Carol Wilcoxen
Photos
Date
04/26/2003
Identifier
DE19711-009
Interviewee
Carol Wilcoxen
Interviewer
Dee Richardson
Interview Date
04/26/2003
Interview sponsor
Moda Fabrics
Location
New Castle County, Delaware
Transcriber
Shira Walny
Transcription
Dee Richardson (DR): This is Dee Richardson, today's date is April 26th, 2003 and it's about 3:30--quarter of 4. I am conducting an interview with Carol Wilcoxen for Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories project in the Brandywine Hundred Library in Newcastle County, Delaware. Carol, where you are from?
Carol Wilcoxen (CW): Well I was born in Washington D.C. during the war, meaning the Second World War, and my father went into the military and we traveled for the next 10 years, in and out of the Washington area all the way to Germany, all the way to California, to Japan and then back again. And when he got out of the service in 1952, we came back to Washington. So I lived most of my life in Washington D.C. from the age of 10 on.
DR: Okay and how long have you been in Delaware?
CW: I came to Delaware in 1998 as a primary care giver for somebody who had Alzheimer's and I don't know whether you were at the meetings at that beginning; I used to bring her with me to the meetings.
DR: No, I never met her.
CW: Yeah, and I was with her for a year and a half and then she went to live with her daughter so I stayed up here because I wasn't going to live in Florida and started taking care of other people and this past year, the person I was caring for who was a COPD patient, which means that she had respiratory problems, died in August and at that point I retired.
DR: Okay. Tell me about the quilt that you brought in today.
CW: This is the quilt that I started about 1987. I took a class before that in making a garment that was a quilted garment. It was a log cabin variation. And then the next thing I made was this quilt which was a "Quilt In A Day" by Eleanor Burns and it's called Lover's Knot and I've made about thirty of these quilts. This was one of the first ones that I did. I started one that was in blues and yellows which I thought my husband would like and he liked this better so this red, white, and blue ended up being my husbands quilt. [laughs.] It's a throw which will fit a twin bed or just be nice to lay under when you're watching television.
DR: You've described it somewhat but can you go into a little bit more detail about what it looks like and what kind of stitches were used and things like that?
CW: Well, this was completely done by machine and it was, since it was the first one that I had done by machine, I have made other quilts but this one was just a really simple quilt that could be realistically made in one week. If you cut it out and put all the pieces together and spend a couple of hours every day, at the end of that time, you would have a finished quilt. The design itself is sort of like a knot, if you look at it, it has a red strip and then there's a blue strip and they both end up being in knots in various places depending on which one you used as the primary, you'll get more of the blue knots or more of the red knots. And then the background is white with little red hearts on it. The secondary print was a red and blue print which also had hearts on it and then the primary color was the red polka dots. White polka dots on a red background and the four different fabrics were used to offset the design and, very simple to make. I have another one here which is the last one I made which is the same pattern but it's, you know, different colors.
DR: What kind of materials are in here? What are the materials in here?
CW: The materials in this one are blend; these were not 100% cotton. The first time I made it, I did go for a high percent cotton but this one when, the colors, the fabrics that I wanted to use ended up being some polyester blends. You can see the white, there's pilling on it that didn't come off. Then also all my cats have been all over it because this is one that sits on my sofa in my living room. [laughs.]
DR: I'd like to know what special meaning this has to you but I can tell that it's part of your life so--
CW: Well, it's a quilt that I use regularly and it has been washing many times. You know, most quilts when you sit down to construct a quilt you don't want to put something together that's going to be thrown in the washing machine, you know, unless it's something that's a quickie and this is that kind of a quilt. I've made lots of these for people with small children or for people who have children in their family and consequently they don't feel bashful about throwing it in the washing machine.
DR: How long have you been quilting?
CW: Well, the first quilt that I put together myself was in 1973. I've started, I saw a pattern in Family Circle Magazine which was done in blues and it was a Trip Around The World and of course being the intrepid seller that I am, I didn't start out small, my first quilt was a king sized bed quilt. It took me ten years to finish it but at that time, we didn't have rotary cutters and mats and things like that by the time I got through cutting all those soy squares, after six months of construction of that, I was so sick of it, I didn't want to see it again. [laughs.] So I put it away for a while, I didn't have a king sized bed, I just knew that that's what I wanted it for eventually and it was in yellows and oranges and browns which were autumn colors.
DR: What inspired you to make the quilt? Why did you decide to try quilting?
CW: Well, my great-grandmother was a quilter and she did everything by hand because she was bed ridden. I got a quilt of hers when I was about 28 or 29 years old and it was a Trip Around The World which was done in oranges which is apparently is another name for it, it's kind of a Kansas, which is where my mother's family is from, Kansas. And there's a special name due to the fact that this is an orange design on it. I didn't realize what it was, I didn't appreciate it for what it was. I let children sleep on it, which means it got wet and you know, urine and stuff like that, but I used it for about fifteen or twenty years before it finally really fell apart. One of these days I'm going to reproduce it because it was one of my favorite quilts. And then a friend of mine who lived in Haverstown was able to get a hold of quilts up there from manufacturers, there were fabric mills up there and they would get the fabric for free and then make them as a community project and then you could buy them very inexpensively. Now this was back in the 60s.
DR: Buy the quilts?
CW: You could buy a quilt for 35 dollars. And I bought about seven or eight of them and they were different varieties. Most of them were scrap quilts using different kinds of fabrics, they were not 100% cotton, they were whatever blend was given to them by the mills and I use those quilt off and on in many varieties, as a guest thing, as a gift for people, and so on. But in 1971, I found some quilt pieces from my mother that had been given to her from her grandmother, which was my great-grandmother, and I really fell in love with those blocks so I took them to somebody, now I wasn't interested in selling at that point, you know, doing quilting at that point, I didn't really understand what quilting was all about and took them to my, to this young lady who was interested in making the quilt and she took it and she put it together and it is the sorry looking excuse for a quilt that you've ever seen in your life and it just broke my heart because those blocks were something that are irreplaceable, there's no way. And I didn't, again, know very much about quilting so I gave her a blanket to put in the middle instead of batting and she did not put it together, you know, she did what a lot of people do with a quilt which is to put the layers together but she didn't bother to stitch them together. [laughs.] And so when it got used and it got thrown in the wash, it literally fell apart. That would have been about 1970, 1971. In 1973, I stopped working for a while and I'd seen this piece that I told you about in the Family Circle and I decided that I was going to try and make a quilt and I read the instructions and, you know, used a little bit of brain power and went to the local public library and got a quilting book and sat down and started cutting out all those thousands of blocks and squares that I needed to make the trip around the world and then the next year I got involved with a group through the local recreation and parks department and she taught us how to make a sampler so that was my second quilt was a sampler. That took me twenty years to finish. [laughs.] And after I got it together I realized the reason it took me so long and she tried to tell me this but I wasn't paying any attention because I didn't like the colors and the colors were Christmas colors. So when I went back to finish it because I decided that I really did want to finish it, I took a very dark forest green which really toned it down a lot. Working with yellow and red is not a fun thing to do for long periods of time. And I figured out why I didn't like that but I did finish it, it was hung in a show, I--this would have been 198-- No, this was after my husband died so it would have been 1993 when it finally got hung in a show. I used it on my bed for a couple of years and then it was destroyed in a fire. And I don't know what happened to the king sized quilt, I think it ended up in a closet in the house where the fire was and I never found it.
DR: You said that the quilt scraps that you got, the quilt squares that you got had belonged to your great-grandmother.
CW: Right.
DR: Do you know of any other quilters in your family?
CW: No, just my great-grandmother. Nobody else that I'm aware of was a quilter. My grandmother on my mother's side was, she had diabetes at a time when diabetes wasn't really known, they didn't really know much about it and she didn't start taking insulin until the '40s when it became available. So she used to pass out all the time and as far as I know, she never did any sewing, did any sort of craft stuff. My mother was a seamstress and a knitter and did things like that until she was unable to continue doing that because of her drinking. So I had been exposed a little bit to these things but not a whole lot and I really had not been exposed to the tradition of quilting. I didn't pick that up until I joined a quilt guild in 1988.
DR: And where was that?
CW: That was in Bowie, Maryland it's a group called the Southern Comforters.
DR: And they were weren't they?
CW: They really were. When I took that course in 1973, I tried to find a quilt guild. The closest one I could find was in Southern Maryland and it had been around for 180 years and it was a bunch of little old ladies who had been around for 180 years. [laughs.] But it was too far away to go on a regular basis so I never joined. I went when I started taking these classes where I took the, made that jacket that I told you about and then started making this quilt in a day, they were starting to come on public television at that point so that there was a place for me to find information about it, there weren't a whole lot of programs available but this was in the early '70s so there really wasn't anything that I can remember on television except for Georgia Bonesteel's lap quilting. And lap quilting did not appeal to me.
DR: What is lap quilting?
CW: Well lap quilting is where you take a block, you make, you construct your block and then you actually quilt that block before you go to the next block and it's a much easier to handle it so it was a nice way to hand it, but somehow or another it didn't penetrate.
DR: You like the big projects?
CW: Well, I like the big project and I certainly wouldn't have objected to learning how to do it that way but that's not how I was taught. The one class that I took with a teacher from the recreation and parks department in Prince Georgia's County--
DR: That's in Maryland, right?
CW: That's in Maryland, it's right outside the District of Colombia and she was an old time quilter style, you sat down and you drafted all of your pattern blocks, you didn't pick something out of a book or a magazine or whatever, you actually constructed your own designs. And so it was a very good learning experience but it was an awful lot of detail as well. The first thing that I quilted by hand was a little sewing pocket that I made out of a nine patch squares and I did the nine patches on the front and then the back of it I did a different version of the same patch so I actually hand constructed that, put it together, made this little pocket and you could put your sewing things inside it.
DR: You wrap it tight around your waist like an apron?
CW: Yes, right, like an apron pocket.
DR: And it was just there?
CW: It was there for you to use, which is really funny because my stomach wasn't as big as it is now but I still have a hard time [laughs.]. This is a little sewing packet that I made in, you can see, I made it in 1993 which was something that I constructed after seeing somebody else's version and this actually has fabric that has, that shows sewing items, thimble and needles and thread and so on and I love it. I can put everything I need in it including scissors and a thimble, which I forgot, marking tools and thread and pins and needles and whatever. You just pick it up and go, so it's really nice. I find this much handier than the pocket that I made. [laughs.]
DR: Have you ever used quilting to get through a difficult time?
CW: Yes. My husband died in 1992 in January, committed suicide and--
DR: That must have been difficult.
CW: It was very, very difficult.
DR: And did the--
CW: My quilt guild was very, very supportive and one of the things that they did for me was instead of giving me flowers, they made quilt blocks that were flowers, that were appliquéd flowers. And I didn't do anything with it at that point because it was too painful for me to do it but I can remember going to a friends, I went to Georgia for a couple of months while I was waiting for a house to become available and I can remember just sitting there and looking at the block that I was supposed to be constructing and not knowing what in the world I was doing. [laughs.] I didn't even know how I got where I was sitting and the block I constructed at that point was totally wrong so when I came back to Louis, I had to make a new one because that one didn't work. [laughs.] But quilting has always been very soothing to me. I'm in the process and have been in the process for the last four or five years of working on a white on white quilt which is in a stand with a very large hoop, it's a 26 inch hoop, maybe it's 36, anyways it's a big hoop, the diameter across. And I have used free form quilt frames which we made ourselves. I bought a used quilt frame from somebody, but it wasn't long enough to hold my quilt so although I still have all the parts to it, I prefer to use the round hoop one because it's easier to work with in a small area.
DR: I'd like to see that when we're finished.
CW: I'm three-quarters of the way through it, I've done more in the last six months on that quilt than I've done in the whole five years I've had it on the frame. [laughs.]
DR: Are there any aspects of quilting that you don't enjoy?
CW: Not really. It takes me, you know when I'm taking care of people it's very hard for me to do things. I have a quilt here that I pieced when I was taking care of this last person but I knew that I could do the hand piecing and be in the same room with her without having to lug this great big thing around with me and I decided I wanted something for myself that was hand pieced. The first quilt that I did hand piecing on was a Grandmother's Flower Garden which I made for my best friend's daughter when she went to college and it took me five years to get it put together and quilt it and I hung it in a show and then gave it to her. [laughs.]
DR: Now, did she get it before she went to college?
CW: No, no, she didn't stay in college, it was--she said, 'You told me that that was my high school graduation present.' I said, no, I gave you a pre-made comforter which was your high school graduation present and this was supposed to be your college graduation present but she didn't remember that, so I said, okay. [laughs.] Anyways, I ended up giving that to her, you know, five years down the road.
DR: Let's talk about quilts in general.
CW: Okay.
DR: What is it about quilts, what do you think makes a really great quilt? What's the most important aspect of it?
CW: To me, the design is important but it's also the love that you give to the person that you're making that quilt for. Many people have asked me to make a quilt for them and how much would I charge them for it and I've always told them that it would cost more than you could afford. [laughs.] But I have made over 150 quilts and I only have one, two, three, four, probably four quilts left in my personal possession because I give them away. One Christmas, a family friend of ours who had eight children, I made eight quilts for them for Christmas.
DR: And all for one Christmas? Wow.
CW: That's right. But they were, you know, they were young children and there was a teenage boy who was going into high school and I made him this pattern, this--
DR: What is it called again?
CW: This is a Lover's Knot.
DR: Lover's Knot.
CW: I made this pattern in a, you know, a male dominated color scheme, I think it was black and what else, green, I think the background was black and then the colors were green and orange and yellow or something like that. And often I will use as the backing material, I will use something that is of value to them so that they really have two quilts rather than just one. And you can make this into a quillow which is a pillow quilt where you just roll it up and put it inside of the container so that it stays in one place, and kids like that, you know, that's something that they can throw around a room and not worry about it getting damaged or whatever, and I've made several of those.
DR: How does that work?
CW: Its called a quillow and what you do is you make you're pattern, you know, you do your construction for your top and then you take one extra block and you put that one the back of the quilt inside out, alright, so if you were showing this quilt right now, this has a sheet backing on it, you would take this sheet backing, put it on the one side of the quilt, of this quilt block that you're putting together and then you put the inside, which is the outside of your--the fancy part of your quilt, you lay that on the inside, stitch around it, roll it all together, put it inside, turn it inside out, and that way you have the design from the front of it to make it look like a nice pillow and but there's a place for you to store the rest of the quilt.
DR: I see.
CW: So, it's called a quillow.
DR: Sort of like a carrying pack for it.
CW: Yes, yes, and protection.
DR: Talking about design, does, what part does color play?
CW: Oh, it can make all the difference in the world. If you take, one of the things that I do when I'm, what's the word they use for it, I'm having a senior moment, where you see what the finished product is going to look like, I will take and maybe do three different versions of the block to see which one I like best. With electric quilts and things like that, you could do it on the machine instead of do it physically.
DR: Electric quilts?
CW: Electric quilt is a computer generated quilting pattern, a program that you can sit down and you can actually draw a section of this to make your decision on how you want the things to lay out. That was not available, I guess the first one came out about 1990, '91, there abouts and in the last 10 years they've done a huge turn over. Barbara Brackman has a book that's supposed to be all of the quilt blocks and their names from 1970 back to the beginning of time.
DR: Wow. Now this is in a book?
CW: It's called "The Encyclopedia of Quilt Blocks" and these are not appliquéd blocks, these are pieced blocks and there are about 4,500 different names, different pieces, etcetera. And actually, there are more than that because since 1970 there has been a resurgence of quilting and there are a lot of designs that are, you know, it's the same block but it's been turned around in so many different ways using color in a various way. I like bright vivid colors. I choose to go in that direction although as I get older, I'm tending to go a little bit more muted. But I'm not a person who likes antique-y looking things, I like things that are, probably because of my color, the colors that I like, I like things that are pure colors rather than that are antiquated or old looking colors and it isn't a question of you know, one's better than the other, it's just prefer the brighter colors.
DR: Can you see, do you think that there is a place in museums for quilts?
CW: Absolutely, absolutely. I used to go down to the Smithsonian all the time because they have a wonderful collection and there's a quilt in there that is a white on white Trapunto style quilt which was done about 1834 and the design in the middle of it is a fair, it's a country fair and you see horses with men with stove top type hats, women with, you know, children and animals and so on as pets walking around this quilt. I don't know how you could get a picture of it because it is white on white and the shadow work is what you see the designs with but it is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life. When I first started getting involved with quilting on my second go around, because I figure the early '70s was one go around and then the mid '80s and on was my second go around. I went to a quilt show at the Woodlawn Plantation which is about four or five miles from George Washington's home in Mount Vernon and they had quilts there that you would not believe. A woman took the background of a quilt using a fabric that had a little bit of design in it and changed the color of that quilt by using colored quilting thread for the background and she did stitches about an eighth of an inch apart, you know, rows of stitching about an eighth of an inch apart.
DR: Oh my.
CW: And I can remember looking at that quilt and I wasn't into taking pictures of quilts at that point and I wish that I had a picture of that. It was one of the most beautiful quilts I've ever seen. And that kind of thing is what got me started and going. They had a book at that time that had a history of quilting, places where you could buy quilting supplies, guilds where you could meet people who were doing the same kind of thing you were doing, shops that sold 100% fabric and that were going after the quilter and etcetera. And this was about 1984, 1985 and it was before I really got into doing the quilting that I've been doing the last 20 years.
DR: The 150 quilts that you've made, has that all been in the last 20 years?
CW: Yes. More so than, I made two, I think I made three quilts the first 10 years.
DR: That comes out to--
CW: A quilt every three or four years.
DR: About 8 quilts a year.
CW: From 1920, I mean, from 1983, '84 thereabouts.
DR: Wow, that's a big production.
CW: Yeah, but that was--a lot of that quilting that I did in those days was machine work. I only did one or two quilts in that period of time that was totally hand work.
DR: Well, one of the things that I was going to ask you is how do you feel about machine quilting versus hand quilting versus longarm quilting?
CW: I think they each have their place. I hate to see a quilt top languishing someplace in a closet and not being shown and used and so on. I met a woman in Bowie, Maryland who was, I think she was originally from Pennsylvania. She married someone by the name of Lancaster, not Lancaster, Lancaster. But her family name, she was Hungarian, her family was Hungarian and she didn't start quilting until she was in her mid 60s and she made probably three quilts a year almost all total hand work and every once in a while she'd drag a quilt out and give it to one of her grandchildren. [laughs.] But for the most part, I mean, she had quilts that were made with the big medallions that were pansies, she had another one which was an old fashioned quilt which was a Sunbonnet Sue variation, the older variation of Sunbonnet Sue. She would find a quilt in a magazine and just fall in love with it and she loved to do scrap quilts and that's what I'm into now as you can see this is not a scrap quilt, this is a quilt that I'm showing everybody but the more I get involved with things the more I like the look of scrappy even if you have to plan it out, that kind of thing. [laughs.] I just like that finished look, it's so bright and vibrant and, you know there's so many interesting fabrics and if you use fabrics, if you were a dress maker as I was, there are a lot of things out there that you maybe made into clothing, garment construction that you could put into the quilt. The Grandmother's Flower Garden that I made for my niece, we'll call her my niece, I had her soft ball uniform, I had the clothes that I made for her when she was a little girl, baby outfits that were made, clothes that had a significance to her when she was a young teenager, so there were a lot of scraps of things in there that had value to her as a memento and that's one reason why I wanted to make that for her. Her mother wasn't really that interested and I can remember talking to my grandmother on my father's side who was born and bred in New York City and I asked her one time, I said, 'Did you ever make a quilt?' And she looked at me down her nose and said, 'No, we didn't have to do things like that.' [laughs.] And I said, 'Well, you missed a wonderful opportunity.' Now truthfully, I think if she had ever done anything like that it would have been more in the line with crazy quilting because she was born from people who were Victorian in their thinking and background and her mother was French and her father was English and they came to the United States when he was retired from the Diplomatic Core from Great Britain and I don't know, I'm sure he became an American citizen but his two daughters were born in the United States.
DR: Do you think that quilting is traditionally an American thing?
CW: I did for a long time but of course now we know that quilting went back to the Egyptians, I mean there was quilting done in the Egyptian times and I think anytime that people needed a means of getting warmth, they found someway to put fabric construction together. You know the great tapestry of the battle of Hastings which was really more cool than it was quilting but they did use Trapunto and things like that and so it was a combination of those things and I understand that's supposed to be 30 feet long so you know--
DR: That would keep a lot of people warm.
CW: But it was done as a more as an artistic thing than it was as a bed thing. But I know that the English and the Irish used what we would call Whole Cloth quilting as a means of warmth for many years. Now we're not talking about people who lived on the farm, we're talking about people who lived in towns, cities, people who had a little bit of time, I mean, if you've ever tried to do any stitching when it's almost pitch black out there, I mean, until this century when lighting was really readily available it was very difficult for people to do that, to do the hand work that was required and women, this was one acceptable means of artistic expression that women could do and that's certainly more obvious as the years have gone by that that was something women could enjoy doing and could show off what they did. More so than knitting although knitting certainly had a lot of wonderful things. In the early '70s when I first started looking at quilting, I was looking at the whole arrangement of fabric and or hand work and I went to the 1967 World's Fair in Montreal and they had Czechlovakian, I don't remember what they called them, containers that are filled with sawdust and then they would do lace work and I decided I wanted to try that but that is so much work and it felt like so much more work than hand piecing quilting, don't ask me why, there are things that you get attached to simply because it makes it more interesting. I tried to do macramé, I spent about $150 when $150 was a lot of money and I made a couple of hangings and I really didn't enjoy it, I said I'd rather go do something else, but once I got hooked on quilting, I don't even want to do fabric construction anymore, garment construction, I want to make quilts and when I make a quilt, I'm not talking about a wall hanging, I'm talking about something you wrap up in and you know, there are people who like to do wall hangings, that's fine and dandy, but that's not my cup of tea. I want a quilt, when it's finished, that somebody can roll up in. I've made them for little children and I've made them for really big children. [laughs.]
DR: You've hit on the significance of women and their artistic endeavors as far as quilts are concerned, could you expand on that a little bit?
CW: Well, my grandmother, my great-grandmother who was a classic example. Here's a woman who was not able to walk very much, I don't know what her physical diagnosis was, she died in 1951 and I can remember coming into the house and being upset that my mother was crying and I asked my father why is she crying and he said, 'Her grandmother just died and she's very sad about that so we're going to go out and let her have some time to herself.' But she was bed ridden the last, probably 10 years of her life and it was one of the few things she could do. She apparently wasn't much of a reader and she really enjoyed you know, putting the blocks together and I have some of the blocks that she made which were never finished and one of the things that I'm astonished with as much work as people have gone through to finish this thing that they haven't left enough seam allowance here and there and rather than go back and reconstruct it and fix it, you know, it just put it in the pile and someday they'll do something with it. I remember when I showed the quilt that I had wanted to be made to the teacher that I had in 1973, she said, 'Well, you could take it all apart and reconstruct the blocks and make them just a tiny bit smaller so that the finished product would be well put together.' I said, 'No thank you.' I said, 'I've done garment reconstruction for years, I don't want to do that anymore. [laughs.] But I certainly would like to duplicate that pattern.' So she sat down and we figured out how to get a nine inch block out of that pattern. And I've never seen it, it looks a little bit like the Weather Vane block but in the center of it is a cross. It's a nine patch but it's done as a cross and then you've got diamonds all the way around it going in different directions, and that's the block. So one of these days, I will sit down and I will construct a completed block like that but I will probably go look for old pieces of 30s, 20s, 40s fabric.
DR: Now will you look for the old fabric for reproduction?
CW: Whatever I can find. I don't really care if it's actually the old fabric.
DR: To try to maintain the same, the look of it?
CW: Yes, and I can close my eyes and look at that Trip Around the World that was done with oranges and it was actually machine quilted so it must have been done by one of these longarm machines that was available back in the 40s. I have a very poorly constructed wedding, Double Wedding Ring quilt that my great grandmother pieced together and I remember pulling it out and looking at it and I was going to fix the old parts to it and somebody said, well you shouldn't, you really shouldn't do that. I said, I'm not satisfied with it, I'm happy that she made the pieces together but I would not be happy with a quilt that looks in this poor a condition so I would have to go back and fix that and that's one of those projects that I will do one of these days.
DR: Uh, Carol, we're getting a little tight on time and before we close, is there some significant comment that you would like to make or do you have any observations that you want to make sure that I didn't miss, that I did miss that you would like to include?
CW: Okay, no, I think that one of the reasons why people are getting involved with hand crafts again is because they feel a loss of communication with other people and by doing this, they can go to a group where everybody is doing the same kind of thing and share their experience with that and it is, when you finish with this quilt, whether it's a pillow or a huge quilt, you have something that you have made and the satisfaction from that is just enormous and I don't think that people--I'm a knitter, I've done crochet, I've done garment construction, but the most pleasure I've ever had has been making quilts.
DR: Thank you so much for letting me interview you today as part of the Quilters' S.O.S.- Save Our Stories project our interview is concluding at about 4:30 on April 26th, 2003, thank you Carol Wilcoxen.
[tape ends.]
Carol Wilcoxen (CW): Well I was born in Washington D.C. during the war, meaning the Second World War, and my father went into the military and we traveled for the next 10 years, in and out of the Washington area all the way to Germany, all the way to California, to Japan and then back again. And when he got out of the service in 1952, we came back to Washington. So I lived most of my life in Washington D.C. from the age of 10 on.
DR: Okay and how long have you been in Delaware?
CW: I came to Delaware in 1998 as a primary care giver for somebody who had Alzheimer's and I don't know whether you were at the meetings at that beginning; I used to bring her with me to the meetings.
DR: No, I never met her.
CW: Yeah, and I was with her for a year and a half and then she went to live with her daughter so I stayed up here because I wasn't going to live in Florida and started taking care of other people and this past year, the person I was caring for who was a COPD patient, which means that she had respiratory problems, died in August and at that point I retired.
DR: Okay. Tell me about the quilt that you brought in today.
CW: This is the quilt that I started about 1987. I took a class before that in making a garment that was a quilted garment. It was a log cabin variation. And then the next thing I made was this quilt which was a "Quilt In A Day" by Eleanor Burns and it's called Lover's Knot and I've made about thirty of these quilts. This was one of the first ones that I did. I started one that was in blues and yellows which I thought my husband would like and he liked this better so this red, white, and blue ended up being my husbands quilt. [laughs.] It's a throw which will fit a twin bed or just be nice to lay under when you're watching television.
DR: You've described it somewhat but can you go into a little bit more detail about what it looks like and what kind of stitches were used and things like that?
CW: Well, this was completely done by machine and it was, since it was the first one that I had done by machine, I have made other quilts but this one was just a really simple quilt that could be realistically made in one week. If you cut it out and put all the pieces together and spend a couple of hours every day, at the end of that time, you would have a finished quilt. The design itself is sort of like a knot, if you look at it, it has a red strip and then there's a blue strip and they both end up being in knots in various places depending on which one you used as the primary, you'll get more of the blue knots or more of the red knots. And then the background is white with little red hearts on it. The secondary print was a red and blue print which also had hearts on it and then the primary color was the red polka dots. White polka dots on a red background and the four different fabrics were used to offset the design and, very simple to make. I have another one here which is the last one I made which is the same pattern but it's, you know, different colors.
DR: What kind of materials are in here? What are the materials in here?
CW: The materials in this one are blend; these were not 100% cotton. The first time I made it, I did go for a high percent cotton but this one when, the colors, the fabrics that I wanted to use ended up being some polyester blends. You can see the white, there's pilling on it that didn't come off. Then also all my cats have been all over it because this is one that sits on my sofa in my living room. [laughs.]
DR: I'd like to know what special meaning this has to you but I can tell that it's part of your life so--
CW: Well, it's a quilt that I use regularly and it has been washing many times. You know, most quilts when you sit down to construct a quilt you don't want to put something together that's going to be thrown in the washing machine, you know, unless it's something that's a quickie and this is that kind of a quilt. I've made lots of these for people with small children or for people who have children in their family and consequently they don't feel bashful about throwing it in the washing machine.
DR: How long have you been quilting?
CW: Well, the first quilt that I put together myself was in 1973. I've started, I saw a pattern in Family Circle Magazine which was done in blues and it was a Trip Around The World and of course being the intrepid seller that I am, I didn't start out small, my first quilt was a king sized bed quilt. It took me ten years to finish it but at that time, we didn't have rotary cutters and mats and things like that by the time I got through cutting all those soy squares, after six months of construction of that, I was so sick of it, I didn't want to see it again. [laughs.] So I put it away for a while, I didn't have a king sized bed, I just knew that that's what I wanted it for eventually and it was in yellows and oranges and browns which were autumn colors.
DR: What inspired you to make the quilt? Why did you decide to try quilting?
CW: Well, my great-grandmother was a quilter and she did everything by hand because she was bed ridden. I got a quilt of hers when I was about 28 or 29 years old and it was a Trip Around The World which was done in oranges which is apparently is another name for it, it's kind of a Kansas, which is where my mother's family is from, Kansas. And there's a special name due to the fact that this is an orange design on it. I didn't realize what it was, I didn't appreciate it for what it was. I let children sleep on it, which means it got wet and you know, urine and stuff like that, but I used it for about fifteen or twenty years before it finally really fell apart. One of these days I'm going to reproduce it because it was one of my favorite quilts. And then a friend of mine who lived in Haverstown was able to get a hold of quilts up there from manufacturers, there were fabric mills up there and they would get the fabric for free and then make them as a community project and then you could buy them very inexpensively. Now this was back in the 60s.
DR: Buy the quilts?
CW: You could buy a quilt for 35 dollars. And I bought about seven or eight of them and they were different varieties. Most of them were scrap quilts using different kinds of fabrics, they were not 100% cotton, they were whatever blend was given to them by the mills and I use those quilt off and on in many varieties, as a guest thing, as a gift for people, and so on. But in 1971, I found some quilt pieces from my mother that had been given to her from her grandmother, which was my great-grandmother, and I really fell in love with those blocks so I took them to somebody, now I wasn't interested in selling at that point, you know, doing quilting at that point, I didn't really understand what quilting was all about and took them to my, to this young lady who was interested in making the quilt and she took it and she put it together and it is the sorry looking excuse for a quilt that you've ever seen in your life and it just broke my heart because those blocks were something that are irreplaceable, there's no way. And I didn't, again, know very much about quilting so I gave her a blanket to put in the middle instead of batting and she did not put it together, you know, she did what a lot of people do with a quilt which is to put the layers together but she didn't bother to stitch them together. [laughs.] And so when it got used and it got thrown in the wash, it literally fell apart. That would have been about 1970, 1971. In 1973, I stopped working for a while and I'd seen this piece that I told you about in the Family Circle and I decided that I was going to try and make a quilt and I read the instructions and, you know, used a little bit of brain power and went to the local public library and got a quilting book and sat down and started cutting out all those thousands of blocks and squares that I needed to make the trip around the world and then the next year I got involved with a group through the local recreation and parks department and she taught us how to make a sampler so that was my second quilt was a sampler. That took me twenty years to finish. [laughs.] And after I got it together I realized the reason it took me so long and she tried to tell me this but I wasn't paying any attention because I didn't like the colors and the colors were Christmas colors. So when I went back to finish it because I decided that I really did want to finish it, I took a very dark forest green which really toned it down a lot. Working with yellow and red is not a fun thing to do for long periods of time. And I figured out why I didn't like that but I did finish it, it was hung in a show, I--this would have been 198-- No, this was after my husband died so it would have been 1993 when it finally got hung in a show. I used it on my bed for a couple of years and then it was destroyed in a fire. And I don't know what happened to the king sized quilt, I think it ended up in a closet in the house where the fire was and I never found it.
DR: You said that the quilt scraps that you got, the quilt squares that you got had belonged to your great-grandmother.
CW: Right.
DR: Do you know of any other quilters in your family?
CW: No, just my great-grandmother. Nobody else that I'm aware of was a quilter. My grandmother on my mother's side was, she had diabetes at a time when diabetes wasn't really known, they didn't really know much about it and she didn't start taking insulin until the '40s when it became available. So she used to pass out all the time and as far as I know, she never did any sewing, did any sort of craft stuff. My mother was a seamstress and a knitter and did things like that until she was unable to continue doing that because of her drinking. So I had been exposed a little bit to these things but not a whole lot and I really had not been exposed to the tradition of quilting. I didn't pick that up until I joined a quilt guild in 1988.
DR: And where was that?
CW: That was in Bowie, Maryland it's a group called the Southern Comforters.
DR: And they were weren't they?
CW: They really were. When I took that course in 1973, I tried to find a quilt guild. The closest one I could find was in Southern Maryland and it had been around for 180 years and it was a bunch of little old ladies who had been around for 180 years. [laughs.] But it was too far away to go on a regular basis so I never joined. I went when I started taking these classes where I took the, made that jacket that I told you about and then started making this quilt in a day, they were starting to come on public television at that point so that there was a place for me to find information about it, there weren't a whole lot of programs available but this was in the early '70s so there really wasn't anything that I can remember on television except for Georgia Bonesteel's lap quilting. And lap quilting did not appeal to me.
DR: What is lap quilting?
CW: Well lap quilting is where you take a block, you make, you construct your block and then you actually quilt that block before you go to the next block and it's a much easier to handle it so it was a nice way to hand it, but somehow or another it didn't penetrate.
DR: You like the big projects?
CW: Well, I like the big project and I certainly wouldn't have objected to learning how to do it that way but that's not how I was taught. The one class that I took with a teacher from the recreation and parks department in Prince Georgia's County--
DR: That's in Maryland, right?
CW: That's in Maryland, it's right outside the District of Colombia and she was an old time quilter style, you sat down and you drafted all of your pattern blocks, you didn't pick something out of a book or a magazine or whatever, you actually constructed your own designs. And so it was a very good learning experience but it was an awful lot of detail as well. The first thing that I quilted by hand was a little sewing pocket that I made out of a nine patch squares and I did the nine patches on the front and then the back of it I did a different version of the same patch so I actually hand constructed that, put it together, made this little pocket and you could put your sewing things inside it.
DR: You wrap it tight around your waist like an apron?
CW: Yes, right, like an apron pocket.
DR: And it was just there?
CW: It was there for you to use, which is really funny because my stomach wasn't as big as it is now but I still have a hard time [laughs.]. This is a little sewing packet that I made in, you can see, I made it in 1993 which was something that I constructed after seeing somebody else's version and this actually has fabric that has, that shows sewing items, thimble and needles and thread and so on and I love it. I can put everything I need in it including scissors and a thimble, which I forgot, marking tools and thread and pins and needles and whatever. You just pick it up and go, so it's really nice. I find this much handier than the pocket that I made. [laughs.]
DR: Have you ever used quilting to get through a difficult time?
CW: Yes. My husband died in 1992 in January, committed suicide and--
DR: That must have been difficult.
CW: It was very, very difficult.
DR: And did the--
CW: My quilt guild was very, very supportive and one of the things that they did for me was instead of giving me flowers, they made quilt blocks that were flowers, that were appliquéd flowers. And I didn't do anything with it at that point because it was too painful for me to do it but I can remember going to a friends, I went to Georgia for a couple of months while I was waiting for a house to become available and I can remember just sitting there and looking at the block that I was supposed to be constructing and not knowing what in the world I was doing. [laughs.] I didn't even know how I got where I was sitting and the block I constructed at that point was totally wrong so when I came back to Louis, I had to make a new one because that one didn't work. [laughs.] But quilting has always been very soothing to me. I'm in the process and have been in the process for the last four or five years of working on a white on white quilt which is in a stand with a very large hoop, it's a 26 inch hoop, maybe it's 36, anyways it's a big hoop, the diameter across. And I have used free form quilt frames which we made ourselves. I bought a used quilt frame from somebody, but it wasn't long enough to hold my quilt so although I still have all the parts to it, I prefer to use the round hoop one because it's easier to work with in a small area.
DR: I'd like to see that when we're finished.
CW: I'm three-quarters of the way through it, I've done more in the last six months on that quilt than I've done in the whole five years I've had it on the frame. [laughs.]
DR: Are there any aspects of quilting that you don't enjoy?
CW: Not really. It takes me, you know when I'm taking care of people it's very hard for me to do things. I have a quilt here that I pieced when I was taking care of this last person but I knew that I could do the hand piecing and be in the same room with her without having to lug this great big thing around with me and I decided I wanted something for myself that was hand pieced. The first quilt that I did hand piecing on was a Grandmother's Flower Garden which I made for my best friend's daughter when she went to college and it took me five years to get it put together and quilt it and I hung it in a show and then gave it to her. [laughs.]
DR: Now, did she get it before she went to college?
CW: No, no, she didn't stay in college, it was--she said, 'You told me that that was my high school graduation present.' I said, no, I gave you a pre-made comforter which was your high school graduation present and this was supposed to be your college graduation present but she didn't remember that, so I said, okay. [laughs.] Anyways, I ended up giving that to her, you know, five years down the road.
DR: Let's talk about quilts in general.
CW: Okay.
DR: What is it about quilts, what do you think makes a really great quilt? What's the most important aspect of it?
CW: To me, the design is important but it's also the love that you give to the person that you're making that quilt for. Many people have asked me to make a quilt for them and how much would I charge them for it and I've always told them that it would cost more than you could afford. [laughs.] But I have made over 150 quilts and I only have one, two, three, four, probably four quilts left in my personal possession because I give them away. One Christmas, a family friend of ours who had eight children, I made eight quilts for them for Christmas.
DR: And all for one Christmas? Wow.
CW: That's right. But they were, you know, they were young children and there was a teenage boy who was going into high school and I made him this pattern, this--
DR: What is it called again?
CW: This is a Lover's Knot.
DR: Lover's Knot.
CW: I made this pattern in a, you know, a male dominated color scheme, I think it was black and what else, green, I think the background was black and then the colors were green and orange and yellow or something like that. And often I will use as the backing material, I will use something that is of value to them so that they really have two quilts rather than just one. And you can make this into a quillow which is a pillow quilt where you just roll it up and put it inside of the container so that it stays in one place, and kids like that, you know, that's something that they can throw around a room and not worry about it getting damaged or whatever, and I've made several of those.
DR: How does that work?
CW: Its called a quillow and what you do is you make you're pattern, you know, you do your construction for your top and then you take one extra block and you put that one the back of the quilt inside out, alright, so if you were showing this quilt right now, this has a sheet backing on it, you would take this sheet backing, put it on the one side of the quilt, of this quilt block that you're putting together and then you put the inside, which is the outside of your--the fancy part of your quilt, you lay that on the inside, stitch around it, roll it all together, put it inside, turn it inside out, and that way you have the design from the front of it to make it look like a nice pillow and but there's a place for you to store the rest of the quilt.
DR: I see.
CW: So, it's called a quillow.
DR: Sort of like a carrying pack for it.
CW: Yes, yes, and protection.
DR: Talking about design, does, what part does color play?
CW: Oh, it can make all the difference in the world. If you take, one of the things that I do when I'm, what's the word they use for it, I'm having a senior moment, where you see what the finished product is going to look like, I will take and maybe do three different versions of the block to see which one I like best. With electric quilts and things like that, you could do it on the machine instead of do it physically.
DR: Electric quilts?
CW: Electric quilt is a computer generated quilting pattern, a program that you can sit down and you can actually draw a section of this to make your decision on how you want the things to lay out. That was not available, I guess the first one came out about 1990, '91, there abouts and in the last 10 years they've done a huge turn over. Barbara Brackman has a book that's supposed to be all of the quilt blocks and their names from 1970 back to the beginning of time.
DR: Wow. Now this is in a book?
CW: It's called "The Encyclopedia of Quilt Blocks" and these are not appliquéd blocks, these are pieced blocks and there are about 4,500 different names, different pieces, etcetera. And actually, there are more than that because since 1970 there has been a resurgence of quilting and there are a lot of designs that are, you know, it's the same block but it's been turned around in so many different ways using color in a various way. I like bright vivid colors. I choose to go in that direction although as I get older, I'm tending to go a little bit more muted. But I'm not a person who likes antique-y looking things, I like things that are, probably because of my color, the colors that I like, I like things that are pure colors rather than that are antiquated or old looking colors and it isn't a question of you know, one's better than the other, it's just prefer the brighter colors.
DR: Can you see, do you think that there is a place in museums for quilts?
CW: Absolutely, absolutely. I used to go down to the Smithsonian all the time because they have a wonderful collection and there's a quilt in there that is a white on white Trapunto style quilt which was done about 1834 and the design in the middle of it is a fair, it's a country fair and you see horses with men with stove top type hats, women with, you know, children and animals and so on as pets walking around this quilt. I don't know how you could get a picture of it because it is white on white and the shadow work is what you see the designs with but it is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life. When I first started getting involved with quilting on my second go around, because I figure the early '70s was one go around and then the mid '80s and on was my second go around. I went to a quilt show at the Woodlawn Plantation which is about four or five miles from George Washington's home in Mount Vernon and they had quilts there that you would not believe. A woman took the background of a quilt using a fabric that had a little bit of design in it and changed the color of that quilt by using colored quilting thread for the background and she did stitches about an eighth of an inch apart, you know, rows of stitching about an eighth of an inch apart.
DR: Oh my.
CW: And I can remember looking at that quilt and I wasn't into taking pictures of quilts at that point and I wish that I had a picture of that. It was one of the most beautiful quilts I've ever seen. And that kind of thing is what got me started and going. They had a book at that time that had a history of quilting, places where you could buy quilting supplies, guilds where you could meet people who were doing the same kind of thing you were doing, shops that sold 100% fabric and that were going after the quilter and etcetera. And this was about 1984, 1985 and it was before I really got into doing the quilting that I've been doing the last 20 years.
DR: The 150 quilts that you've made, has that all been in the last 20 years?
CW: Yes. More so than, I made two, I think I made three quilts the first 10 years.
DR: That comes out to--
CW: A quilt every three or four years.
DR: About 8 quilts a year.
CW: From 1920, I mean, from 1983, '84 thereabouts.
DR: Wow, that's a big production.
CW: Yeah, but that was--a lot of that quilting that I did in those days was machine work. I only did one or two quilts in that period of time that was totally hand work.
DR: Well, one of the things that I was going to ask you is how do you feel about machine quilting versus hand quilting versus longarm quilting?
CW: I think they each have their place. I hate to see a quilt top languishing someplace in a closet and not being shown and used and so on. I met a woman in Bowie, Maryland who was, I think she was originally from Pennsylvania. She married someone by the name of Lancaster, not Lancaster, Lancaster. But her family name, she was Hungarian, her family was Hungarian and she didn't start quilting until she was in her mid 60s and she made probably three quilts a year almost all total hand work and every once in a while she'd drag a quilt out and give it to one of her grandchildren. [laughs.] But for the most part, I mean, she had quilts that were made with the big medallions that were pansies, she had another one which was an old fashioned quilt which was a Sunbonnet Sue variation, the older variation of Sunbonnet Sue. She would find a quilt in a magazine and just fall in love with it and she loved to do scrap quilts and that's what I'm into now as you can see this is not a scrap quilt, this is a quilt that I'm showing everybody but the more I get involved with things the more I like the look of scrappy even if you have to plan it out, that kind of thing. [laughs.] I just like that finished look, it's so bright and vibrant and, you know there's so many interesting fabrics and if you use fabrics, if you were a dress maker as I was, there are a lot of things out there that you maybe made into clothing, garment construction that you could put into the quilt. The Grandmother's Flower Garden that I made for my niece, we'll call her my niece, I had her soft ball uniform, I had the clothes that I made for her when she was a little girl, baby outfits that were made, clothes that had a significance to her when she was a young teenager, so there were a lot of scraps of things in there that had value to her as a memento and that's one reason why I wanted to make that for her. Her mother wasn't really that interested and I can remember talking to my grandmother on my father's side who was born and bred in New York City and I asked her one time, I said, 'Did you ever make a quilt?' And she looked at me down her nose and said, 'No, we didn't have to do things like that.' [laughs.] And I said, 'Well, you missed a wonderful opportunity.' Now truthfully, I think if she had ever done anything like that it would have been more in the line with crazy quilting because she was born from people who were Victorian in their thinking and background and her mother was French and her father was English and they came to the United States when he was retired from the Diplomatic Core from Great Britain and I don't know, I'm sure he became an American citizen but his two daughters were born in the United States.
DR: Do you think that quilting is traditionally an American thing?
CW: I did for a long time but of course now we know that quilting went back to the Egyptians, I mean there was quilting done in the Egyptian times and I think anytime that people needed a means of getting warmth, they found someway to put fabric construction together. You know the great tapestry of the battle of Hastings which was really more cool than it was quilting but they did use Trapunto and things like that and so it was a combination of those things and I understand that's supposed to be 30 feet long so you know--
DR: That would keep a lot of people warm.
CW: But it was done as a more as an artistic thing than it was as a bed thing. But I know that the English and the Irish used what we would call Whole Cloth quilting as a means of warmth for many years. Now we're not talking about people who lived on the farm, we're talking about people who lived in towns, cities, people who had a little bit of time, I mean, if you've ever tried to do any stitching when it's almost pitch black out there, I mean, until this century when lighting was really readily available it was very difficult for people to do that, to do the hand work that was required and women, this was one acceptable means of artistic expression that women could do and that's certainly more obvious as the years have gone by that that was something women could enjoy doing and could show off what they did. More so than knitting although knitting certainly had a lot of wonderful things. In the early '70s when I first started looking at quilting, I was looking at the whole arrangement of fabric and or hand work and I went to the 1967 World's Fair in Montreal and they had Czechlovakian, I don't remember what they called them, containers that are filled with sawdust and then they would do lace work and I decided I wanted to try that but that is so much work and it felt like so much more work than hand piecing quilting, don't ask me why, there are things that you get attached to simply because it makes it more interesting. I tried to do macramé, I spent about $150 when $150 was a lot of money and I made a couple of hangings and I really didn't enjoy it, I said I'd rather go do something else, but once I got hooked on quilting, I don't even want to do fabric construction anymore, garment construction, I want to make quilts and when I make a quilt, I'm not talking about a wall hanging, I'm talking about something you wrap up in and you know, there are people who like to do wall hangings, that's fine and dandy, but that's not my cup of tea. I want a quilt, when it's finished, that somebody can roll up in. I've made them for little children and I've made them for really big children. [laughs.]
DR: You've hit on the significance of women and their artistic endeavors as far as quilts are concerned, could you expand on that a little bit?
CW: Well, my grandmother, my great-grandmother who was a classic example. Here's a woman who was not able to walk very much, I don't know what her physical diagnosis was, she died in 1951 and I can remember coming into the house and being upset that my mother was crying and I asked my father why is she crying and he said, 'Her grandmother just died and she's very sad about that so we're going to go out and let her have some time to herself.' But she was bed ridden the last, probably 10 years of her life and it was one of the few things she could do. She apparently wasn't much of a reader and she really enjoyed you know, putting the blocks together and I have some of the blocks that she made which were never finished and one of the things that I'm astonished with as much work as people have gone through to finish this thing that they haven't left enough seam allowance here and there and rather than go back and reconstruct it and fix it, you know, it just put it in the pile and someday they'll do something with it. I remember when I showed the quilt that I had wanted to be made to the teacher that I had in 1973, she said, 'Well, you could take it all apart and reconstruct the blocks and make them just a tiny bit smaller so that the finished product would be well put together.' I said, 'No thank you.' I said, 'I've done garment reconstruction for years, I don't want to do that anymore. [laughs.] But I certainly would like to duplicate that pattern.' So she sat down and we figured out how to get a nine inch block out of that pattern. And I've never seen it, it looks a little bit like the Weather Vane block but in the center of it is a cross. It's a nine patch but it's done as a cross and then you've got diamonds all the way around it going in different directions, and that's the block. So one of these days, I will sit down and I will construct a completed block like that but I will probably go look for old pieces of 30s, 20s, 40s fabric.
DR: Now will you look for the old fabric for reproduction?
CW: Whatever I can find. I don't really care if it's actually the old fabric.
DR: To try to maintain the same, the look of it?
CW: Yes, and I can close my eyes and look at that Trip Around the World that was done with oranges and it was actually machine quilted so it must have been done by one of these longarm machines that was available back in the 40s. I have a very poorly constructed wedding, Double Wedding Ring quilt that my great grandmother pieced together and I remember pulling it out and looking at it and I was going to fix the old parts to it and somebody said, well you shouldn't, you really shouldn't do that. I said, I'm not satisfied with it, I'm happy that she made the pieces together but I would not be happy with a quilt that looks in this poor a condition so I would have to go back and fix that and that's one of those projects that I will do one of these days.
DR: Uh, Carol, we're getting a little tight on time and before we close, is there some significant comment that you would like to make or do you have any observations that you want to make sure that I didn't miss, that I did miss that you would like to include?
CW: Okay, no, I think that one of the reasons why people are getting involved with hand crafts again is because they feel a loss of communication with other people and by doing this, they can go to a group where everybody is doing the same kind of thing and share their experience with that and it is, when you finish with this quilt, whether it's a pillow or a huge quilt, you have something that you have made and the satisfaction from that is just enormous and I don't think that people--I'm a knitter, I've done crochet, I've done garment construction, but the most pleasure I've ever had has been making quilts.
DR: Thank you so much for letting me interview you today as part of the Quilters' S.O.S.- Save Our Stories project our interview is concluding at about 4:30 on April 26th, 2003, thank you Carol Wilcoxen.
[tape ends.]
Collection
Citation
“Carol Wilcoxen,” Quilters' S.O.S. -- Save Our Stories, accessed October 14, 2024, https://qsos.quiltalliance.org/items/show/1609.