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Threads Magazine Podcast: "Sewing With Threads"
Commemorative American Quilts, with Sandra Sider | Episode 102
00:30:44
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- [00:00]
Jeanine Clegg
Summer is coming. What better time to sew up a couple easy skirts you'll reach for every day? Sewing pro Kelly Williams demonstrates how in a recently released on demand elearning course. It's called Button Front and Paper Bag Swing Skirts. Kelly shows how to create two a line skirts, one with a faux button placket and the other with a paper bag waistline. This course includes downloadable patterns so so you can get started right away. To sign up and to find other on demand elearning courses, go to courses.threadsmagazine.com. Hello and welcome to Sewing with Threads, the monthly podcast from Threads magazine. I'm your host, Jeanine Clegg. Today I'm joined by Sandra Seider, a quilt artist, quilt historian, and author of many quilt books, including the recently released Commemorative American Quilts. It's published by Schiffer Craft.
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Interviewer/Host
Welcome, Sandra.
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Sandra Seider
Thank you, Janine. Happy to be here.
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Interviewer/Host
Well, thanks for. Thanks for coming on.
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Jeanine Clegg
You have a long list of qualifications that reflect your expertise in quilts and quilting.
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Interviewer/Host
You had served as president of Studio
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Jeanine Clegg
Art Quilt Associates, your past curator for the Texas Quilt Museum, and you were editor of Art Quilt Quarterly for six years.
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Interviewer/Host
Plus, you've published many timely books and articles on quilt history and quilt aesthetics.
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Jeanine Clegg
Your latest book comes as America celebrates
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Interviewer/Host
its 250th birthday on Independence Day.
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Jeanine Clegg
July 4th was the anniversary, the impetus
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Interviewer/Host
for commemorative American quilts.
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Sandra Seider
It certainly was. I've been so disturbed by a lot of things going on in this country for quite some time, and I just felt I had to do something to be involved, to have a positive attitude and a positive result. And what better than quilts to do that?
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Interviewer/Host
So what, what is it about quilts that helps illustrate or narrate American history? Does, does quilting do a better job rather than, say, garments?
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Sandra Seider
Well, everything has its place. But the thing with quilts, what's always attracted me for a long, long time is it's a common touchstone. I mean, everybody sleeps, everybody gets chilled, everybody wants to be covered. And in this country, the history of quilt making goes so far back, even way before 1776. We just don't have the quilts because it was a long time ago and they were used up. And that attraction is across the board. I think just every single person understands the value of a quilt. I cannot tell you how many people have said, here's a picture of the quilt that my great grandmother made. And, you know, can you tell me anything about it? And it's just very personal. And I think that this is coming out in all of the celebrations across this country. I've tried to keep track of the quilt involvement and I lost track about two months ago. The Daughters of the American Revolution, which has regional groups, is sponsoring exhibitions. The huge Quilts of Valor project, which is based in Iowa, has a representative in each state and each state is contributing to exhibitions in those states. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are, I mean, of course there's the exhibition that Pamela Weeks and I are doing at the New England Quilt Museum in conjunction with my book. And might I give the title of that as a little plug? Would that be ok?
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Interviewer/Host
Yes, please do.
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Sandra Seider
Okay. It's Commemorative American Quilts, Selections from the Centennial, Bicentennial and Beyond. And I can give a little sneak peek. All of your listeners can be the first public access to know there will be more than 30 quilts in that show. It will take over the entire museum and six of the quilts will be from the book. We managed to borrow those quilts for the exhibition, so we're very pleased that's going to Happen. It opens June 30th and in September 26th. In September we'll have a little panel discussion. We thought about doing something really, you know, fun on July 4th with the show, but it turns out there's so many other things going on in the Boston area, it's mind boggling. So we'll wait till have our sort of celebration in September.
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Interviewer/Host
Well, that sounds wonderful. Really, that's such a coup to be able to get some of the quilts that you highlight in the book to be on display at the exhibit. Can you give me an example of one that will be there?
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Sandra Seider
I sure can. Well, I'll tell you example of one from the book, which is by Robin Schwald. It is her quilt that she made for the 2020 exhibition that Pamela and I also co curated in Deeds Not Words about Of course, the 19th Amendment in women's suffrage. And she was so kind alone for that show. It's a very graphic, very powerful statement about that change in women's garments and, you know, women's independence, which was happening already at that time in the mid to late 19th century. There. There's another quilt that that is not in the book but is. It's actually eight quilts. It's a Boston Marathon celebration of the 130th anniversary of the Boston Marathon. And each eight quilt and it sort of counts as one quilt. It's a project, but it's eight individuals and, and they show the route of the marathon and from quilt to quilt to quilt through each town the marathon passes through. And that's going to be a very special installation since, you know, Lowell is right there near Boston.
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Interviewer/Host
That takes a lot of coordination to put those eight separate quilts together, for sure. Now, that brings to mind the question of these commemorative quilts that you highlight in the book. Are they made by individuals or are they made by groups like several people putting certain blocks?
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Sandra Seider
Very good question. The problem is with, with the antique quilts, there are quite a few of them. We don't know the names, but for quite a few, we do know the names, individual people that made the quilts, and, you know, some of them were known as quilt makers in their communities. And this goes back to the 19th century, then the early 20th century. We assume that some of those earlier quilts were made, were quilted in quilting bees, which was, you know, the way it was put together, and one person would piece it and then you would have quilting bees. There are also, we also have crazy quilts from the latter 19th century that I believe. I think my book probably proves it, that they were sort of a spin off from the centennial of 1876 and the, the huge increase in production of fabric and silks that were very available and available through mail order by the 1880s, 1890s. So, you know, the crazy quilts could. You could think of that as a group project if you have people in the family giving pieces of fabric but not actually sewing it. So the question is, what is it? How do you, how do you define a group project? Is it who actually stitched it together or the sort of intellectual content and the concept of bringing things together?
- [07:19]
Interviewer/Host
Yes, that's right. And, you know, I wonder if a lot of these quilts, and I guess specifically the commemorative quilts are the fabrics that are used in it, as you say, hand me downs, or pieces from garments that were made, or are they, are the commemorative quilts different from a quilt that maybe a home sewer would use in their home in terms of what fabrics they use? Because a lot of home sewers made quilts from leftover fabrics from garments they sewed years ago. Maybe not so much these days, but I think the historical quilts that you're looking at may have been made with scrap fabrics. And I'm wondering if the commemorative quilts, that was the same for those, you
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Sandra Seider
would be surprised how many seem to have been made with new fabric, because when you open them up and look at them, they look new. And so if they had been used fabrics, then you Would see that on the top of the quilt. So there was an idea about. And especially for the centennial from 1876 and the sort of the. The Columbian celebrations In Chicago in 1892, 1893, there were pieces of fabric that were produced, hold yardages just for those events with the dates on them or imagery or the names of. I have a few images of that in my book. And we also have commemorative. I call them bandanas, some people call them kerchiefs. About 20 by 20 or 22 by 22 lithographed images of the buildings in those events. And those were bought as souvenirs. And then some of them show up in quilts that were completed 20, 30 years, sometimes 40 years later. So that was special, that was saved and wasn't used until the time came to make a quilt out of it. All these questions about used, new, partially used, saved. These are some of the real, really important questions for quilt researchers. And there's a lot of research to be done about this.
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Interviewer/Host
Yes, for sure. Because, you know, a lot of home sewers do use scraps, but we also save special pieces for just the right time. And I think that may be the case with what you were just describing. You know, the special souvenirs that were bought years earlier and then used again then used for this special quilts that they put together. Do you think that the quilts, the commemorative quilts that were made are preserved or in better shape than something that a home sewer would use in their home because new fabrics were used or unused fabrics were applied, and they were not put on beds or used on a daily basis.
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Sandra Seider
They could have been put on beds you name, but maybe never washed. Some of them do not show any evidence of being washed, which means they weren't used that much. Well, we know that many times a special quilt would be put out for a visitor or a guest. One time, two times use, put back. And the idea about these commemorative quilts, and when I say commemorative, I have to make it really clear. I'm talking about quilts that commemorate a passage of time. Not simply something that celebrates a wedding or a birth or a graduation, but a quilt that's conceived as sort of encapsulating a passage of time. And sometimes it's 50 years, sometimes it's 300 years. And we have quilts that would fill that definition. And that. That makes it very, very special. And those. They're exact. There's indication that some of those quilts were thought of as a legacy to be, you know, handed on, in which case, you Wouldn't use it all that much because you would want to keep it for the next generation or generation after that.
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Interviewer/Host
Right. Well, but if they probably were not hung either, because that would, that would expose them to a lot of elements over time, even dust. So
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Sandra Seider
as far as we know, not in homes, not in residences. They certainly were hung up for display in some of these events that I talk about in the book. I mean, we have examples of that.
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Interviewer/Host
Right. One of the chapters that you have focuses on county fairs. And I think a lot of people years ago were very involved in the organization of county fairs and there was a lot of pride in displaying your sewn work at a county fair. That doesn't seem to be as much of a pastime or an interest these days. Would you agree?
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Sandra Seider
I do not have enough information on that to think about whether it's important or not. I know that quilts are still put in competition for, you know, premiums. Well, they call them prizes now. It used to be premiums. So, I mean, I can think of renowned quilt makers now like Marianne Fonz, who have won prizes at fairs like that. But I just, I don't know enough about county fairs. I actually talk more about the world's fairs in this country than the county fairs. But it's, again, a wonderful topic for no quilt study. And, you know, the International Quilt Museum in Nebraska a couple of years ago had an entire show on fair quilts. So the interest is certainly there. It's certainly there for researchers.
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Interviewer/Host
How did you limit yourself to certain quilts for this book? Because it seems like it would be a limitless kind of topic.
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Sandra Seider
Yes. I had to keep this book to no more than about 200, 210 pages because if I put everything, every image in that book that I wanted to, it would cost $80. So there's a marketing, you know, sort of impulse there to be able to. For people to be able to buy the book, which makes sense. But I had. There are 200 images in the book and I must have had 600.
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Interviewer/Host
Yeah, there were a lot of images in the book which was impressive, and they were all colorful color and some of them, you know, were larger than others. There weren't as. There weren't shots, like close up shots of the stitching or of the motifs. So can you talk a little bit about that?
- [13:48]
Sandra Seider
Well, yes, I would have liked to have had that, but it would have made the book so much longer. And in fact, and this is where I probably will lose everybody listening to this, but my interest was not so much in the stitching or in the quilting, but in the history and in the cultural relevance of what we were talking about. So the motifs, you know, where they're. I mean, I've already had people saying, oh, I can't see the close ups in the crazy quilts. And every single one is online. Go online, look it up, Zoom in. There you go. You can see it. But we just. We could not include details like that because just of the length of the book. There are constraints. I love book publishing, but there are constraints. Whereas online you can just do whatever you want.
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Interviewer/Host
Oh, yes. We have constraints too, with the magazine. And you do. We always want to show more than we have space for. So it's tough decision making sometimes. Well, the history is very interesting. How did you decide which quilts to choose? Because there are many.
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Sandra Seider
That is a really important question to ask, and a huge decision factor for me was could we get a beautiful image? That was really important because Schiffer is. I love Schiffer. Their designers are wonderful and they're very, very strict about the quality of the images and the pictures in that book that are smaller than full page, that is the largest. We could reproduce the image and not have it fall out, you know, not have it pixelate or go out of focus. So I had to choose images that were good. And also I tried to have something of a geographic distribution of the pictures in the book. I was trying to make it comprehensive as much as I could for the nation, but as you can imagine, for the Centennial was almost all east coast and also very few quilts from the south from that period because, you know, the south wasn't all that keen about the United States of the Union at that point because the Civil War just ended. So there was skewed more towards, you know, the north and Northeast at that time, so.
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Interviewer/Host
Right, right. Well, the book talks about patriotism, but also about protest. What kind of protest quilts did you
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Jeanine Clegg
include in the book?
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Sandra Seider
Well, there were quite. There were several. Not as many as I would like to have included just for the reason of not getting good images. But we included the Vietnam War protest quilt by Jenny Girakar, which was a group quilt. That is one that definitely was a group quilt. Oh, that's interesting. Almost all the protest quilts were group quilts, now that I think about it. And I think I may have mentioned something. I should have made a bigger deal of that. There is another quilt that is the Emancipation Proclamation quilt for Maryland, because as I'm sure everybody who does American history knows with Emancipation Proclamation it was freeing the enslaved people in the Confederacy. Maryland didn't pertain. So that came a year later. So that was a huge 10 by 10 foot quilt that was assembled by more than. I believe it was more than 200 people. I can't remember the exact number now over a period of years. So it was mostly about racial injustice. There's Kim Cooper's Tulsa Massacre quilt from the 1921 massacre in Oklahoma. And that, of course, you know, protest that action and everything that happened from that. So it was more. They were more based on, you know, Vietnam, racial injustice. And then finally, there is one wonderful quilt from the reservation in South Dakota, from the Sioux, the Sioux who lived there. S I O U X, of course, that were celebrating their final, I would say their autonomy as a group at that point, which happened many, many years after it should have in that area.
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Interviewer/Host
Sandra, you just mentioned that more than 200 people were involved with creating or sewing together quilt sections for the Maryland quilt that marks that marked their Emancipation Proclamation. Who put all of those together into one quilt? Who sewed them together? Was it a group or just one person?
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Sandra Seider
It's one person. Amazing woman, Dr. Joan Gaither. And the title is the 1864 Maryland Sesquicentennial Slave Emancipation Proclamation Quilt. That was done in 2014. 10ft by 10ft. And this is something. She worked with the African American Arts Council in Maryland and made it a pictorial quilt that they are traveling. They're still traveling it around Maryland. Her goal is to show it in every single county in Maryland and then finally in Baltimore, which is her home city.
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Interviewer/Host
Oh, that's wonderful. Is that how these kind of group quilts are put together? That different people sew together certain blocks or certain sections, and then one person is tasked with assembling them into one comprehensive quilt?
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Sandra Seider
One or two. Sometimes it's to the California commemorative quilt and Arizona, they split it up into sort of north and South. And two people in each case were involved and a third person for quilting the back of the. For quilting it all together. It's amazing to me that without the Internet, the power of the Internet, these projects were able to come to fruition because they were earlier than some of the others. And they're really beautiful. The idea of having this. They're pictorial, both of them, the California and Arizona quilts. And they really have a flavor of the state of the scenery, of the people, of the history. And it shows that there was one comprehensive concept for the quilt that then pulled together everybody who was working on it over a period. Of time and the stories. I was able to interview some of the people working on these quilts. There was one young woman. Her name is Shannon Quinlan. There's a picture of her in the book. She went with her mother to work on the quilt when she was 9 or 10 years old. And she has fond memories of working with all these older women on the quilt. And she really believes it influenced her in her life to go into elder law. She's a lawyer now, and that's what she does. Elder law, which I find that sort of touched her life in a very special way.
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Interviewer/Host
That is wonderful. So the. The quilts, do you think there was a lot of discussion ahead of time, a lot of planning, like, okay, you do this section, and that will have, like, trees from our mountainous regions. And, you know, this person over here will do some quilting that will reflect the urban area of our state. Do you think there was definitely?
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Sandra Seider
Absolutely, definitely. And they talked about color. It was really orchestrated beautifully. And there were assignments. And of course, there could be questions. But you were each maker. I know most about the California commemorative Quilt. They were turned loose, and they did whatever research they wanted to, and they went into archives in some cases to find out, you know, the names of people who had stores. And, I mean, the sort of attention to detail makes it really special to me to see how much work was done to make it accurate, to make it, let's use the word authentic.
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Interviewer/Host
Yeah, that is wonderful. Did you notice a difference in the quality of the quilts from the time that they were hand sewn early on, early quilts that were just hand sewn and those that came later, the more recent quilts that were probably sewn at least partially using a sewing machine.
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Sandra Seider
Well, we have to talk about what kind of difference in quality are we talking about here? I mean, are we talking about, you know, the hand piecing versus piecing with a sewing machine? In which case we certainly would have, you know, maybe a little bit more accuracy with the hand piecing, where you could do paper piecing and turn it than with a sewing machine. But people got very good at using the sewing machine with quilts really fast. So you can't really say there's a difference in quality. Maybe a difference in the fact that you could spend more time, maybe doing hand quilting because you pieced it with a machine, meaning how your time is used and you could allocate that time. I. I don't know if women made or people made more quilts in a shorter amount of time. We don't really have documentation on that that I know of, but it's certainly true that you could make a larger quilt faster with the sewing machine. And so as beds got larger, that was probably a good thing to be able to do that. I don't. You know, I think that people who do. There's a mindset of people who are serious quilters, and they're very meticulous, and they're very precise, and they're very focused. And so you would have the same kind of focus whether you were doing everything by hand or are doing everything with a machine, you know, piecing by machine, machine quilting. And I. I don't. I don't see a difference in quality. I maybe see a difference in how. How to say it. The. The presentation you could have. You know, you could do. If you do very, very tight hand stitches, it gets puckered when you wash it really easily. If you do it with the machine, not quite so much. So you have that. But then we also have batting, which is. And you don't want me to go into that at this point, which can make a difference in the. The. The bulkiness, the thickness, how it takes the light, even when it's on a bed. So it's. They're. They're different, but in a way, they're just the same because they're made by a quilter. And, you know, quilters are. They're serious makers. This. Across the board.
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Interviewer/Host
And, you know, the thing that came to mind when you were just answering this question was the time that it takes and the planning. Again, back to the planning issue. That for a celebration, if they're commemorative, for a specific celebration, you know, as an anniversary, one of the centennial, for example, how far ahead did people start thinking about and discussing and planning to make sure that the quilt was done in time for, say, the fourth of July?
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Sandra Seider
I don't think any of them were done by the 4th of July, 1874. 75 is when the mills geared up to start printing the centennial fabrics that we just talk about 1876, and that hit the market the fall of 1875. And so the fabric could start to be bought. But since most people, you know, were still working by hand, I don't see how they could finish a really magnificent centennial quilt by July 4th. And. And we actually have examples of some that were finished four years later and five years later and six years later. So it's not like they were preparing to have them for the centennial to hang up somewhere. They had the idea of a centennial quilt and the United States being 100 years old, which was a big deal because nobody lived that long like they do now. So, you know, they came, they came later and I think they, I can imagine them savoring those fabrics and the souvenirs that they had and then beginning to work on those quilts. But we have a few that were 1876, but you know, they're, we don't know exactly when they were done and there's no specific evidence of one finish for the fourth of July. It start, they start being mentioned in newspapers about August, September, November, you know, after the fourth, before the whole event closed in November. But there are quilts that are talked about as centennial quilts before then, but I can't remember any that were finished specifically for the Fourth of July. It was thought of as a whole year celebration, which we're supposed to be doing now.
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Interviewer/Host
Right? Exactly. Exactly. Has there ever been a heyday of quilting?
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Sandra Seider
I think it's going on right now because there are more people making quilts for this America 250 with these projects than I would ever have imagined, more than I would ever have thought I would think they would saturate the market for it. But one exhibit after another keeps happening and, and of the projected 100,000 events to happen in this country in this year for America, 250, it looks, I've already counted about 110 and there are more to come. And you know, you have things like the Virginia quilt museum with 250 quilts commemorating Virginia building their museum with that many quilts. It's, it's really a watershed of people doing quilting. And I also hope it sort of boosts the industry a little bit more for younger people to be excited and be involved. That's really important going forward.
- [27:57]
Interviewer/Host
Well, this is so interesting. There's so much more I want to talk about, but we're coming to the close of our time here and I just want to let folks know that there is a brief review of your book in our summer Threads issue print issue and folks are welcome to take a look at that, Sandra, if they want to find out more about this book and your many other books. Where should they check?
- [28:24]
Sandra Seider
Well, my website. Go to my website and also they're all on Amazon, which I hesitate to mention, but they're all there if somebody wants to take a look and if there are specific questions, Sandra ciderac.com just email me. I love to hear from people who are, you know, reading what I've written. And what's your website, www.sandrasider.com okay, great.
- [28:52]
Interviewer/Host
Well, thank you. Well, I do appreciate all of your time, Sandra. There's just. There's so much to touch on here. I just want to wrap up with one question. At the very beginning, you talked about how you decided to write this book because you were not happy with the way things were going in the country. Did this book help you feel better about how things are going? And did it, did it bring you any solace at all?
- [29:20]
Sandra Seider
No, it did, because, you know, it actually made. I talk about a lot of issues and troubles in this country between 1776 and today. And I just, I realized it's cyclical. I mean, there it will. Things go up, things go down, things get crazy, things get calm. And I think as long as we keep doing something, especially, you know, in various groups, like making quilts and talking about, you know, quilts as, you know, as valid work, and I just, I feel that it makes a sort of. Makes a place. Makes a place where we can go and be ourselves and be calm and be excited about, you know, what we're making, not about what's all over the news. We can just make ourselves happy with what we're doing.
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Interviewer/Host
What a great way to end. Thank you, Sandra. I appreciate your time.
- [30:18]
Sandra Seider
Thank you very much.
- [30:19]
Jeanine Clegg
Thank you to our guests for joining us, and thanks to all of you for listening. Please remember to send your comments, questions and suggestions to thhreadsmagazine.com and please, like, comment and subscribe wherever you are listening. Until next time, keep on sewing with threads.