Theodora - A Modern Tree of Life Quilt

Theodora

50” x 50”

It wasn’t her greatest desire, moving West. She had a comfortable life in a respectable home. Growing up in town, in a house her father purchased, not built, meant that Theordora had no notion of what it might really be like to move to the Wild West. But she was in love and her husband wanted to go. At least she wouldn’t have to be a farmer. That’s what she told herself, at least. Her husband was a gentleman and would be working for the government. In the city, not the farm. That notion was small comfort when she arrived in Calgary. It was still rather wild for her tastes. They found a small house, she joined the church, and soon made friends with the other women brought by their husbands. It was one of these friends that introduced her to quilting. Needlework, she knew, but quilting was a new skill and a handy one when the long winter nights settled in. She could piece her little triangles while her husband read and it almost made it worthwhile, the homesickness.

Theodora is a modern interpretation of a Tree of Life quilt I found in the Heritage Park quilt collection. I’m making up the story here, but the original quilt inspired both it and the quilt here. A few years ago I was asked to teach at Heritage Park’s Festival of Quilts. My idea was to look at quilts in their own collection and create a modern version of it for student’s to play with.

I took the original quilt, wrote a modern pattern that uses only half square triangles and squares for simple patchwork construction, then had some fun playing. This is one version I made, drawing from the original colours but scaling up the size of the block.

Theodora takes blocks I made as samples for that class 3 years ago - made into a finished quilt top earlier this year - and finishes it up. My daughter’s pentathlon coach and his wife are expecting their first baby. With a woodland themed nursery and a love of Heritage Park this seemed like the perfect gift for them.

To tone down the greens of the front I added a contrasting backing with fabrics hiding in my stash. They provide a bright contrast in colour, making this truly a double sided quilt. I love doing that, especially for baby quilts, so there are more options for use. Continuing the woodland theme I quilted it with a woodgrain free motion pattern on a rented long arm machine. While I often recommend olive green as a magical blending colour for quilting, this time it was perfectly on the nose.

To make the binding I hunted through my stash for the perfect green. Normally I like a contrasting binding but that didn’t seem like the right move here. With so many greens - shades, tints, low volumes, perfect hues, limes, emeralds - in the quilt itself, any green can indeed be perfect. The perfect green ended up being the only green I had enough of in my stash. So I am calling it perfect. I did a common 2.5” inch double fold binding, hand stitched on the back.

And I can’t let you go without a bonus treat from the photo shoot. To capture this quilt I stole away to the area just outside Heritage Park. There is a little wooded area next to a wetland. It’s at a confluence of a parking lot and a couple of busy roads, next to the main reservoir for the city. It may look like I am in the middle of the forest, but I am actually in the middle of the city. And just as I was hanging up the quilt on a line strung between two trees a friendly visitor joined me. She was calm with me being in her space so I thanked her, took my pictures quickly and left in the opposite direction to avoid bothering her further.

Social Justice Sewing Academy Anti-Racist Guidebook

Last fall, after a summer of Black Lives Matter protests, the Social Justice Sewing Academy set out to do some different kind of work. This, on top of the amazing lessons, memorials, and community work they already do. They’ve just published a guidebook for the sewers of the world, An Anti-Racist Guidebook.

What is Anti-Racism?

I came to the term through Ibram X. Kendi and his book How to Be an Anti Racist. Essentially, it is about doing more than saying you believe all races are equal. Saying you don’t see colour isn’t the answer. It is about examining the systemic racism that we all participate in one way or another, then actively working to dismantle it.

When the call for volunteers came out I signed up immediately. As a quilter who works almost exclusively in cotton, as a white woman who only learned more than pop culture civil rights history in the last 10 years, as a human, I wanted to do some of the anti-racism work for myself and our community. Ever since my trip to Alabama and seeing cotton fields for the first time I’ve wanted to dive deeper into its production. Hand in hand with that is the deep dive into the role cotton has played in systemic racism.

My essay in the Anti-Racist Guidebook is the result. I looked into the ties between slavery and cotton production, which most of us know about. But it also examines the growth of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism as tied to cotton production, and therefore slavery. It also examines current cotton production, including how those links aren’t really gone.

The process was eye-opening for sure. I hope it is for you. It has me hanging on to every scrap of my cotton, not wanting to waste a bit of effort that went into making it. I won’t lie, it also gives me mixed feelings about using cotton at all. This discomfort is good, its going to force me to dig deeper. The next step is to talk to the fabric companies that make our medium of choice and ask them about their current supply chain. The more we all know, the better.

I highly recommend checking out the entire Anti-Racist Guidebook. There are some incredible pieces on everything from code-meshing to political quilts, from housing to resiliency. Each essay is written by a volunteer. They place themselves in the work, to show the work rather than centre their story. Each essay also includes recommendations for self reflection by the reader, to do their own work on the topic.

For my part one of my resources was this book: Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert. I pulled from multiple sections but now I am sitting down for a good read. It is fascinating and disheartening at the same time, illuminating and depressing. But we can’t walk away from the thick, the ugly, the hard just because they are so. People live this still and it is up to all of us to move forward for all.

And for those of you who might want to tell me to keep politics out of quilting, I hope you read this guidebook. If anything, to know that cotton, our material of choice is inherently political.