When we feel and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love.
You can't offer happiness to another until you have it youself.
Learn to love and heal yourself, then you have something to offer others.
Images of one of the quilts I've been growing my heart with this summer. In progress.
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| Crown of Thorns 1972. first quilt by Judy Martin re-purposed clothing and curtain fabric, hand pieced and hand quilted, (no longer exists) |
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| self portrait, 1985 hand painted cotton, re-purposed maternity clothing, hand quilted 42 x 42 inches |
When I started having babies, quilt making fit into my day better than any other art form.
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| Judy (31 years) with her two older children in 1982 |
I live in Northern Ontario. I've lived here all my life.
The quilts I made during my 30’s and 40’s are shocking in their lack of skill. I gave the baby quilts (learning samples) away to new parents who accepted them graciously.
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| spider web baby quilt, 1983 polyester-cotton blends, machine pieced, hand quilted this photo from 1999 when the baby was 16. She was using it as a car blanket. |
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| Skipping, 1988 fabric paint, cotton fabrics, machine pieced, hand quilted |
Quilts are slow to make.
There are a lot of repetitive tasks involved that put a person into a meditative state.
And as I was making them, not only did I feel comforted, I also felt that here was the place I could say things that were not "normal".
About the photos in this blog post. I spent all day yesterday writing and deleting text, but the images here have been stable. I wanted to write about how I learned to quilt with no mentor.
I studied fine art and received a fine art degree from Lakehead University while the kids were still little, but quilts were not part of the curriculum. Quilts are not part of the fine art world.
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| Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow, 1995 hand painted clotton, overdyed cotton, machine pieced, hand quilted, grocery list embroidered on reverse side |
And the quilting world was very rigid at the time. There were quilt police with rules and points and 12 stitches per inch. My quilts were accepted into juried shows but they rarely won awards. They were not understood in the quilt world.
The quilts I made when I was actively mothering were related to my daily life as a mother and also to the fantasy I had about what quilts could be. Even when they were finished, I maintained that fantasy and loved my own work. I believe that making them saved my life.
We moved from Kenora to Manitoulin when the kids were 6, 8, 13, and 15 years old. They went to school and I taught classical piano in a church basement.
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| protection blanket 2005. Chemical dyes on rayon embellished with sequins and ribbon, machine pieced, hand quilted |
In 2005, we had an empty nest. I began this blog in 2006.
I kept making my quilts. I didn't know what I was doing in so many words, but I kept doing it.
When I gathered up the few here I looked at them more critically. They don't speak for me the way they used to but they remain evidence that I was here.
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| prayer cloth: hope 2024 natural dyes on cotton, hand pieced, hand quilted with red thread |
This is a much edited post. Thank you for continuing to read it.
Psychic: derived from the unconscious rather than the conscious.
Therapy: care and attention
Making quilts: still saving my life.
He seems to me equal to gods that man who opposite you
sits and listens close to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing -- oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking
is left in me
no: tongue breaks, and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am dead -- or almost
I seem to me.
Fragment 31, Sappho
I received this white whole cloth quilt that was beginning to rot away from passage of time. The back was the worst with big holes and disappeared batting so first I covered the back all over with new batting, some of which was not batting at all but a felting material (pre-felt) and then I added a layer of silk and rayon squares that had been dyed and then marked in the centres, all odd sizes, with large circles. And then after that, on the other side, I added easter egg shapes of silk velvet and then I quilted the piece, echoing and renewing the earlier maker’s thick blue thread only I used a pinkish avocado thread instead.
We used it on our bed during that velvet egg patching time and the colours were so very bright because they were from the pandemic dye experiments my artist daughter mixed up and the colours – well the colours were like spring and gave a renewal feeling of softness to that side. When I quilted it, echoing the interesting and beautiful whole cloth pattern from the original, I went through the velvet and the original quilt and then it was done. I washed and dried the thing in the machines – subjecting it to life and a kind of drowning death and then rebirth and oh wow, the pre-felted parts reacted and shrank and turned it into something older, or perhaps I mean more human. The amazing texture in the now quite misshapen quilt, is no longer usable as a bed quilt but too interesting to not look at and touch.
I look at it and think I want to wrap myself in this weird courage – this cloak of resilience and mistakes and time past and isolation-colour experiments. An object originally made by a woman I do not know but I admire nevertheless, a cloak from the pandemic when we didn’t know what we were doing or what would come next, when I was so afraid, but poured my fear and desire to protect my family into this cloth of many colours. A softer than soft quilt. An emotional cover up. A close listener to my sweet speaking and lovely laughter and my breath.
I think of my quilts as poems, and for me, this one is like Sappho’s fragment 31, her love poem that describes how she falls apart when she looks at the beloved. How she is greener than grass and also feels dead. Her tongue breaks and fire races under her skin and in her eyes no sight and in her ears drumming and cold sweat holds her and shaking grips her. "Greener than green I am and dead, or almost I seem to me."
And how this quilt fell apart, dead or almost – but now it is greener than grass on the inside. Dull on the outside, bright in the inside. Your sweet speaking. Your lovely laughing.
Fragment 31 is perhaps Sappho's most famous poem. In this post it is translated from the original Greek by Anne Carson. Fragment 31 was a key reference in Carson's long essay about the creative space of yearning, of not knowing but wanting to know and being in love with that erotic wooing or seeking, that human lovers and artists and thinkers are familiar with. Eros the Bittersweet, was selected by the modern library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time.
Kindness is our only hope.
We were with our family in a Mexican resort during that unreal time between Christmas and New Year's. We had a very beautiful escape.
I took my handwork with me and there were moments of quiet when I turned to it, mostly in the early evenings in our very clean and white room when it was a relief to be away from the sun.
I am pleased to finally be able to share on this blog that I have been invited to mount a solo show at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham England this coming August. For the exhibition, I plan to finish up the quilt tops I put together during the pandemic so that I can display mostly all new work. And this is one of them.
Quilting it surprised me. When I hand piece a quilt, I usually need to strengthen the seams by quilting them 'in the ditch' and that is the case here. However, this is the first time that I have added a secondary grid and that simple stitching made the old damasks express a softness that I had not expected.
It became a quiet safety net full of PEACE.
A traditional one patch quilt has a timeless quality, not innovative or risky. Quilts like this make me think about my 50 year marriage to Ned. We celebrated it in Mexico with our children and there were many speeches and teasing about our long marriage and one of the kids asked me what my favourite thing about being married to Ned over the years and my answer was that I felt safe with him.
I'm a timid person. It's a scary world and I am afraid of it.
And this quilt. It is so safe.
Our world goes to pieces. We have to rebuild our world. We investigate and worry and analyze and forget that the new comes about through exuberance, not through a defined deficiency. We have to find our strength rather than our weakness. Out of the chaos of collapse we can save the lasting: we still have our right or wrong; the absolute of our inner voice. We still know beauty. We still know freedom and happiness, unexplained and unquestioned. Intuition saves us examination. We have to gather our constructive energies and concentrate on the little we know, the few remaining constants. But how? We neglect a training in experimenting and doing. We feel safer as spectators. We collect rather than construct. We are proud of knowledge but forget that facts only give reflected light. If we want to learn to do, we have to turn to artwork, more specifically to craft work. We learn that no picture exists before it is done. The conception of a work gives only its temper, not its consistency. Things take shape in material and in the process of working it. Anni Albers
I thought the cloth was finished. I put it in my show at the Homer Watson last spring.
But this autumn, I felt that it needed more.
More weight. More time. More definition. Some darkness.
I began by adding brown silk thread.
which bird said what or to whom or for what reason.
The oak tree seemed to be writing something using very few words.
I couldn't decide which door to open
they looked the same.
or what would happen when I did reach out
and turn a knob
I thought I was safe, standing there
but my death remembered its date.
Only so many summer nights still stood before me,
full moon, waning moon,
October mornings: what to make of them? Which door?
I couldn't tell which stars were which or how far away any one of them was,
or which were still burning or not -
their light moving through space like a long, late train -
And I've lived on this earth so long. 70 winters.
70 springs and summers,
and all this time stars in the sky - in day light
when I couldn't see them
and at night when, most nights, I didn't look.
The images are of my stitching these past few weeks.
