A Different Memory Quilt: Mom and Dad's 50th Anniversary

Donna Rae Gislason and Cliffored Eugene Biel

This year Memorial Day weekend was a special time indeed.  My parents celebrated their 50th anniversary in Wisconsin.  There was a big party organized by my brother and sister-and-law at a hotel, my sister had worked on invitations, sang at the reception, put party favors together, and I offered to make a memory quilt for my parents.  Ha!  I knew that it couldn't be big as their wall space is already loaded with the memories 50 years can accumulate.  And, as my mother told me many Christmases ago, "Please!  No more art!"  She just didn't know where to put it all and it ended up in drawers.

So, the challenge was to come up with something that they would want to display, that would not be too intrusive and that could reflect my genius.  Heh, heh.  I chewed and chewed and chewed on ideas.  The celebration was getting closer and closer.  (I had had TWO years to get this together, but of course....  procrastination is queen.)  I toyed with an idea of creating something that could be hung on the wall or folded into a box.  As my parents have had Christ and the church as the anchor of their lives, I was trying to figure out how to make a cross shape work in that way.  If you flatten out a box, it will look like a cross...  Well, I gave up.  I ended up making a "book" with memory pockets.

"50 Years", Memory Quilt by Rachel Biel, front

I transferred four of their wedding photos on to fabric and stuffed the inside with cardboard to stiffen the panels.  The panels are held together with vintage sari fabric and decorated with vintage lace and fresh water pearls.  The whole thing can be folded up and stored as a book.  One structural headache was figuring out how to make the piece stable enough to stand upright an yet have enough room to fold it up.  This was resolved by crimping the sari fabric at the top with decorative clamps, not pictured here.

"50 Years", Memory Quilt by Rachel Biel, back

The back of each panel has a pocket for memories.  I used vintage crocheted doilies to make the pockets.  Then, I sewed little sachets out of old photos, also transferred on to fabric, and stuffed them with lavender.  A friend from Brazil made a booklet for them which fits in the pockets and an aunt also came up with a little collage.  The pockets also hold all the cards they got at the reception.

Each panel was machine quilted, front and back, before I assembled them together.  The tricky part was flipping the panels once the sari borders were added.  I closed the tops with  a fiery red trim that also has some symbolism, at least for me.  Flames often adorn the tops of Mexican religious popular art.  In this piece, these are the flames of love.

"50 Years", Memory Quilt by Rachel Biel, detail, cake

Cliff and Donna Biel, September 2010

Fifty years is a long time to be married, especially nowadays when 25% of couples in the United States choose to live together in partnership rather than being married.  My own marriage only lasted for four years.  Are my parents soul mates?  Their personalities are very different from each other, as are their interests and hobbies.  I'm sure that this has been a source of frustration from time to time, but I cannot imagine one without the other.  All of us are rather eccentric, difficult people in our own way, but at the core of their marriage is the belief that their union is holy, set apart to do God's work.  Within that framework, they bend and accept and work towards becoming a better partner for the other.  It is not a perfect marriage, but one that I tried to emulate.

"50 Years", Memory Quilt, detail, Hope Lutheran Church

A year after they were married, I was born.  Six months later, they took off to Brazil for 18 years of service as Lutheran missionaries.  They were 24 and 26 years old.  Babies, it seems now.  They went through language school, immersed themselves in a culture that experienced profound transformations while they were there, and gave each of us a childhood we will never forget.  I have started to document some of this in my blog, Biels in Brazil.

Biels in Brazil

Relatives whom I had not seen for years and years came to the reception, a wonderful reunion!  One of my aunts brought a gift which was very exciting for me and this blog that I am working on.  She had saved the letters my mother had written during their early years in Brazil.  Loads of them, packed with interesting information of life in Brazil during that time.  I will slowly transcribe these letters to that blog.

Another highlight at the reception was a viewing of the dress my mother wore for her wedding.  The dress had originally been made for my aunt LaVonne, who married my Dad's oldest brother the year before.  Stan and LaVonne are my godparents.  Many years later, Laurie, their daughter, also wore the dress in her wedding.  My sweet niece, only 11 yeas old, modeled the dress and all former brides posed with her.

 

Wedding dress with former brides.

Fifty years points to one undeniable and inescapable truth:  we are all aging.  My parents are now in their 70's, I am approaching 50 and my brother and sister agree, "Yes, my hips hurt, too."  We have almost lost my father twice now, once to a diabetic coma and once to heart disease.  We came together to celebrate a life well lived, while lurking behind that joy is the certainty that we will also come together to bury one another.  Who will be around ten years from now?  We don't know.  What we do know is that their love for each other and for each of us empowered us to come into our own selves fully and with courage.  Within our flaws, weaknesses and failures, there is also the certainty that we have been loved, accepted, forgiven and blessed.

Was my gift a success?  My father wrote me in a thank you note:

"Dear Rachel,

The celebration of our golden was golden indeed.  Thanks for being a part of it.  We appreciate all of the hours of work and creative effort it cost to make the quilted family panel you made.  We will always cherish it.  Donna is already making plans of where she wants to take it and who to show it to.

You children are all so special to us!  Each is so different from the other.  Each is gifted in a different way, yet the bonds of love and faith hold us powerfully together.  

Again, thank you!

Love, Dad



Yes, it seems that they liked it.  However, I am the one who is filled with gratitude.  Mom and Dad, I thank you for those fifty years of love and example that the two of you have given us.

"50 Years", Memory Quilt by Rachel Biel, detail, Kiss

A Different Memory Quilt: Mom and Dad's 50th Anniversary

Baghdad Burning, A Powerful Quilt by Donna Hussain

Baghdad Burning

When I first became a quilter my quilts were traditional geometric patterns that required only basic quilting skills. By taking advantage of classes sponsored by my quilt guild and local quilt stores, I have learned many advanced quilting techniques over the years, which I try to incorporate in my quiltmaking. Recently I have been sewing pictorial art quilts, like Baghdad Burning, an artistic stretch for me.

I drew my inspiration for Baghdad Burning from a number of sources: my respect for my husband’s Muslim heritage, my appreciation of the beauty of Islamic art, architecture, and décor; my interest in the lives of women throughout the world, and my despair over the war in Iraq. But how could I express these feelings in the fabric of a quilt? For several months I wrestled with this problem before realizing that the quilt should have symbolic images: a tiled mosaic or tapestry to represent the culture of Iraq, a fire to represent the devastation of battle, and an anguished woman to represent innocents whose lives are ravaged by war.

The first steps in construction of the quilt were to design the pattern for the background mosaic on graph paper, then shop for fabric and a pleasing color palette. With luck I immediately found a decorative fabric of gold swirls on a green background which shifted gradually to gold swirls on brown. Green scorched to brown. Perfect for a fire. This one fabric turned my “perhaps quilt” into a feasible working design. I then found matching fabrics, a blue for the background, a soft purple, and golds for the quilt that that looked well with the chosen scorched green.

Scorched green fabric

The unburned mosaic quilt blocks were easy to sew: the burned sections were the challenge. I spread all of the fabrics from my stash onto my bedroom floor to look for pieces that could be used to represent smoke damage.

Burned and unburned sections

I frequently use interlacing designs made with bias tubes for my quilt borders. In Baghdad Burning the interlacing border needed to be damaged on the right side of the quilt. I first tried to dye a section of the border for the burned portion, but the lacy trim would not absorb the dye. Instead I changed the color of the bias tubes and background, then covered the burned section with two layers of black tulle.

Burned interlacing border

To help me draw templates for the appliquéd flames, I looked at photos of forest fires on the internet. That is where I got the spiky shapes for my smoldering flames and hints about the color of fires.

Flames

For the major focal point of Baghdad Burning, the woman’s face, I adapted a technique I learned in a class with the quilt artist Sandi Cummings. Sandi makes stunning colorful quilts with dot-matrix black and white photos for the heads of her quilt figures. I clipped a small face of an Iraqi woman from newsprint, enlarged the face on my computer, and printed it on lightly-colored fabric. In order to run the fabric through my printer I had to first iron the fabric onto freezer paper for stability.

Face

The woman had to be a large figure in order for her facial expression to be seen. But how could I give her all black clothing visual interest? My solution was to make a pleated three-dimensional skirt, and to quilt heavily the fringed shawl with parallel lines of stitching. Unfortunately, photographs of the quilt do not show the contrast between the two blacks that are apparent to the eye when viewing the quilt on display.

Baghdad Burning has not been a prize-winning quilt, but it draws the attention of those who pass by at quilt shows. I would very much like to know your reaction to the quilt. Please leave me a comment at the end of this blog.

Baghdad Burning has been juried into the International Quilt Festival in Houston, October 30-November 2, 2008. If you attend the show you can see the quilt in person.

Note from Rachel: I saw Baghdad Burning at the AQS show in Paducah that took place here in Paducah this past April. I was zooming down the rows of displayed quilts, saw Baghdad Burning and stopped in my tracks. This quilt led me to find Donna and invite her to become a regular contributor to Fiber Focus, which she graciously has! If you attend the Houston show, do make the effort to find this quilt. It is powerful!

California quilter, Donna Hussain, has exhibited in major quilt shows around the country, authored books, and is a regular contributor to Fiber Focus. Click on her name to see all of her past articles.

The photo shows Donna with her husband, Pascha.

Baghdad Burning, A Powerful Quilt by Donna Hussain

The Inter-American Quilt Project by Allison Svoboda and Rachel Biel

A little over a year ago, I had the pleasure of working on a joint quilt commission with my friend, Allison Svoboda. The project, funded by the Chicago Cubs charitable arm, Cubs Care, was part of a larger arts grant made to the Inter-American School, a bi-lingual magnet school in Chicago's public school system. Allison's daughters, Emma and Bella, attend this school and Allison has been an active parent, volunteering to teach art classes and working with other teachers and parents on school projects. Allison was also instrumental in securing the grant by writing the proposal, getting presentations together and working with others on what the monies would fund.

Allison next to the finished panels.

Our joint project involved making three queen-size panels that would hang in one of the school's corridors. Allison painted topographical maps of the world on silk and then I did the quilting. She also led a workshop with the 2nd grade class where they made collaged self-portraits of themselves using a photo of their heads and cut outs from National Geographic magazines.

The bi-lingual English and Spanish school has a large percentage of kids of Latino descent. Thus, the curriculum emphasizes the history of the Americas. The central panel attempted to capture this by focusing in on the Americas with a large collage of photos of American history, natural landscapes, and events held at the school. The two side panels remained mainly topographical with the collaged kids portraits weaving on currents of words relevant to the school's mission.

Left Panel
Central Panel

Right Panel

Neither Allison nor I had ever worked on such a large project. We found several challenges along the way. Allison painted on 45" wide silk widths. Since we working over the phone and via e-mail from two different states (Illinois and Kentucky), it was hard for both of us to problem solve all of the little or big issues that might come up. Of course, we got better with each panel. There is a major learning curve visible on the first one we did, the Left Panel. The Bering Strait is so close you could step over it! We didn't leave enough room for sewing the yardage together. Oh, well...

Allison's color palette is so different from mine. I tend to work in more vibrant, earthy colors. It was a pleasure to collaborate in this way, although I was scared to death that I was going to mess something up beyond the point of any repair. I also felt challenged with my work space, which is too small for such a large piece. I used cotton batting, the Heirloom adhesive type if I remember correctly and a muslin backing. I did some basting, a lot or pinning and worked from the center out. It was a lot of bulk to manage, heavy, and slippery because of the silk. I used rubber tipped gloves to control it.

My poor new Bernina had a huge work out!

I used King Tut #40 variegated threads for the top and a cotton off-white of the same weight for the back. I loved King Tut- it was the first time I had used so much of it and it flowed like butter. I changed colors depending on the currents, glaciers, and landscapes. I told Allison we would have to re-do the quilt in 10 years with global warming changing our topography so quickly!




The Central Panel was a huge challenge. Allison made a collage, photographed it and transfered it on to fabric that was printed on 8.5x11 sheets. They overlapped each other and I had to figure out a way to cut them, re-arrange them and make them look as close to her original collage as possible. I found this hard to sew and the tension kept going out of whack.


I was also worried about the panel not hanging correctly because of quilting with less density, but it was fine when we finally hung it. I went up to Chicago with the three finished pieces (I thought I was pretty much done!) only to find that Allison had these kids she wanted added on. Well, I knew she wanted some, but when I got there, there were dozens of them! To give you an idea of scale, each one was also printed on an 8.5x11 sheet.

We only had four days to finish this before the opening ceremony. So, we cut, ironed and sewed and got it done. One of the lessons learned here was that the photo transfer fabric we used was a bit translucent. If you look closely, you can see the current colors behind the image.


Oh, and there were the words, too! We had to figure out what markers to use (now I can't remember the brand) and Allison had to work where they would flow and make no mistakes as she wrote them out.

We were in a panic! But, it was also great fun and in my opinion, these last touches really brought the pieces together and made them relevant to the school. There's a little history next to the quilt (with my name spelled wrong.... wonder if that ever got fixed?! And, I'm not Brazilian, just a piece of my heart is.) and Allison tells me that the kids and parents continue to love it.

This was a great learning experience for both of us. I really enjoyed working on a piece of public art like this, and I especially loved working with Allison. She continues to explore her artistic talents. Allison has a wonderful, organic way of seeing how elements can be broken down into minimalist expressions and then blown up into a shape or object. I hope that we can someday collaborate on something again.

Allison was actually the person who suggested I take a look at Paducah as a place to move to from Chicago. She accompanied me on my visit down and we had this awful picture taken together in Paducah in March, 2005. I think this is the only photo we have of the two of us together after almost 20 years of friendship! I look like I'm holding her up in the air... We're all disheveled and travel weary... But in a way, it is also an accurate portrait of two women who can tackle a task and laugh while doing it!

Thanks to Michaela Marchi for most of the photos of our quilt project!

The Inter-American Quilt Project by Allison Svoboda and Rachel Biel