Social Justice Sewing Academy - Remembrance Block Project

Hi, everyone.  My recent three weeks of sewing have been deep and meaningful.

As some of you know, I have been doing some sewing for the Social Justice Sewing Academy for a while now.  This is a brilliant organization, lovingly and thoughtfully created and organized. The mission statement includes using and teaching sewing and art skills as a way to voice social justice topics and to give voice to parts of the population who are underserved or not served by the art world.

I can best describe the Remembrance Block Project by quoting from the website:

...a quilt block community art project that will provide activist art banners for local and national activist organizations who have requested creative statements to be publicly displayed that represent solidarity as well as remembrance. This partnership will create a visual statement to memorialize those who have been unjustly murdered by community violence (e.g. gun violence, domestic violence, child abuse, etc.) race-based violence, law enforcement, and gender or sexuality based violence. These artivism blocks will honor the lives of individuals through symbolism and portrait. Their names and identities will be displayed during community activism events reminding the world that their lives mattered.

Unfortunately, as we know, the list of names is very long and continues to grow.

I received my assignment three weeks ago.  I spent the first week researching the life cut short that I was to memorialize, and two weeks on the sewing.

Here is Bettie Jones' sad, sad, story:

This block honors Bettie Jones, who died on December 26, 2015 after being shot while trying to help a neighbor in distress.  There is lots of information online about her murder, because it was complex and in litigation for 4 years.  Her landlord and upstairs neighbor had called the police because his son was suffering from mental illness and had become violent and threatening.  The landlord asked her to open the door for the police, but when she did and the officer saw the son coming downstairs and towards him brandishing a baseball bat, he fired into the building.  He killed both the son (Quintonio LeGrier) and Bettie.  Quintonio himself had called earlier to ask for help, but the dispatchers didn’t send anyone.  In the end, the officer was fired and the dispatchers suspended for some time.  To me, this whole heartbreaking story highlights so many ways that this system is broken.

Red was Bettie’s signature color.  She was the matriarch of a loving family, and so I surrounded her with flowers representing her 5 children and 9 grandchildren.  This reminds me of all the large red and white flower arrangements that surrounded her red coffin at her funeral.  The golden bells at the top represent the family choir called Seven Bells.  Her nickname was Bettie Boo.

And here are some in-progress and detail photos.

 

 

The Remembrance Blocks are an on-going project.  You can register to stitch a block on the SJSA website.  There are other projects on-going as well - another sewing project to make memory quilts for bereaved families, and a brand new small business incubator.

There is also a block-of-the-month project.  These blocks are designs by the students in the social justice sewing workshops (which are now on hiatus due to the pandemic).  The blocks are super powerful.  I made one back in March.

I can tell you that this was not emtionally easy, but it has opened my heart and taught me a lot.  It has been a very Good thing to do.

The growing collection of Remembrance Blocks is on Instagram at @sew4justice_sjsa.

Eye Contact P.S.

So, having just blogged about my entry in the Eye Contact show yesterday morning, this post about the exhibit showed up in the evening on my instagram!  (It's in two pieces because I couldn't screen shot the whole thing in one go.)

Eye Contact

An exhibit called Eye Contact: Creating A Connection has recently opened at the Virginia Quilt Museum in Harrisonburg, VA.  The exhibit runs through September 15, 2020. 

I love everything about this show.  For one thing, I always love a challenge quilt show.  I find all the different, creative ways the challenge topic is expressed to be endlessly fascinating.  I also love this particular show because I have a quilt in it, and I had such a deep experience in making the quilt. 

The quilts are small - 23" wide x 5" high - and the only instruction to the artists was that the subject be "two human eyes looking at the viewer".

Here's my quilt:

Piece on Earth

Hello, everyone! 

I haven't posted here in well over a month....

All healthy, so no worries there, in case any of you noticed my absence and were worried.  The whole situation in which we find ourselves took over my attention and energy, and certainly my ability to express it all in words.  But I’ve been busy, and here’s what I’ve been doing.  It’s been a while, so this will be long!  Grab an iced tea (in my hemisphere anyway), and settle in.

Why Restore and Conserve Old Quilts?

read the story of this quilt

Why do I like repairing quilts?  My academic background is in anthropology, which taught me about how much meaning the objects we make and use every day can hold.  And all quilts have their story.

"Storytelling is the place where social and personal history meet."

This is a line from a lovely book I recently received, How to Write Your Personal or Family History, by Katie Funk Wiebe.  The book was written by the mother of a dear friend of mine.  She wrote many books, many of them about family and history.

One thing she stresses is how small memories and facts can build a valuable memoir.  I feel the same is true of quilts - it's not only the flashy and museum quality quilts that are worth gentle handling and care.

Courthouse Steps

Lately, I have been reaping the benefit of getting to the age of downsizing.  And the benefit has been adopting quilts from many directions.

Not that I really have room or reason to have them myself either, except for being able to write about them here and share them when I teach.  That's good enough, I figure.  But really, the main reason I say yes and bring them in is that I love them and want to give them a home.

I am reminded of my brother- and sister-in-law who kept the garage door open a crack and a bowl of cat food inside until they had a population of 3 dogs and 9 cats.  The 9th cat in the series was named E. Nuff Already.  Yup.

Anyway, a friend offered me this lovely silk Courthouse Steps.  She'd had it hanging on her wall for many years, and now the silks are doing that late 19th century silk "thing" of shattering and crumbling.  So before I show you the detail photos, take a moment to appreciate it from a distance, in all its glory.......

A Blast from the Past

The other day, I met up with a quilt I'd made over 30 years ago and forgotten!

I got a text from one of the people who grew up a few houses away from me.  She's been doing lots of sorting and clearing out over these last couple of months.  In amongst her son's childhood items, she found this quilt, and asked if I had made it.  At first, I didn't remember having made a baby quilt for her.  But when I scrolled down further to see the photos, I recognized it immediately.

Wow.  Hee, hee.

I made it in 1986, about 7 years after I learned to quilt.  It was a pretty popular pattern at the time.  A Google search came up with Garden Trellis, Garden Twist, and Around the Twist.  Around the Twist sounds very familiar, so I think that was the name as I learned (and forgot) it. 

And yes, at that time, I signed all my quilts and crafty items with those little name tapes.  The name was suggested by one of my friends, a pun if you will.  "Handmade" becomes "Ann Made" - see?  I ran out of "Ann Made" business cards a long, long time ago, but I still have some of that tape tucked away in a drawer, and I still have scraps of some of those fabrics in my stash. 

It's this kind of color play and geometry play that are a big part of what intrigued me about quiltmaking - and has kept me going all these years.   I still love green and I still love little spriggy prints the best, like the background white print.   So, it was a very pleasant walk down Memory Lane.  And I'm posting about a crib quilt just under the wire, as it's still just barely Mother's Day here.