A cozy collaboration
Mother's Day quilt layered with many women's efforts
A few months back I was heading up to the art studio of my friend Jessie when I passed by an open door and stopped.
Wait. Is that a LONGARM QUILTING MACHINE?
Indeed it is, said its owner Rebekah. She had to was happy to let me try my hand at what that baby does best: free-motion-stitch a large field of cloth layers stabilized between two rollers. I gripped the handles like a sky-writing pilot and started meandering the needle all over the layers of cloth. It was just the opposite action of the hunchy, shoulder-crunchy business of pushing layers of fabric under the needle on my cranky old Phyllis (the Pfaff) or my basic Bernie (the Bernina).
Rebekah’s forte is surface design, largely in the form of painting on fabric, then using the longarm to bind that layer with batting and backing fabric. Like others who’ve made the big cash outlay for the machine she defrays the major expense by doing commissions. Her speciality is T-shirt memory quilts.
It’s like we were meant to meet.
My mother and her friend/former work colleague Susan once made a quilt out of union-strong T-shirts, a major undertaking that involved soliciting T-shirts from various unions and individuals, then figuring out how to stabilize the stretchy material. It was quite a feat that was eventually raffled off — more than once, I think — and circulated around various union offices. Susan remembers receiving some feminism T-shirts too but they didn’t fit the theme so were set aside for their own quilt — some day. Years later my mother and I went through those T-shirts but she had lost her mojo for this making and I wasn’t up to tackling that challenging project either so the shirts all went back in a bag and in storage for another few years.
Rebekah was up for it, though, so my two sisters and I decided to commission her to make it for this year’s Mother’s Day.
There’s a long, thriving tradition of creating protest quilts as a form of community action, holding the power in both the making — people engaging in individual or social activity toward a shared societal cause — and the resulting object that is more tactile than signs, bolder than billboards.
A T-shirt protest quilt holds additional layers of meaning through the something-from-nothing tradition of using material already in the world, the social history seen in the call-to-action markings on those T-shirts and the convictions of those who wore them.
Many women were involved in the making of this Mother’s Day quilt commissioned by her three daughters, that used her collection of feminism T-shirts donated by other women, that was designed and stitched by Rebekah, and that I bound using fabric donated by family friend Mary, another artist of the cloth (and film).
This collage of expression on fabric can be seen as an historical artifact of a particular moment in the last century but by giving those old T-shirts a new life this quilt could inspire calls for action in this new systematic dismantling of women’s rights and freedoms. We just hope it wraps our mother — a lifelong feminist who taught us well — in warmth and comfort.
Ha! I have one of these t-shirt up-cycle projects to get to. I was thinking I'd make a long sleeveless lounge-y dress out of them - but these quilts are fabulous too! Thanks for including the social justice context in your writing about art & making.
Loved the sky writing line! And the quilt is a total wow.