Quilting a Year

 The May square for my 2020 quilt is a tribute to the quilters of Gee's Bend, Alabama. The Gee's Bend quilters are a community of black women who have been making their own distinctive style of quilts for generations in the face of generations of struggle. Many of the original quilters were former slaves, and they and the women who followed them kept quilting vibrant, colorful patterns through extreme poverty, through the depredations and indignities of the Jim Crow era, through the fights of the civil rights era, and right up through to the present day. In recent decades their work has gathered widespread recognition as a distinctly American born art form, and their quilts have now been displayed in major museums across the country are part of the permanent collections of several great museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  "Workclothes Quilt" by Mary Lee Bendolph Quilt by Lucy Mingo (b.1931) As a beginning quilter, part of my interest ...

The second square for my 2020 quilt is an Easter Basket representing April. Easter was the first big holiday that arrived just a few weeks into the shut down, and my family was fortunate in that my parents, my brother, and I could all gather together. It also became an early occasion for deliveries of easter cupcakes to friends and neighbors. For Easter I made meringue "nest" topped cupcakes with chocolate candy eggs. The pic below of my mom and I masked up for cupcake delivery captures what would become a pandemic ritual of delivering baked goods to doors and enjoying the brief socially distanced visits waving at friends from the sidewalk as they picked up the treats.  Making this quilt square was much less about Easter of 2020, however, and much more about happy memories of the past. This square connects with my family in two ways. Most directly, the "Easter Basket" pattern, is a traditional one which I copied from the one made by my great grandmother Rose, and he...