Quilts and The Blues

March 31 I was in Los Angeles to give a lecture on the opening night of my show at the Craft in America Study Center. Because I like to talk about quilts and play guitar at the same time, I concocted a lecture called Quilts and The Blues, which I thought would give me an opportunity for some amusing comparisons, but which, when I started writing the thing, made me realize all sorts of new aspects of these two forms.

For starters, we have to remember that both forms grew out of existing traditions. Quilts arrived here as formal bedcoverings for the houses of the well-to-do. Blues music has roots in African, folk and gospel musical traditions. Also, they both grew and flourished during the period when the creators of them were excluded from positions of power in the culture.

Women, being legally excluded from owning property or voting, and excluded from the academic traditions of the of the arts, excluded from politics and any positions of power in the culture, created quilts which they chose to give away. With this gift economy, they were safe from the judgements, the interference, the market considerations that would have prevailed if they were trying to appeal to or be part of the academy or the intellectual or the business worlds. Under this neglect by the powerful, women were free to create.

Blues musicians, being seen in the last part of the 19th century and the first part of the twentieth as similarly extra-academic, economically superflous, concerned only with amusing friends and family with their semi-musical plinking and plonking, were also free to create.

The forms these two groups invented were community-owned patterns. The 12-bar form, the 3 against 4 rhythmic feels, the borrowings from African drones and gospel harmonies and improvisations--all these were malleable and infinitely variable.

Within these community patterns, the creators were free to do anything they could think of...and, come to think of it, they didn't even have to stay within the patterns. Anything could work as a blanket if you sewed enough pieces together. You could write a blues with any number of beats, bars, chords or subjects.

So it was precisely because of the neglect of the ruling class that these forms could grow and flourish. To demonstrate the infinite variability of quilt patterns I put together a Powerpoint presentation with 20 or so variations of Log Cabin patterns. For the musical variations I played a variety of blues songs from different artists, all of whom had created wild variations on traditional themes.

It was a blast, for me at least. It seemed like it went over well, and the whole experience made me want to work more on my book of quilt essays.

What It Takes

I have been busy with tax season, with other projects, and have not had a quilt to work on for a couple of weeks. So I had a few minutes in the studio this week and decided to start something new. My first impulse is usually to do something I have done before, what I call the "Hollywood Impulse." It worked before, so maybe I should do the same thing only a little bit different! I laid a whole quilt out to do just that, and realized that I was remaking something, and that my heart was just not in it.

But once I had the fabrics laid on the floor, a couple of them caught my eye, this striped stuff and this beautiful African print. Since I am always looking for high contrast, these two seemed like a pair I could work with.

Great. But now what to do with them? I often find myself in this situation, without an idea in my head. Nothing. No idea what to do. When I feel like that, I just get out my rotary cutter and cut into my favorite of the fabrics before me, the stuff I am afraid to cut. That was this strip. I just whacked away at it for a while, cutting strips on different angles. Eventually I figured I could lay this across some of the green and orange print.

And I was off. Everything at that point becomes a design problem, a problem with an answer. Not, "What should I do?" anymore, but "How big should this chunk be?" and "What should I do about this corner?" and so on.

For me, what it takes is this willingness to start a project without a pattern or picture. For you it might be the pattern or picture. But whatever it takes to get going is what we have to find. For me finishing it is the easy part: I just keep going until I am done with this piece, then start another.

A big part of making the quilts you want is simply finding out what it takes to start your motor.

Winona Pepin, Quilter Extraordinaire

Last December The Dorcas Quilters of St John's Presbyterian Church in San Francisco lost a guiding light when Winona Pepin died at the age of 98. Here is a picture from a few years ago with John Maxwell and Patricia Pepin holding up one of Winona's many quilts and everyone else gathered around her.

Winona was born in Kansas and came to San Francisco in the 1950's, I believe. What I know about her for sure is that when I first moved to San Francisco in the 1990's and attended a quilt show, she was there with the Dorcas Quilters as ever, quilting at the frame as a way of inspiring and teaching all comers about the joy of quilting. She was quiet and contained, so one might overlook her at first, but once you sat at the frame for a few minutes it became clear that Winona was the acknowledged master quilter and the sparkle in the atmosphere. She was always very clear about what she liked and how she liked quilts to be done, but she was also always open to new ideas.

I got to know Winona a bit the day she turned 91. That year I had received a grant to have a long exhibition of my own quilts together with antique quilts from which I had drawn inspiration. Part of the show was a Walk Through How-to-Make-a-Quilt Wall, which culminated in a frame with me sitting there and quilting all day, every day. I loved because I could see the whole show from where I sat, so I could answer questions, conduct tours and teach quilting all at the same time. One day in July Winona drove herself up from Daly City to sit an quilt with me for a while. Over the course of the day I learned it was her birthday, and this was the way she wanted to spend it. We had a ball, talking quilts and life. I learned that she had been quilting all her life, and that she came from a long line of quilters. But most important was that I learned even more about her agile and fertile mind, that she was always curious. Fortunately few people attended the show that day so we told stories and quilted for hours.

After that whenever I had a quilt frame set up in the public somewhere Winona would always spend at least a day there with me. Generous to all, and always fun to be around, she lit up the room. The Dorcas Quilters have quite a few brilliant and accomplished quilters, but none who learned to quilt so long ago, none with that amount of experience. She is irreplaceable there and in my heart as well. We all miss her.

Vanishing Point

Here is my latest pieced and appliqued quilt, "My Vanishing Point." The pink fabric is a sort of dark pink and white striped shirting, and the black and white striped fabric is shirting as well. The other two fabrics are standard quilt fabric. The little appliqued squares were given to me by Naomi Ichikawa, editor of Patchwork Quilt Tsushin, a Japanese quilting magazine. When she came to visit and interview me for an article she brought me a stack of precut squares, which I decided to use just as they came out of the package. The black lines are made with commercial bias tape, which I buy whenever I see it.

I wanted to make an image of how I felt about the horizon of old age, how it always recedes, with an image of my own road I am walking, which someday will vanish. For me it is a comfort to make something that allows me a place to think about topics like this. If I keep making things only about the beauty of the world, I get tired of it. Also, I want to see things I have never seen before. So making a quilt on this subject in this way turns out to be exactly what I need to stay alive and interested.

I Had A Dream

At some point I realized that what was holding me back from doing something significant in quilts was the fact that I was always trying to do something beautiful. It is not so much the striving for beauty that was messing me up as the fact that I was trying to please others thereby, and it is not by pleasing others that you find a way to do something powerful and individual.

Subsequently I found myself going off into directions that, far from pleasing others, seem to be alienating them. I don't know where this path is going to lead me eventually, but in the short run it is taking me away from the pleasing place.

I think it started a few years ago when I had a dream of a graffiti quilt, an ugly pink field with the word "QUILT" across the bottom in big, spray painted letters. I actually talked to a graffiti artist about painting a apiece of fabric for me, but he was repelled by the idea. He seemed disgusted that I had suggested it. Now, that is funny: the idea of putting graffiti on a quilt disgusts quilters and graffiti artists alike, because the worst possible thing is for them to be associated with each other.

This spring I ran across this idea in an old notebook and realized that it would be perfect for a bias tape quilt. Graffiti, I figured, would so obscure whatever was in the background that it would not matter what the background consisted of. So I just assembled an abstract field of scraps upon which I could scribble. The day I started sewing it, I received in the mail a package of bias tape from a woman who had seen my lecture in Seattle the week before. It was all various shades of pink. Obviously, fate wanted me to execute my pink graffiti in a sort of mirror image of the one in my dream.

As my friend Barbara Brackman said when she saw some of my new quilts, "Sometimes you can be TOO abstract." Maybe so, but at least I am no longer being a people pleaser--that's for sure.

New Quilt

I made this quilt top when I was the artist in residence at the de Young museum during the month of March. It was just about the most fun I ever had, the residency, that is. But making this was a treat as well. When I started, all I knew was that I wanted to sew a bunch of this aqua blue bias, so I picked these orange fabrics to set it off. The stuff on the left came from a garage sale--the maker was selling this "failure" from a dye class, perfect for my purposes. After a while I realized I was making a river, so I ended up adding some tributaries and mountains and etc., then quilted it all over with crazy salmon.

My only real disappointment came when I took the last stitch on the binding and hung it up on the wall of my studio: the edges looked like the edge of a potato chip. There was nothing to do but to tear it off and figure some way to make it lay flatter. What I ended up doing was just folding the top and back together and whip stitching them--no binding at all. Now it hangs pretty flat and behaves pretty well.

The thing is, it is all enjoyable. Sewing the strips on, quilting it, binding it--I never get tired of taking some simple materials and turning them into something I like to look at. It is, as they say, a hoot. This one is called "Up The River of Good Intentions."

Unknown Block

Here's a pattern you don't see every day. I thought it was a Maltese Cross variation, which I suppose it could be. I found it in a stack of quilts owned by Connie Davidson when she showed me her collection last week in Hilton Head. Anyway, it seems to be a sort of floral design, a tuilp, I guess, made of a Maltese Cross style block. What I like about it is how logical, even inevitable it looks. Of course you would make a tulip like that!

Of course the other thing I like is that women have always invented patterns, anyone who could make a quilt could make it her own way, or could invent her own pattern. Any signs of this creative impulse make me happy.