Finished Sewing New Quilt top

 

    I Just finished sewing together all the blocks for my challenge quilt. I belong to an art quilting group called Cutting Edge and we decided to make quilts to show our own personal journey with racism.  I wrote about this in my last blog post, with a picture and explanation of  the center block.  Some of the pictures are from my senior yearbook which gives you an idea of how

 few Black girls were 'integrated' into our school. About sixteen into 850 some White girls.

It couldn't have been easy for them, to say the least. For me,  it was the first time 

I had ever met or talked to a Black person. I had seen Black people when we went to downtown Milwaukee to see our dentist or go shopping. But there were no Black people in our neighborhood.

For the 2020/2021 school year, Divine Savior/Holy Angels

 reports that 28% of the students are students of color.

The other pictures show some of the many marches and protests of those times. There's even a picture of  National Guard tanks on the streets of Milwaukee from the summer of 1967.  Although that is considered the 'summer of love' it was also the summer of hate and discrimination in Milwaukee and other cities. There were 199 consecutive days and nights of marches to protest unfair housing practices (Redlining)  and school bussing and segregation. Fr. Groppi was one of the leaders of the protests.

Pictures are courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal, 

Wisconsin Black Historical Society, Milwaukee Public Library

 and the Milwaukee Journal /Sentinel.

As time went on and I lived in other areas of the world and country I had Black coworkers, friends, and boyfriends. I currently live in a county where Blacks make up only 2% and Latinos 23%.

Wauwatosa where I grew up is currently 86% white with 5% black. 

New Quilt Challenge

      It's been a while since I last posted anything. I've been busy working on a new quilt for a challenge from my Cutting Edge group.  The topic being, My Personal Journey with Racism.  This challenge has been very thought provoking, to say the least.

      I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the age of five, our family moved to Wauwatosa, a suburb of Milwaukee. You might have noticed that Wisconsin, especially Kenosha and Wauwatosa, have been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons.  There have been a couple of what appears to be racially motivated incidents of police killing young Black men. The September 24th New York Times reported that Milwaukee is among the most racially segregated counties in the United States. 

     After grade school, I attended Divine Savior High School. Sixteen courageous black girls entered Divine Savior-Holy Angels high school in September of 1969. They 'integrated' into the 850 some white girls.There were four Black girls to approximately 220 white girls in each of the four grade levels.They came from Holy Angels High School which was located in the 'inner city' of Milwaukee. The two schools merged that year due to decreasing enrollments at both schools and a decrease in the number of teaching nuns. 

     One day in religion class, Gwen, one of the Black girls was drawing on her hand with white chalk. When Sr. Mary Margaret asked her, "Gwen, what are you doing?" She responded, "I'm just trying to fit in Sister." That really struck me and still does. What was it like for these girls to be so outnumbered by white girls?

I'm still working on assembling some of the other blocks for this quilt, 

but thought I'd post a picture of this one. My husband photographed my hands in the position above, showing one hand drawing on the other with chalk. 

I then used Photoshop to modify the photo. The writing in the background was hand lettered

 and printed to organza, then fused to the  photo.

Sunflower Quilt with Photo and Organza Overlay

During my foot surgery recovery, I've been looking a lot at two quilts on my design board that I knew needed something different.  Last week I talked about rearranging one of them and am really excited about the direction  that one is now going.

Yesterday, I played around with making changes to the other one.  I covered up the previous focal  point, which was a screen print of flowers, on which I did a lot of machine quilting (oh well) and replaced it with a photo of one of my  gigantic sunflowers that I grew this summer.  On top of that I placed an organza version of the same photo.  So if it looks a little distorted, it's due to the organza being slightly shifted on top of the opaque photo and seeing the other photo below.  I think it  just makes it a little more interesting.  I had read about this technique a long time ago in a Quilting Arts magazine.  For more information on this technique check out Wen Redmond http://wenredmond.weebly.com/holographic-images.html.

Here's a closeup of the two photos overlapped.

Upcoming New Solo Show

I will be having a solo show of my art quilts in the Paso Robles City Hall for the last week of April and all of May.  Here are a few quilts that will be in the show.

Orange and Blue Landscape

24” x 21”

The left side symbolizes nature with its organic leaf shapes in contrast to the more industrial, polluting, skyscrapers of the cities. A small river of bright blue Dupioni silk runs through the top symbolizing our decreasing precious water supply.

Into the Redwoods

21 ¼” x 18"

This quilt was inspired by a photo I took going into the Redwoods in Santa Cruz.  It was started in a great class I took from Susan Brandeiss,  http://www4.ncsu.edu/~brandeis/ who creates beautiful fiber art,  I digitally printed it onto silk, after enhancing it in photoshop.  There is a leaf digitally printed on the green organza.  I then added embroidery and beads.  I like using the  combination of the digital  photography, which is high tech with the low tech of hand stitching, which has been around forever.

What’s Black and White and Red All Over?

19” x 31”

This quilt was inspired by photos and views of the many fields and vineyards in the central coast area of California

Hand dyed fabric using potato dextrin resist, commercial fabrics, ribbon, buttons, beads, and foil.

Collage Quilt about Mom

Every March brings memories of my incredible mom,  who was a March baby like me.   She taught me many things, sewing being only one of them.  She instilled in me a sense of ethics, honesty, responsibility and generosity.  She was a feisty, independent, smart woman. When she was 19, she set off on a solo trip by train to visit the World's Fair in New York City to see first-hand what inventions and ideas were being developed for the future. The theme of the 1939 World's Fair was "The World of Tomorrow."

In researching the fair to create the quilt about her trip, I learned that there was a prototype of the first dishwasher displayed at the fair.  Did my mom ever have a dishwasher in her lifetime?  No, she would joke that she had five dishwashers when asked by us why we couldn't get one.  Of course, the dishwashers were my siblings and me.

I loved to hear stories from my mom about this trip. A postcard she had sent home to her family from New York became the inspiration for me to create a collage-type quilt about her. Below is a picture of mom and the postcard.

The background for the quilt was painted with acrylic paint

 which was first applied to plastic wrap, then transferred to fabric. 

 Mom's favorite colors were red and green.  Below is a closeup

 from part of the quilt showing a picture of Mom and the story of her trip, 

which I printed on organza.  I actually ended up using the front of a different postcard

 which played better with the other photos and background.

Here is a picture of the whole quilt.