Linda Colsh

Linda Colsh

MD20816-005

Linda Colsh

Le Rowell

05/25/2005

Moda Fabrics/United Notions

Bethesda, Maryland

Le Rowell (LR): This is Le Rowell and today's date is May 25, 2005. The time is 1:20 p.m. and I'm conducting an interview with Linda Colsh for the Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories, a project for The Alliance for American Quilts and we are in my home here in Bethesda, Maryland and thank you Linda for taking time out of a very [laughs.] busy schedule to come and do this interview. It's really a pleasure.

Linda Colsh (LC): Thank you.

LR: Tell me about the Touchstone Quilt that you selected for your interview.

LC: Well, when you asked for a Touchstone Quilt, I really had to think about what I would bring and I wanted something that was fairly typical of the techniques I've been using in the last 10-15 years and because I do a lot of surface design, I chose this one which has a lot of discharge and overdyeing and that sort of work in it. I also wanted to find something that was made with a theme that was important to me. This was made at the time of, well, actually it was before the Afghanistan war that we were involved in and it was a time when I was very concerned about Afghani women. You couldn't see them. They were in dire straits and I felt that attention needed to be called to the plight of the Afghani women at that time. In fact, it is black because at that time you couldn't find photographs of the women and later when I saw that the burqas are really quite brightly colored in Afghanistan, I realized that black was not the right color, but the quilt was already made. Also, it is a personal favorite of mine. It was difficult to make because it has all these openings in it. The point of the openings is that when it hangs, I want it to hang in the round so that people are walking around it and you have people on one side looking through the openings at people on the other side so that you really get the feeling of looking through the small grills opening in a burqa and how difficult it really is to see much.

LR: Describe some of these openings.

LC: They're gridded, a whole variety of grids. Some of them have little strips that I've made into a grid. This little piece of fabric here, this little piece of crochet, and there are a couple other ones like this, were made by my friend Monique Gilbert's mother, who has since passed away, so that's really kind of a nice women's touch to me that I have the mother of a friend crocheted a piece for this quilt--a little bit of her handwork is included.

LR: And Monique Gilbert--

LC: Monique Gilbert is my best friend in Belgium and she's also a quilter, an art quilter. I've known her since 1990, met her through a Japanese friend. And really technically it was a nightmare to put together because each one of these individual squares I had to, they're all faced openings. They're faced on both sides, then they have to be sewn together and then you're left with all the raw edges which, nowadays, I'd probably just do them sort of like an appliqué and stitch across where the seams meet. However, this is all pieced. I am a patchworker, that's the part I like best.

LR: Is there a batting?

LC: Yes there's batting, there's not only batting all the way through the whole piece, but both sides of the sleeve are batted also: there's batting in both sides of the sleeve. I had to figure out how to do that sleeve. I've never done one like it since.

LR: Explain the sleeve.

LC: It is the one side goes--

LR: Pull it towards us [Linda gets up and brings the quilt closer to us to show the sleeve.].

LC: This is just an extension of the quilt. So this was put on, it was actually put on as an extension of the quilt and folded up and then the same was done on the backside so that quilt actually stopped here and then I had two extensions and then the binding sewed the two extensions together on the top.

LR: So each side looks like a complete quilt.

LC: A complete quilt, right.

LR: But it has a sleeve.

LC: Right. And this the front side of the quilt if you will--

LR: Is that the colors? With the colors?

LC: No, the black side is the front side.

LR: The black is--

LC: The black side I consider the front side it's like the outside of the--

LR: Of the burqa.

LC: I used a variety of different textures of black fabrics. I have velours and I doubt that they are satins but there are shiny sateen weaves and plain cottons--all because I wanted some texture and some visual interest, but very low key, very subdued. The edges of the back facings show on the front side which to me is like an indication of what's coming on the backside, when you see the back side where I used a lot of flame look fabrics that I had discharged. Because people have emotions…I just feel like the women and all their feelings were all being hidden so I used a whole variety of these fiery discharged fabrics. I guess I--have you done discharge?

LR: No, that was my next question. Talk a minute about the discharge process.

LC: If you take a commercial black fabric and discharge it, you really never know what color you're going to get because it's my understanding that fabric manufacturers take fabrics that haven't sold or unsuccessful marketing ventures or whatever and then they overdye them black. So it may have green fabric underneath it or it may have started out as some other color. There's something also I think in the black dye, so that most will go to a beige or an orange. People who do surface design are always looking for the black that discharges to white so that then they can overdye it any color, but I find that most of them will discharge to an orange color.

LR: How do you do--what's the process?

LC: Bleach. I use bleach. I dilute the bleach. I have occasionally had disasters where it will eat through the fabric.

LR: [laughs.]

LC: But you have to stop the process with a product called antichlor. The chemical name is sodium bisulfite. (There's also sodium bisulfate which is a different chemical.) Antichlor is the only product that will actually stop the chlorine in the bleach. There are other ways to do discharge but this piece here just happens to be all bleach.

LR: And the fabrics you purchased where?

LC: All over the place. In fact, when I was making the black side, I put out an urgent email to my friend Carrie Arnold in California and I said, 'Carrie, I need more black.' [laughs.] So she went out and sent me a whole package of half-yards of this black and that black that she had gotten. Carrie and I met in Seoul many, many years ago and we've kept in touch. She's a big inspiration to me all the time.

LR: That was in Korea?

LC: Yes. My husband was assigned to Korea from 1988 till 1990 and Jay and I could go along with him. We didn't know what to expect. I looked at Korea as a great adventure and it was a great time. It was really a big learning time and that tour probably had a huge influence on my work. I think people are influenced when something is different, something is out of the ordinary in their life and that was so out of the ordinary that I think that an awful lot of that has stayed with me.

LR: What was it that was out of the ordinary?

LC: The first thing you do is you get off the plane and you can't read a thing. There aren't even A's and B's and C's [laughs.]--there are little circles and ovals and straight lines. Right there, language was entirely different. One thing that's really shown up, not in this quilt, but in a lot of my quilts is that Korea is a floor sitting society and the first time you're in a skirt and you have to sit down gracefully to have a meal with your Korean hosts you realize, uh oh, there are no chairs. [laughs.] So you kind of think about things like that. I do journals. I keep notebooks. They're non-linear, I mean, I'm not very disciplined about it or anything; but, very shortly after we arrived in Korea, I realized that I was writing a lot about the fact that there were no chairs. We had chairs at our house; but, on the economy, when you would go out to a restaurant or to a friend's house or whatever, you sat on the floor. And so the chair kind of became important to me because it wasn't there. So then I started thinking more and more about it and then your mind, my mind anyway, not everybody's, but my mind goes to things like children's musical chairs--a game where you're constantly moving around and around and around the chairs and there's always one missing. So I've used chairs as a symbol for a way that I've lived my life.

LR: How have you used that?

LC: In my first quilt with chairs, the whole center of it was chairs. I drafted my own block and pieced--how many chairs? There are probably 50 chairs, maybe more, in that quilt. It's a rectangular block--I think it's four and a half inches by nine inches. When you put two chairs together, you have a square block and I actually offset them a little bit so that they kind of move up and down. That movement, to me, gives a little bit of nervousness, a little bit of anxiety, excitement or whatever to it. And I have another quilt where I've used the chair as a sort of an antidote to high-tech. It's a computer quilt and the chairs don't bounce up and down. They're very stable chairs on that quilt, but I've used the chairs as sort of a low-tech answer to the high-tech. I mean, we all sit there at our computer screens going into cyberspace and wild worlds and all this kind of thing but we all need that chair to sit on. [laughs.]

LR: When did you start making quilts?

LC: I started--I guess I took my first quilting class in 1981. I worked up until I was 34 years old. Quilting is time intensive and I didn't have time to do that when I was working. I was painting in the evenings, but that was something that I could pick up and put down that wasn't so labor intensive. So when I stopped working and married my husband Jim who was in the army, he's retired now, and I knew we'd be moving around, I gave up my career and started making quilts--well, actually I explored a lot of different crafts at that time. We were stationed at West Point and they had a great arts & crafts program there. So I did some folk art painting. I did some pottery-- that was a disaster [laughs.] I still have a couple of pots that I made but I don't show them to anybody. I started quilting and I really, really enjoyed that and then about a year later, when I was pregnant, I realized that quilting would be something that I could do with a young child so I kept on with that. Then of course, later on when I started dyeing my own fabrics and things like that, I realized I could put the art back into the sewing and that was perfect for me.

LR: What was your first memory of a quilt?

LC: Oh, it wasn't a patchwork quilt but it was a very comforting thing. My grandmother didn't make a lot of quilts but she made a few, and she made me a comforter. I had wanted a little flowered cotton on the back of it and I wanted it really fluffy and so she filled it with down. I don't know how she did it but she filled it with down and the top was shiny satin, oh satin, and I was a little girl and I just loved that. [laughs.] And I remember, I must have been young because, I remember it in the bedroom in Maplewood, New Jersey. My grandparents moved in 1954 to Bayhead. So I would have been under seven when I remember that quilt, oh how I loved that quilt.

LR: So your grandmother was a quiltmaker. Were there other quiltmakers in your family?

LC: Her daughter, my aunt made quilts and to this day, I think she still makes quilts and she's in her 80s now, but again, not too many. She does other stuff, other projects too. The artistic side, the sewing side is on my father's side. My mother hemmed skirts. [laughs.]

LR: How does quiltmaking impact your family?

LC: Tremendously. My son will tell people, 'This is my mother the famous quilter.' At least when he was younger he would say that. My husband is extremely supportive, which is fantastic and I think necessary. He's actually made quilts, he may not want that in the interview but he's actually made a few. [laughs.] He's too busy now, but he has. It was a case of his offering me advice on my designs and I said, 'Well, here's pencil and here's paper and I'll show you how to use the sewing machine.' And he did, actually, he made a few.

LR: Has quilt making ever taken you through a difficult time?

LC: I haven't had many difficult times since I've been making quilts. I've had a very good life, I've been very lucky, I've been very happy, I would say yes, it has the potential but I really haven't had an extremely rough period that I needed it to get me through.

LR: But strong convictions on certain issues--

LC: I think they're very important.

LR: They're touchstone.

LC: Oh yes I feel very strongly about certain issues. In fact it's sometimes difficult for me not to get too political in what I have to say and not to be too liberal. I have a feeling there's probably a Bring Our Boys and Our Girls Home quilt in the not too distant future for me. I'm real concerned right now about what's going on and in Iraq and I think that's a quilt that's possibly coming very soon.

LR: Talk for a minute about some of your quilt related activities - exhibitions, shows that you've been in.

LC: Tomorrow we head off to Ohio which is probably the pinnacle of my career. [laughs.] I've always felt that one of the highest achievements you can have as an art quilter is to be juried into Quilt National; and, after many tries, this time for Quilt National '05 I have a quilt that's been juried in so I'm very, very pleased about that. I also had a quilt in Visions in 1996.

LR: That's in Southern California?

LC: That's in Southern California and that was difficult for me. I had a quilt…one quilt was going to Lyon, France, to Quilt Expo Europa there. I don't remember which number it was but to the one that was in Lyon. I was moving at that time from California back to Europe. I wasn't going to get there in time for the opening of Lyon. I had a quilt juried into Visions in San Diego at about the same time. I was going to have to leave California just before that big opening, so I missed both of them. But that was a busy time. I've had quilts in a lot of shows, I believe in supporting small shows if you can. I have a small quilt group in Europe. We started up an art quilt group. (I had a group of traditional quilters also but now I'm more focused on the art quilt group.) There are six of us and we've been working to get our name, Q.Art, known and our image known around Europe for a long time. This year, we have succeeded in getting two major exhibitions that are coming up, so I'm real pleased with that.

LR: Where are you living now?

LC: I'm living in Everberg, Belgium, just outside Brussels. We've lived in Belgium since 1990, except for two years when we were back in California. We still have our house in California. We will return eventually to the United States somewhere. We don't know what coast or what state or anything, but my connection to Maryland is I grew up here. I grew up in Annapolis and lived here most of my life.

LR: And have family here.

LC: And I have family here, yes. All the way from the east to the west [laughs.] in Maryland.

LR: Can you talk a minute more about your quilting activities in Europe and the cross cultural impact?

LC: Oh the impact of the cultures has been great. I would say not as literal in imagery and that kind of thing as Korea has been, but there's a certain feel and it was gradual. Along about 1997 or 1998, I had people starting to say, 'Well your quilts don't look American.' And yet, I couldn't see the change.

LR: What was that change?

LC: I still don't know.

LR: You still don't know?

LC: I still don't know. I think Europe is not homogeneous like America is. I can look at a quilt, of course this is not when you're looking at your own work, but I can quite often tell you if the quilt has come out of France or if it's come out of Germany or possibly England. They all have traditions and elements that they bring to their work that you can see and it doesn't disappear. The English are great embroiderers and so their stitch work is wonderful and the French of course have that feel for fabric. I mean, they have that whole couture tradition. I would say that some of that quilts that are closest in my opinion to American quilts would be maybe the Dutch quilts and they have a patchwork tradition there. You can go to their Open Air Museum near the Kröller-Müller Art Museum and that has a collection of antique quilts. There's, quite a bond, between American quilts and what the Dutch have made in the past. And I think that shows in their work today, I mean, they have more of a tradition. The Germans have no quilt tradition that I know of, when you go and stay at hotels there, you don't get quilt, you get a duvet. It's colder there. The Germans have done tremendous work with color. If you look at Inge Hueber's work or some of the other German quilters, the color work is what really stands out to me. And there are other countries, for instance Italy, where just in the time that I've been in Europe more and more Italian quilts are showing up in quilt shows. It's warm there; they don't have a tradition so it's new to them. I'm seeing an increase in the number of quilts, certainly art quilts that are coming out of the southern regions.

LR: What do you find most pleasing about quiltmaking?

LC: Oh, the process [laughs.]. Now, when I set out to make an art quilt, I probably get the most satisfaction these days out of the surface design -- of making the fabrics before I even sit down at the sewing machine. I do a lot of dyeing; I'm printing more of my own fabrics. Now I've gotten into making my own images on the computer with my digital camera. I go out and I take photos and then I work in Photoshop and I can use those images then to cut stamps or make silk screens or I have a machine, a Vistafax which is similar to a Thermofax and I can make very interesting silk screens on that machine. Wendy Huhn taught me the process five years ago, I think. I took a workshop with Wendy and that really changed my work a lot. Actually, this quilt, my touchstone quilt, doesn't have any screenprinting in it. This touchstone quilt is before the Thermofax, but I've been doing surface design work since I moved to California. I started making quilts in '81 when we lived as I said in New York. I started very traditionally. I didn't even make a quilt the first year. I just made quilted pillows. The first quilt I made was for my son. In fact, it wasn't quite finished when he was born, but I got it done. I tell this story when I lecture: when I got out to California one of the first things we did was we drove down to Big Sur. I don't know if you've ever done that, but I was used to New York, where if you drove down the side of a mountain hundreds of feet above an ocean and you were just creeping along the edge of this mountain side, you'd have walls or you might even have chain link fence or all kinds of protective things and certainly a good size shoulder. In California, we didn't have that. You could drive right off the edge of that road and that to me was sort of a metaphor for the whole "you can try anything." You might fall off the side of the mountain, but you just might get to a real interesting place or see some really great stuff. That opened my eyes a lot and it really changed the way I looked at what I was doing with the patchwork and I don't know if I would have stayed with it if I had just continued to do traditional patterns. There wasn't enough individuality there I don't think for me.

LR: But it was experiences like this that inspired the--

LC: Oh yes, definitely and actually my first art quilt happened because of being in California--that was the first time I actually sat down and said, 'I'm going to make a quilt that's a piece of art.' I look at it now and it's not all that original but it is about driving down to Big Sur. At the time, I didn't connect the two but since then I've thought, that really is, you know, this business of not being protected at every turn and being able to take risks and soar or fail.

LR: What do you think makes a great quilt?

LC: I think, one obvious answer would be fine craftsmanship, technical prowess, but, for me that's not--that should be invisible. Fine craftsmanship should be there but it should be secondary to the visual impact, to the statement the quilt has to make. I think it should be a given that at a certain level, you can craft a good quilt. It doesn't have to be perfection. Many, many quilts in shows technically just knock your socks off, but they don't have any soul, they don't speak and I think they have to have that impact, they have to have that something which comes from the maker, I think.

LR: So what makes a great quilter?

LC: [laughs.] Someone that has a voice and a vision and who has something to say. I really think, and it doesn't have to shout. Some musician (I can't remember who it was) was talking about if you want to make an impression, just sing really loud. But you don't really have to shout. It's a feeling that's clear when you look at a quilt. It's like obscenity - you know it when you see it. [laughs.]

LR: [laughs.] So how do great quilters learn the art of quilting? Especially how to design a pattern, choose fabrics?

LC: Well, I have an art history background: I have two degrees in art history; and I think that's probably responsible both for my desire to create and the ability to look at things and analyze. I know composition. I spent years looking at art and figuring out how to lead the eye around the canvas. Leading the eye around the quilt is the same thing. I'm not real good on three dimensional things -- that's why I pretty much stick to two dimensional work. It's more interesting to me and I can do it more successfully. I think a great quilter needs to know certain basic techniques. I think you need to know geometry, but not in the math sense but just in the practical sense. I think obviously you need to know how to use a sewing machine or, if you want, how to hand sew; but you get to a certain age and you can't do as much hand sewing as you used to do. I feel that people need to know how to draft a pattern and make templates. I don't make templates very much any more, my piecing has actually simplified back to squares and rectangles. There still is a lot of math involved because I still sit down and draw the quilt out. I've all these drawings with little measurements all over. It's very messy, but I still use math in putting the top together.

LR: How do you do that? Do you do it on a computer?

LC: No that I do with piece of paper and pencil. I don't have the patience. My computer's not in the same room as my sewing room. For the first time in our lives, our house is set up so well for my art and quiltmaking. [laughs.] We have a basement, a big basement and I can do all the messy stuff down there. That's my "wet studio" for surface design. And then I actually have the luxury of having a bedroom in this house that is my sewing studio. After having sewn in a little tiny corner underneath a breakfast bar and all kinds of things, I've gradually taken over more and more space as we've moved house. The computer's in another room entirely. I do a lot on the computer but it's more before I actually make the fabric. I've designed quilts on the computer but once I get to the actual sewing phase, I find that going back to the computer is more of a pain than sitting there and just roughing it out in pencil on scrap paper.

LR: How do you feel about hand quilting versus machine quilting?

LC: I don't do much hand work anymore at all. I loved hand work and for many, many years, I only hand quilted. I only have one quilt (and that's not even finished) that's completely hand pieced. I felt that those were stitches that didn't show. So I didn't feel the time and the effort that went into piecing them was worth it. I don't feel it's a strong a seam either. So I don't hand piece anything anymore. Hand quilting? I admire people who can hand quilt well. In fact, the quilt show you had in Luxembourg at the castle in Bourglinster probably had my last, my greatest hand quilting. At that point, I didn't have arthritis in my fingers or anything and I really worked hard to get stitches very even and very small. I realized with that quilt, I wasn't ever going to do better than that- the eyes were going, the hands were getting sore, and so I said, 'We're going to learn to machine quilt and we're going to learn to do that well.' That would have been 1992 or '93. I think that was a turning point. That was also great fun to be in that castle that night.

LR: Wonderful show. Why is quiltmaking important in your life?

LC: Oh it's a means of expression. I think, certain loud mouths have to get their ideas out somehow [laughs.] and for me that's the way I say what I want to say--it's good for the soul. I think it's very relaxing. It's good for me mentally and I really enjoy parts of my process too. I mentioned the surface design and the piecing. Those two are probably the most important parts of the process for me. The quilting sometimes is less satisfying than the patching and the surface design. But another important part for me that not everybody does is that I need time away from it. I jog everyday, I have a nice farm road that I can go out my front door and down through the woods and I'm in the farm fields. I'm away from the phone, I'm away from the distractions, I can't say, 'Hmm, let me try that and sit down at the sewing machine and go do it.' I really have to work things out when I'm out there without anything. Not even a pencil and I think that's an important part of anybody's artistic process that often gets overlooked. People need to think about things. I think Paul Gauguin said 'I look when I close my eyes,' or something like that, or no, 'I see better when I close my eyes,' something like that. And that's important; you do need time away from the actual doing.

LR: In what ways, do you think quilts have special meaning for women's history in America?

LC: Well certainly it's a woman dominated field. Men have been involved and done well but I think it's definitely still a woman's form of expression. A woman is more likely to turn to needlework. There's the whole, and I am an early feminist and I worked hard, hard, hard for the woman's movement when I was working and after, I still am. But I do feel there are some differences in things. Women, I noticed that when I read through some of your other Save Our Story interviews, almost everybody mentions family. I mean everybody talks about their children, they talk about their husband, their mother, their grandmother, it is a family thing. You don't just bring yourself to it, you make quilts for other people, they're warm, they're comforting, and those are all things that I think women think about and want to do. They want to protect, they want to comfort. Women are the caregivers in most cases. And I think that's probably why women tend to make textile work and quilts and embroidery and all the needle arts.

LR: How do we encourage this in young people?

LC: I'm not even sure you need to encourage it in young people. I think young people, they're busy. Our son Jay, for example, is just getting out of college and he's going on to graduate school but he's got to think about his job and an apartment and he doesn't have time for things like art or whatever. He probably would not sew although he does know how to sew. I think people have to come to it when they're ready and I think people do. I think there are certain arts and certain things that people do when they're at a level of maturity, when they've got a body of experience that they want to coalesce and make something out of and then toss it back out to the world and say, 'This is what I think.' And so I don't think that it's that important to have people start quilting real young. I think if they get the skills: to sew a button on, to iron a shirt, to sew a seam if they need to or sew a hem (heaven knows short people need to know how to sew hems)-- if you give them the basic skills, they don't need to make a quilt when they're 18. (I do think it's wrong that home economics is such a poor sister in schools now.) I think people need to pull a lot of other things together and then realize at a certain age, 'Well, I want to express myself this way.' And as long as they have the sewing and maybe art skills to begin with, it will come out, it will happen at the right time. I think as long as there are quilt shops out there and there are beautiful fabrics and there are people teaching dyeing, it will happen.

LR: So what trends do you see for the future in quiltmaking?

LC: Well, I've already seen an awful lot change. When I started in 1981, we didn't dye our own fabrics, I'd be hard pressed to come up with a name of any artist at that time, any quilt artist, that was dyeing their own fabric. Later, surface design started spreading and people started dyeing and printing. Then other techniques, like raw edge appliqué started. We were always told that the edges of the appliqué must go under--not anymore. I still bind the edges of all my quilts but there are a lot of people out there that don't bind the edges of their quilts. I think, quilting is always going to be with us as an art form. We may have national events, I mean look what the bicentennial did, what a wonderful thing how that brought quiltmaking back. I'm a product of that. I think that the first two quilts I made were red, white, and blue. [laughs.] I think one of the trends that we're seeing now that you're going to see more and more of is people printing fabric out of their computers. There are lots of us that would love to be able to do it on a bigger scale than we can do it on right now. I think that's one trend that you're going to see in the immediate future. There will be high tech fabrics. There are people in Japan and in other places that are working on some really exciting technological fabrics that have light in them, fiber optics, things like that. Quilters will eventually find all those things and they'll be in quilts.

LR: We have a few minutes left, is there anything in particular that you would like to talk about that we perhaps haven't covered in our conversation?

LC: One thing that bothers me a little bit, and this again goes along with the future of quilting, is I think people need to slow down a little bit.

LR: What do you mean by that?

LC: Well, there's an awful lot of emphasis on quilt-in-a-day, fast, fast, fast, come to my workshop, play all day, go home with a quilt or go home with piles of fabric. There are certain techniques that I use, that I do, that you can't teach in three hours or teach in a day or even in a week and I think people need to realize that the process isn't all instant. It's a product of our society, I mean, children want to be entertained, they want everything to happen fast, flash, flash, flash. I think people do need sometimes to slow down and realize that the best work sometimes comes from some of the slower processes.

LR: I have one other question, what is the title of your Touchstone piece?

LC: Restricted Vision.

LR: Okay.

LC: Which has to do with the looking in and looking out. That's another thing that I have been doing lately is sort of self, lot of self portrait kind of things, I've used my own hands in my quilts, images of my own hands. I've used hands in quilts before but lately I've actually taken pictures of my own hand and altered them in Photoshop and I've been printing them on fabric. So I think, you know, self portrait is a way that I've been going, not self portraits of my face or anything. Well, I do have one with my face on it, but I think that, you know, when you realize that quilting is more than stock patterns that you can really express yourself. You can do some self examination, some self expression.

LR: What are your plans for this quilt?

LC: I have no real plans except to exhibit it where people will see it. It has been in the first European Quilt Triennial which is German, based in Heidelberg. It used to be a show of quilts from German speaking countries and then in 1990something, 1999 I guess, they opened it up to all residents of Europe. I entered this in it and it was juried in. Then it sat rolled up in our house until I showed it at Val d'Argent in 2001. Then it was shown in Cincinnati recently at a quilt show that focused on women's issues. I believe it was against violence, so it was shown there. There will be other venues where it can be shown.

LR: Okay, our time is about up.

LC: Have we gone--

LR: Yes.

LC: Yes we have. [laughs.]

LR: [laughs.] So--

LC: Thank you.

LR: Thank you Linda for allowing me to interview you today as part of our Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories program and it is 2:05 p.m. and it's May 25.