Showing posts with label commemorative quilt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label commemorative quilt. Show all posts

August 31, 2020

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.




January 6, 2020

My Happy Holiday Sewing


We had just a few holiday plans, no travel, no guests, and so I decided that sewing on all sorts of back-burner projects of my own was The Thing To Do.  It was so fun!  Here are the results.

The farm.
Another (could it be the last?) quilt in my Something From Nothing series.  This one's been in the planning stage for nearly two years, taking tiny steps towards construction.  It entered full-out construction mode during a fiber retreat in October.  And now it's done!  (It's made with plastic produce bags.)

December 30, 2019

Charm Quilts

Well, I think this is a great topic for this put-a-new-calendar-on-the-wall and make-those-happy-wishes time of year.

Charm quilts, as the name indicates, are made with thoughts of good luck in mind.  I'd heard the folklore that the magic happens because each piece is a unique fabric....but if one and only one fabric has been used twice, the quilt has a special magic.  So that's what I did.  My charm quilts were made for my babies because, as a quilter, I of course had to make them each a very special quilt.

June 18, 2018

Quilts at the Art Institute of Chicago

 

 



The exhibit this past winter-spring in the textile galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago was spectacular.  So spectacular that I went twice!  Going once was just not enough time to soak up the beauty and history of the pieces from their great collection.  I craved another chance to breathe the rarefied air of these wonderful quilts!

And here they are, in no particular order, so all of you who don't live near Chicago get to enjoy them, too.  (I missed a couple of them, due to "too much" chatting, but this is most of them.)

October 19, 2015

La Grange Community Quilt


This quilt was made in 1979 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of La Grange, IL, a western suburb of Chicago.  

It hung in the La Grange library for quite a while, and then was in storage during and for a while after the library's move to a new building.  The library is now ready to hang the quilt again, and they contacted me to help spruce it up.

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