Great Quilts, Great Stories

In Lowell Massachusetts this old savings bank is the New England Quilt Museum. And this is one of the many banners.

Saturday morning, October 20, I met Pam Weeks who, with Kate Hanson Plass, curated the show I'm in: Great Quilts, Great Stories. One of their motivations was to make history come alive through "material culture".  So often history as we grew up with it was based on men, conquests, inventions, & explorations. Women had hardly a place in the books I/we studied.

I didn't meet Kate, but here is Pam.

 

She gave a tour for me & the docents that morning, so we could learn more about all the quilts. One of the quilts in this show had been put on the cover of a book on quilt-making I bought in the 1970s.

Here are some of the other quilts in the show.

I'm not going to be able to tell you their stories, though each had one.

You can see that these are all conventional & classic quilts, each made with fabulous skill, dense quilting, etc. Textile places tend to be dark to preserve the cloth, so I had to lighten all of my photos.

This Red Cross quilt made during WWI & others were others less conventional. 

And a marvelous "Don't Judge a Man Till You've Walked a Mile in His Shoes" story quilt. An elder talks to the youth, & possible trouble is ahead on the road of life-- black cat, snake, dead skunk,  and so on. The shoes are at the bottom.

And then me, in my space in the exhibit, with 10 quilts honoring the people & things that make my quilt-making possible.

(Oops! I touched the photo by mistake, it fell, I had to fix!

I'm really not allowed to handle the quilts any more!! The Museum owns them now.)

About 22 people came from various patches in my life. 

We ate together & had champaign, thanks to Mary Beecher Price.

Lowell is a place with a lot of feminist consciousness. 

The first women's labor organization in the USA was in Lowell.

There are several sculptures about women.

I am very happy that my project is in Lowell and at the NEQM.

Then Kate Layzer, my niece, found a plaque celebrating a visit William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Philips & George Thompson made to Lowell. We scrubbed the faces down.

This is no relation to 'my' George Thompson. This one was a British abolitionist.

Garrison named two sons after these two men.

And finally, some shots of Lowell.

  Lots of old brick everywhere, old buildings, old mills, & renewal.

 

And unspeakably beautiful days!

Thanks to Nan Heminway & friend, Mary Beecher Price, Myra Ramos & her daughter-in-law Michele, Pam Smith Hendricks, Lee Thorndike Sprague, Nancy Hansen, Peggy Latimer, Joan Countryman, Emmy Preston, Sally Ropes Hinkle, Greta Keyes, Cory Hurley McPeek, Pat Jackson, Kate Layzer & her sweetie, Don, John Harwood,

Lynne Harwood, Faith Gilbert, Upty Terry Clouse, Diane Haley, & if I've forgotten anyone, I'm truly sorry. I did forget some married names.

Thank you for coming. It was lovely sharing this with you.

And thanks to George for brick-like support!

That's it for now.