[Issue #5] Poems in the Buff - Poem Quilt

A quilt made of poems about quilts.

The Naked Stuff

This poetry and quilting project was an endeavor. The basic idea was to interview my grandmother about her life as a southern woman who dabbled in the domestic arts while she taught me how to hand quilt. How simple I thought it would be. How charming.

And it was charming, but as we rifled through her collection of quilts dating all the way back to the early 1800s, I was faced with a lineage of great, creative matriarchs whose lives were stitched into mounds of colorful patchwork, warm and supple and real between my hands.

I am honestly still processing this whole experience. For now, only one 9-inch by 9-inch square is done. Once I finished quilting that square, which I’m so proud of (and believe me, it’s rough), I embroidered one of the poems on the back. I’ll continue this until all the poems I’ve written so far are on a square (you can see them arranged in the third photo above), and once they’re all sewn together it’ll be something of a quilt! Full of me, my grandmother, her mother, her mother’s mother “Big Mama”, my grandfathers great grandmother Shampanor, and countless other women who came before me. I wonder what they’d think of my little project?

The poems

Each poem is inspired by either a piece of research I came across, or by a quote from my grandmother during our interviews.

This poem is based on a quote from my grandmother, who described laying underneath quilts while groups of women quilted them. The light shining through the colorful fabric "was like stained glass.”

This poem is based on the way my grandmother learned to sew. I was surprised she wasn’t required to learn when she was a small girl; rather, she wanted to help when her mother was sewing things. Most of her skill was self taught, even into adulthood. I can see this very clearly in her quilting technique, which differs a lot from the “proper” techniques in books and modern learning resources.

This poem is inspired by my grandmother’s memories of playing underneath the quilting frame and pretending she was in a barn yard. It’s also based on the idea of a group of women quilting being referred to by their husbands of “hens outside the coop.”

This poem is based on my experience trying to “pop the knot” as the first step when hand quilting, where the goal is to bury the knot on the end of the tread in between the quilt layers so that it doesn’t show on the front or back of the quilt. I kept pulling the thread too hard so that the knot wouldn’t “catch” in the layers correctly. My grandma gave me a stern warning after I’d done it wrong a few too many times.

This poem is inspired by my grandmother saying that the devil can’t “catch” her if her hands are never idle when quilting. It echos the research I discovered which indicates a lot of domestic arts, including quilt making, was used as a way to pass time since women’s roles were largely still domestic and not based on finding work or building careers.

This poem is based on my grandmother not being able to remember making a few of the quilt squares we found in her project stash. The first stanza is a direct quote, and the second is a thought I had, wondering what else (quilting projects, but also life experiences) are etched into the world but she doesn’t remember them happening.

This poem is a near direct quote from my grandmother describing the types of things she would sew because she “had” to, versus making things for fun. She said it in almost a sing-song kind of way, which made me think it could exist as a poem on its own.

This poem is inspired by the oldest quilt my grandmother still owns, which was hand made by my great-great-great-grandmother Shampanor. I imagined the quilt as embodying her spirit, so that she was present for all the wonderful, fun, and loving things that happened around it.

Click this link to see a collection of photos of my grandmothers quilting materials, and progress shots of the small square I made and embroidered with a poem.

Take care, nerds.

JS