recrafting a quilt........

i love this quilt. i bought it in round top from a great dealer named harol hollis. it was really the first time i had ever met harold and he gave me a wonderful deal on this piece. the first of many great deals.

so when the quilt after much use and love started to fray, i decided i would have to tackle the task of the repair myself. the price i paid was so minimal that maybe in my eyes this piece wasnt worth paying to have the repairs done, but i love this quilt and to me it is priceless, so maybe i just wanted to repair it myself.                      

There are so many things i love about this quilt. the colors are dramatic. the pattern is big , bordering on huge ,and the fabric is a cool crepe, not the typical cotton fabric that we usually imagine with quilts. there are some cotton pieces in the quilt but they are almost homespun in their roughness and surprisingly they are the pieces that must be replaced as if they finally decided to revolt and get away from this rebellious piece.  even the back of the quilt looks amazing and the fabric is as contemporary in its boldness as it is quant in its subject matter.

it could easily be seen in an anthropologie cataloque today. 

i would guess this quilt was made at least in the 50′s, but i lean a little more towards the 30-40′s.

this makes me wonder about the creator of the quilt. i think i must know her .

she had to be a dreamer, a young woman who thought out of the box. but her box may have been the 1950s, when the box for women was a tad more confining than it is today.

and somehow this quilt brought to mind a picture of my mom with her graduating class. she is the one looking off  tothe left.

i think about how she would often take the road less travelled in her opinions and then would “VOICE” them. what a journey she made. what changes she saw.

but i know she is not the only woman i have known that had an amazing story and a dream that if not fufilled by them, might one day be dreamed by a daughter or granddaughter.

i wonder sometimes where my stories come from , and my love for telling them. my mom was a woman of direct communication. she had romantic notions and loved to read, but she was not a story teller. when i asked about her past and the stories of her family she would complain to me that those things were not important, or that she just simply did not know the answers. after all, her mom grew up in a tenement house in new york, helping to raise her siblings who were without parents, orphaned at an early age. she died in a sanitarium for tuberculosis in san angelo, texas in the early 20′s. maybe these were stories that she would rather not remember.

so i had other women in my life, storytellers and dreamers who could see beauty and create it and had a life or maybe just a soul that inspired it in others.  i think of them as angels of mychildhood, who helped me remain an optomist. encouraged me with their humor and storytelling to believe in beauty and myself.

simone garcia was one of these angels, and tiny stepchinski was the other.

these ladies would encourage me, that i Could have long hair if i wanted it, and i could sing like a bird and that life could be fun,,,,,,and that storytelling is an art.

i think they would love my quilt.

i know my mom would.

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