hollywood stars pictures after Obama. It is kind of fun.

KM: Tell me about your interest in quiltmaking.

KS: I had kind of a strange growing up. I grew up in a family that talked about quilts like some families talk about car races or baseball or fishing, we talked about quilts. I'm a sixth-generation quilter and I can remember in the seventies when the big revival came. It wasn't really a revival in our house. It was just like everybody else was just kind of coming back. When the Quilter's Newsletter came out for the first time--I have my great-grandmother's copies. I inherited her copies of the Quilter's Newsletter. I don't have a complete set, but I have an abundant set of Quilter's Newsletter and you would have thought that the Knights of the Templar had brought back the missing gospels the way my family reacted when the Newsletters started coming because we were just so excited. I didn't know why so much, but it was just all of this information started coming in, all of these patterns and seeing there were more fabrics to buy and classes to take and guilds and it was just everything that they talked about.

Every time we would go to Jessie Shroyers, my great-grandmother's house, she would say, 'Come in the bedroom I want to s how you a quilt I'm working on,' and everybody would walk in, and she would have it all laid out on the bed and it would be one quilt or another. She did those bird quilts of the states where she would embroider all of the birds from every state, and they all had the flowers. Then in 1976, she was just taken with the whole bicentennial. She was probably about 80 years old at that point and she just kept saying, 'Do you realize how exciting this is to be a part of this and to celebrate this?' She made big quilts, red, white and blue quilts, she made the Bicentennial quilt. There was an actual Bicentennial quilt that your kind of appliquéd this big star, just all kinds of, everything that there was to do to celebrate the bicentennial she did.

Everybody quilted. My great-grandmother's grandmother, Susan Shipley, came from Ohio in a covered wagon to Missouri with her husband and her children and they brought quilts with them, and my grandmother has those quilts, and she has the blanket box that they came in. It is just kind of our life, not all our life, but it has always been a part of who we are. My great grandmother's mother used to come and stay summers with them. My grandmother is one of nine and so when Grammy Toot would come and stay with them, she would stay on a cot in the parlor. So one day we were joking how Granny Toot probably would have thought a nursing home was a great bargain after being in the family room. Grammy Toot would piece quilts on the porch and I'm sure that she had lots of help. I'm not sure if it was because they were being punished or if it was something that they were eager to do, but I can image both. My grandmother was a quilter. She still is a quilter. She is celebrating her 90th birthday this summer and all the way through each of my great grandmother and my grandmother every graduation, every wedding, everybody got quilts. I always thought that after a while it was like enough already. We want like luggage or something, because nobody else got quilts. Our friends or people we knew never got quilts, but now of course it is a treasure and the quilt collection that I have is something I wouldn't trade. The kids have quilts and I think that their kids probably have quilts in trunks that my grandmother has stored away. 'Here, I've got quilts made for all the great, great, greats,' and things like that. It is important to us to keep it. It is not like a do or die kind of thing, it's just the keep it going thing. It is just a gift.

I had a friend who was very sick a couple of months ago and my first instinct of course was to make a quilt. It wasn't huge, special, nothing really super fancy, but the instinct was that I know what the power of that quilt is. Every day I see her now, she throws her arms around my neck and says, 'I sleep under that quilt every night,' and I know what she means. She says, 'You know, it's not too heavy. It is not too light. It is just right.' It is. It is just right, and it is because every moment I was working on it I was thinking about her, I was hoping for her, and it is like in other cultures. I had the great pleasure and honor of working and living with some Native American families when we lived in southern California and they make prayer shawls and they take great pride in the fact that every tassel that they tie in the prayer shawl is saying a prayer for this person, and you don't just get a prayer shawl, you don't just kind of buy it or go get one, you are honored with one. I think quilts are that same way, you are given this honor of this thoughtful gift with the prayers and the hopes. You can't help but think about the person that you are giving it to. I did a lot of quilting at the guild who did outreach quilts. I've done it with several different guilds, and I think the whole thing about outreach quilts is whether you admit it or not you are kind of thinking, imagining the people that you are giving them to. It is much better not to ever know who gets them and you just send them out with these wishes, and you give them little rings and you just put them, give them a little life, give them a little love, a little puff of their own air and you send them out and you just hope that the person that gets them understands and feels it. I think they do.

I know at one point I was feeling sort of like I didn't know what my quilting was supposed to do. Whether I was supposed to do it or whether I was supposed to just get a job at Penney's or what was I supposed to do. I just sort of reached out and I said, 'God if I'm supposed to do this. If I'm supposed to really make these outreach quilts, then you've got to do the backs and bats.' I went to guild that night and a friend of mine was taking--you know how at guild sometimes you get bunches of stuff. Sometimes people bring bags of stuff and say, 'Here take this. Take this for outreach.' So, my friend said, 'Here you take this bunch,' and I did, and I took it home and I tipped the bag upside down and flung it out on the floor and it was full of bats and backs, and I thought 'Gee God, [both laugh.] could you be a little bit more specific?' I worked outreach quilts and my guild outreach committee for a year or so and we did lots of outreach quilts and there is just something about it. You are just giving it away. You pay it forward and I just think there is something magic about it. You don't have to be--we get kind of crazy when we are quilters. When you get good at quilting and you are making quilts and challenging yourself, it is sometimes about how good it is and how fancy it is and how great the fabric is. That is not the importance of it at all. I heard a story once, I was in southern California, the guild that was probably about eight people in a little tiny brand new, one of those pop-up towns out in the suburbs and we used to make quilts for the police department and most of them really, really sort had been a part of southern California, and so, my goodness, we could put out quilts. We got all kinds of donations, and they were not fancy. These were made out of polyester, these were made out of everything, and the intention was that if you had just been raped, if you had just a baby had been taken out of a meth house or whatever, they were not going to care what it was made out of. These were to be wrapped around people and if they had to be thrown away right away afterwards so be it. We would make hundreds of them, literally of these quilts and they were just down and dirty.

One day we were at the mall making quilts for something and somebody came up and said, 'Oh you know what, my minister told a story about one of your quilts.' We were looking at each other like okay. Evidently that minister had been on the freeway riding his motorcycle and he wiped out and the policeman had a quilt in his trunk, pulled it out and wrapped it around this minister while he was on the concrete and it was a bunny quilt and the minister said, he was laying there all banged up wrapped up in a bunny quilt. [laughs.] One of my friends sitting there said, 'Oh I made that.' [laughs.] You never know and it wasn't a hugely special quilt. Of course, you make a bunny quilt you think some little baby somewhere is going to take that bunny quilt. You never imagine that some big minister is going to be wrapped in that bunny quilt on the freeway, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. At the time that somebody needs it, they need it. It doesn't matter if it is polyester or cotton or whatever and it doesn't matter if it lasts forever, it just has to be there that minute. That is sort of like what quilt. They are like Mom on the spot. They are sort of like God on the spot. They are sort of like the right thing at the right time and I can only wonder, when you think about women being on the prairie and having those quilts and living away from home and everything that they had. My great, great, I don't know Grandma Susan Shipley packing up her family, not once but twice because they went back home during the Civil War and they went back to Ohio, so they came back to Missouri again after the war was over, and everybody else's grandmas too. Living in sod houses and dust and the wind and wondering if they were ever going to live through it and then I can just imagine getting under that quilt at night and maybe it's the only like really nice thing that you have or the only clean thing or the only thing that is kind of like home and looking up in the morning and the first thing you see is maybe those little patches of calico or something and you think, 'You know what? It's not so bad. I can do this. Okay. [laughs.] I will get up.' You get up and you go. 'Okay I will do it.'

KM: What does your family think of your quiltmaking?

KS: It is really funny because I'm kind of out there. They do very, very traditional things, very squares, diamonds and stuff. I'm considered way crazy. At one point I made a quilt and took it home to show my grandma and it was sort of funny because of instead of, and of course we are not really demonstrative, huggy, feely, great expression people. She just goes, 'Yep that's a quilt.' It had three dancing women on the bottom, and it was all pieced with octagons, no not octagons, like Grandmother's Flower Garden, but they were all like blocks. So, it had all these like great textures, and I put little pieced roses in there and stuff. I have to say that my grandma is really into the whole, the whole part of carrying it on and as she gets older, and I get better she's into the idea that it is staying current and modern and relevant. She had cancer about 20 years ago and I made her a quilt and she said that it was the first time anybody had made her a quilt and when I sent it to her and she said, 'You know I just wrapped up in that every night, all the time. I come home from chemo, and I just wrap up in that.' I made it out of really bright colors, which I tend to have sort of a bright palette any way and she just thought it was great. She took it to the fair. It was the only ribbon I ever won. [laughs.] She took it to the fair and entered it for me at her county fair and I won a ribbon. She is very, very proud of me. My mom, Deanna Schreffler, I think it is very hard for me and my mom to talk about it. I think she is very proud of it. I think she is happy for me. My mom is a completely different kind of a quilter. My mom is very country quilter. I don't know we don't really talk about quilts very much, my mom and I. We just don't quilt alike.

I do have to say though that my mother was very, very, very generous in my growing up time and you have to understand I wasn't easy to raise. Of course, when I was a kid people, we didn't know what we know now and so it was at the time I was just a difficult kid. Now we know that I had dyslexia, and I was ADHD [Attention Deficient Hyperactive Disorder.] and I'm not just like how people just go, 'Oh, I'm so ADD.' I was really like the real deal and so I could not sit still. I couldn't read, and she would go to meeting after meeting with the teachers and they would say, 'I don't know what you are going to do with this kid, we can't deal with her.' I would have all these weird ideas, but I loved to sew, and I could sit and sew for hours and hours and hours. This lady just let me have free run of her stash and if you think about that as a quilter, I mean I couldn't do that, I could not just say okay go for it, whatever. She did and when I got to the next step on how to do something she would show me how to do it and I would be gone. She let me use all the equipment and all the sewing machines. She knew she couldn't do much more than that; I can't image what I must have been like.

KM: At what age did you start making quilts?

KS: I was probably about four or five. My great grandma used to send me blocks that she would cut out for me; you know those little red boxes that checks come in. She would send them to me in those boxes and I would take those and sew them together. My grandpa sent a treadle sewing machine home once that was on the porch for a long time and I remember messing with that a little bit, but mostly by hand. I used to baby sit a lot and I would cut out blocks and take them babysitting and I would sew Nine Patches together while I was babysitting. I used to macramé when I was in elementary school and then take the belts down to the head shop. A friend of mine's sister would take me down to the head shop and I would sell them to the hippies. I was always doing some kind of hand work, bead work, quilting, something. I just had to. I would have been insane if I hadn't something in my hands to do. Barbie dolls were just simply models for me. They were little, tiny mannequins. There was no playing with them like Barbie. She didn't have an identity, I didn't care who she was, [laughs.] she just wore the clothes. Anything with fabric, cutting fabric, weaving fabric, making fabric, sewing fabric together, anything to do with that. I just started at that age, and I have never stopped.

KM: How many hours a week do you spend quilting?

KS: I eat, and I drive, and I sleep, but other than that I'm quilting or beading. It is all I do, other than looking in books for ideas about quilting. I have a studio in Danville that I go to and work at that studio sometimes and then I have a studio here at the house. No matter where we lived, the house has always been, the whole thing has been a studio. I've always had a sewing machine up and always had an ironing board up. When the kids were really little, I was a stay-at-home mom, and it was sort of my reward if I could just keep everybody going, I could sneak away and do a little bit of quilting. I think to me that is kind of the way women on the prairie would live. I guess I always think that is normal, but probably not. Probably other people have other normal.

KM: Describe your studio since you mentioned your studio.

KS: It's not like the studios in the magazines. [laughs.] Studios in the magazines, I really, really wanted one of those but I can't image how those work because I could never do that. There is just too much stuff. We moved into this house, it's an Ichler and Mr. Ichler was a designer in the fifties, and he built these houses for the masses. My house has a courtyard in the middle, an atrium which opens out to, it has sky in the middle and my studio opens onto that. One of my worktables is basically outside in the sun. I can go out there at night or during the day and cut on the cutting table outside. I have a sliding door that goes into my studio and then it has sort of that like Pergo floor, so I don't have to worry about keeping the floor, it is not like carpet. We just moved here last August so I haven't had a chance to really get the lighting the way I want it, but one side of the room is just shelves and I have it sort of set up so there is sections and each section, it can all change, but I put all my stuff in plastic bins and depending on my projects everything is just really fluid. Right now I'm working on stuff that is all silk so I rearrange things all the time, I resort things all the time to first of all keep myself acquainted with what I have and keep things relevant to the project because you might decide to work in a color group or you might decide to work in a type of fabric or whatever, so I keep sorting things and keep boxes of things that are in that group together. Those boxes kind of get repositioned on the shelves. The shelves are divided and some of them are like silks and some of them are all beads or some of them are all like office supplies. Then I have a small enamel top table that I put right in front of the shelves with a small work light and you are not in and out of your shelves all of the time so I push it right up against the shelves and I can work right there and pull stuff off the shelves and then I have another big oak table that has drop leaves that I set my sewing machine on and that's right behind me so I can just put my swivel chair there and I can turn right around and I have two full table tops that I can work on and then my ironing board is just off on the next wall on the corner. Basically, my son, Ben Davis, brought home this office chair that he had taken the back off of, he is a design student so sometimes things happen in our house that are not explainable but he took the back off and it turns out that it is perfect because if you don't have the back on your chair, no matter which way it is positioned you kind of land on it you are pretty certain to hit something. If you stand up to iron and your kind of back up into your square and you are not exactly square, at least you are not backing up into the back of the chair. It has turned out to be kind of a roll about chair for the studio. I think it is kind of a fun studio because it's not perfect but it's the best I've ever had. The rest of the house really, really bright because of all this glass we have. Everything has a sliding glass door either out to the courtyard area in the middle of the house or out to the back yard, so everything is really bright and lots of sunlight. I can move around the house and always find direct sunlight to work in and that is great for drawing and piecing and matching colors, and it makes a really good, energetic workspace. My other studio is downtown and it's in a space with all fine artists and I fully come to the surrender that I'm not ever going to get any work done at that space, but it is great for my social self. I get lots and lots of critique and interaction and I go down there, and I paint, and I've never painted for the most part, but I've kind of learned to paint. What I found is that if you have an idea for a quilt and you get some paint and brushes and palette and you paint your quilt first, work on your idea in paint, it is so fluid, and you can change direction so quickly and make your color changes instantly. It is kind of like discovering the computer. With the paint you can, you do big strokes, long arms; it just gives you kind of a different perspective on your picture. I have also started taking some drawing classes and I've done some life figure drawing classes and it's amazing. I kind of started out thinking I can't draw naked people, but the truth is that when you get into a professional level drawing class with other artists and professional models, what you don't know is that the class starts out with like one minute poses and so the model is changing poses every 60 seconds so you don't have time to even recognize or realize that she is wearing clothes or not, she is moving so quickly that you just want to get your pictures done. You start concentrating on what you are doing.

The first class I kind of just folded up my stuff and brought it home thinking, 'I don't want anybody to see what I've done because I'm sure it's not as good as everybody else.' When I got home, I started looking at my work and it was like, 'This is okay. It is not great, but it is certainly as good as half the other people in the class.' When you start exposing yourself to more art and more ideas, it influences your quilts. You start using more colors. You start using more color combinations. You start going on websites that you won't normally go on and it brings new things to your quilts. That is just like the grandmothers on the prairie, they went to new places and new things influenced their quilts. It is our obligation. It is what we should be doing. I can only imagine, you are talking about 100 years from now, can you image? You watch that Star Trek movie, the new one, can you imagine? They should have put a quilter on there. What were they doing? Would they be finding new fabric on a new planet? Exposing new people to quilts. I just went to the Maker Fair. Have you ever seen Make Magazine?

KM: Yes.

KS: The Maker Fair was in our neighborhood this last weekend and I was talking to a man, and there are so many men who want to learn to sew because they think the sewing machine is so amazing, and this man said, 'Well we just think of sewing as welding with fabric or welding with thread.' I thought that was an amazing way of talking about sewing because it's not just the women's sport anymore. It is about men and lots of young men have come to me, and they've shown me their sewing and they've done some amazing things and I talked to a lot of men artists, and I've said, 'You really need to take up quilting because men quilters my goodness.' You look at the few that we have and look at all the women that flock to them. You are almost an instant celebrity if you are a man quilter. You should definitely consider taking it up if you are a man. All of these things add new flavor to the pot and all of that helps, it makes it more fun. You look at what is available. You go to the quilt stores, and you look at the stuff that is available. I don't think that things have changed very much. It is kind of all the same thing. Quilt books seem to be kind of all the same thing. It doesn't excite me anymore; you have to go find your own excitement.

KM: We are almost done though. Is there anything you would like to share that we haven't touched up?

KS: I think I talked about everything that I had hoped to.

KM: Good. How do you want to be remembered?

KS: I want to be remembered that I participated, that through my art and through, I have a conscience and that I participated through my art, that I didn't just, I had an opinion, that I thought about it, I cared about it and whatever it is. That Barack Obama becoming president gave me pause. It made a difference to me and that difference is reflected in the--I don't know you could multiple it out, but several thousand squares that are hand dyed and that they were placed carefully in a certain order. That the other quilts that I've made have, there is a reason, they were done for a reason. The colors were chosen because I chose them, I participated, it wasn't just an accident. I do a lot of my own dyeing. I just want it to be like a mark, like things matter, things do matter. I just see so often that people sort of act like they don't have an opinion. They don't vote. They don't care. They don't care about whatever. They don't care about other people's children. They don't care about other people falling off their motorcycles. They don't care about kids who don't have whatever. They don't care that God wants them to make outreach quilts. I want to do good things and I want to just make sure that. I don't know, I guess that is it. I don't know, it is hard to say. It just would be nice that people who get kind of jerked around a little bit would get a little bit of something and that is what the outreach quilts are about, is that they get a little hug, a little at-a-boy from somebody that they don't know. Get the feeling that maybe somebody out there that they don't even know cares.

KM: I think that is a great way for us to conclude. I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to talk to me.

KS: Thank you. I feel like I just kind of--my mom was the one that kind of put this whole thing in motion.

KM: Good for your mom.

KS: My mom, well you know, it is funny because my mom has really embraced the Internet and she has a lot of friends on the Internet. When she got this piece of information on the Internet, boy she was really excited. She said, 'Look at this. All these people are making Obama quilts.'

KM: Excellent. We are going to conclude our interview at 1:52.