15 minute read
Stories told in fabric by Karen Janssen
From new cloth or repurposed clothing, local quilters stitch together artistry, warmth and memories.
By Karen Janssen / Photos by Xavier Fané
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There are so many ways to tell a story, from campfire confidences to social media posts to printed pages. The need to tell stories stretches back to ancient pictographs on red sandstone cliffs. Sharing our memories, our trials and triumphs, our sadness and joy has long been part of the fabric of life.
In the Gunnison Valley, we share tales of epic adventures and personal experiences through photography, paint, film, words, dance, quilts. Wait…quilts? In our valley, as in many places, there’s a whole subculture of artists designing, cutting and stitching fabric pieces into amazing works of art that provide a visual treat, preserve memories and tell their own stories.
Take, for example, Lois Rozman’s tie quilt, fashioned from a drawer-full of her father’s ties. When he passed away, she and her family faced the difficult task so many have faced throughout the years. What should they do with her father’s belongings? Lois’ mother, shaped by the Depression, felt nothing should be thrown away. With her skills as a quilter (each of her children and grandchildren own one of her creations), the idea of a quilt seemed a natural progression.
“It became a project we did together,” recalled Lois. “I would set her up before I left for work, and when I’d come home at lunch or after work, she’d proudly show me the progress she had made.” Though Lois’ mom died before the quilt was finished, it now provides a special memory of both her parents.
These themes of repurposing, of creating and holding onto memories, and of working together are some of what makes quilting such a unique and special pastime. Most of us have seen movie scenes or read about quilting bees, where women of the late 18th century gathered to socialize and sew. Many hands made lighter work of a complex task, and it was a chance to connect and
Sarka Shull crafted memory-holding quilts out of her sons’ old t-shirts.
share materials and knowledge.
Donna Rozman, another local quilter (and Lois’s sister-in-law), appreciates the closeness the art has brought for her and her family. When her husband Richard passed away after a car accident in 2015, she was left with a closet full of button-down shirts that held such strong memories. “I wouldn’t have been able to cut them up, but my sister could!” she said. Thanks to her sister’s cutting, her cousin’s ironing and Donna’s sewing, the fabric created enough panels for three good-sized quilt tops. Another sister and her husband picked out the backing and machine-quilted them. By Christmas of that year, the projects were finished. Before giving one to each of her sons, Donna kept alive Richard’s holiday tradition of giving lottery tickets; she stuffed some into the shirt pockets left on the quilt panels.
The stitching together of layers of padding and fabric may date back to 3400 BCE. In the British Museum, an ivory carving from the Temple of Osiris at Abydos in Egypt features the king of the First Egyptian Dynasty wearing a mantle that appears to be quilted. The oldest surviving example of a quilted piece is a linen carpet found in a Mongolian cave, dated to between 100 BCE and 200 CE. For much of its history, quilting was primarily a practical technique to provide protection and insulation (think knights in inhospitable, albeit shining, armor). However, decorative elements were often present. From those humble beginnings, quilting has evolved to include more than 21 million quilters in the U.S. alone.
In fact, what is considered to be the largest community arts project in history is a quilt. In November of 1985, while helping to organize an annual candlelight march, long-time San Francisco gay rights activist Cleve Jones asked fellow marchers to write on placards the names of friends and loved ones who had died of AIDS. At the end of the march, Jones and others stood on ladders and taped the placards to the San Francisco Federal Building. The wall of 1,000-plus names looked like a quilt. People from all over the world were moved to honor their loved ones similarly, and today the AIDS Memorial Quilt is an epic 54-ton tapestry that includes more than 48,000 panels dedicated to more than 100,000 individuals.
Quilting crosses race, age, economic class, gender and skill-level boundaries. Nancy Vogel, a former Crested Butte Community School teacher, spearheaded at least 15 quilting projects with her fourthgraders over the years. The class would brainstorm a subject, and after first honing their skills with Mother’s Day gift pillows, students were responsible for hand-sewing one square each, representing their take on the theme. “We’d work on the quilt the last month of school, when the kids would start to get antsy and needed something to focus on! To this day I have students who say that embroidery and needlework calms them down,” said Nancy. “It was a wonderful way to teach them a life skill, and it also let them each be an individual, yet a part of a larger whole.” The quilts have found numerous homes. Some are displayed around town, like a pet quilt at the Crested Butte Animal Hospital and a quilt at Town Hall showing local historic buildings. Several of the creations were gifted as special memories to parents who lost their children too young.
For indeed, quilts are comforting. Gazing at or snuggling beneath such a labor of love is consoling. And it seems the process of creating them is equally so. Julee Nelson has been part of the Tuesday Night Quilters in Gunnison for 13 years. “You quilt for the enjoyment and the bonding and friendships, but you also do it from a love in your heart for somebody,” she said. Heidi Duryea, a member for 18 years, agreed: “Quilters are
Heidi Duryea and her long arm quilter have finished many local works of fabric art.
givers!” Over the years, the group has made several quilts to place in new Habitat for Humanity homes, as well as crafting raffle quilts for Tough Enough to Wear Pink, Gunnison Valley Hospice and a Japanese earthquake relief effort. Every other year the group presents a show at the Gunnison Arts Center, with far-ranging themes.
Heidi has found that the process really brings the generations together. “We share a common interest, and through that, invaluable friendships have been created. We share stories and support each other through both joy and loss.”
The Tuesday Night Quilters group was formed in 1985, in the back of the E & P Sewing Emporium that occupied a building on Gunnison’s Main Street. Ellen Harriman (the ‘E’ of E & P) recalled, “It started as a marketing thing, and as an opportunity for people to gather and have a large space where they could spread out their projects. It provided motivation to actually finish stuff!” The group has welcomed quilters from their late thirties up to 85 years old, both local and part-time residents. COVID-19 suspended their gatherings, but they still touch base every Tuesday evening by Zoom, sharing their stories and projects.
Quilts can be wholly sewn by an individual or can be a combination of panels, each contributed by someone different. When the quilt top is complete, a backing is then selected and the two are stitched together with a layer of batting in between. In the olden days this was all done by hand, an incredibly time-consuming process. Around the 1970s, machine quilting was recognized as an acceptable alternative, and today many people either own or use the finishing services of someone who owns a long-arm quilting machine. This special sewing machine makes handling such large pieces of fabric more manageable. Heidi Duryea owns one of these, and she sews about three to five quilts a week for people. After the fabric is quilted together, it’s then returned to its crafter for the final steps of adding binding. Amazingly, a large finished quilt can hold up to $1,000 worth of materials and represent an equal (if not more) number of hours!
Of course, that isn’t always the case. There are as many types of quilts as there are memories and stories behind them. Sarka Shull, a local seamstress, decided to use only free and hand-me-down materials in her creations. She loves knowing exactly where the pieces come from: “It’s all about the memories.” She has crafted several quilts out of her two sons’ old t-shirts (some of which they even inherited from other families) and another out of a box of jeans someone gifted her. For Sarka, like so many others, sewing and the creative process are relaxing and rewarding, as well as a tie to her past. She grew up in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia) in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when there wasn’t a free market economy there. Goods and choices were limited, so if you wanted your clothes to be different, you had to sew them! This freewheeling spirit has carried over into her projects today.
Several women expressed their concern that quilting might be a dying art, relegated in people’s minds to little old ladies or the generic, inexpensive pieces that come from China. But there is a vibrant and caring community sewing away here in the Gunnison Valley. In a county of extreme athletes, they embody a different kind of extreme: patience, community, creativity, love. They cut stuff up and then bring the pieces back to life and purpose. They carry on a tradition that runs through generations. They serve as the guardians of memories and the stitchers of stories. b
WILD DIPS
Soak, shiver, sparkle. Repeat daily.
By Leath Tonino
Like so many great difficult rewarding bizarre obsessions, this one started innocently, almost sneakily – without fanfare and thus without me realizing anything special was afoot.
The next 120 days of my life are about to take a turn for the cold, for the shivery? Just because I’m stripping naked way back in Baxter Basin, tiptoeing across a crusty spring snowbank, and doing two quick pushups in a swirling, 18-inch-deep eddy? I’m hot, that’s all. Been hiking all morning. There’s no commitment here, no pressure, nothing but spontaneity and joy and the year’s first swim and – oh sweet merciful crap!—the worst brain freeze in the history of humankind.
Think again, bud.
By accepting the invitation of that crystalline subalpine eddy, and by relaxing on a smooth flat rock after – smoking pipe tobacco, adjusting a topographic map to shade my pale, burnable nether regions, tingling at the cellular level (nay, the mitochondrial level) with exuberant aliveness – I unwittingly embarked upon a
Sophia Chudacoff
summer-defining project. In over my head, as the saying goes.
The following day (oh sweet merciful...) I managed an eight-second bath beneath Gunsight Bridge. Then it was a Long Lake cannonball. Then another Long Lake. Then a muck-floored, willow-walled chamber inside the Slate River’s labyrinthine wetlands. Come Friday evening, I’d achieved six daily soakings in a row. A gauntlet had been thrown down, a challenge embraced.
Saturday. Low fifties, gray rain splattering Coal Creek.
Once more unto the breach!
Three summers out from that inaugural Baxter Basin plunge, I’m still going strong, and now the project has a nickname: Wild Dips. There’s a single rule, an elegantly simple mandate: Every day, regardless of weather or my own wimpiness, I must submerge myself – a Baptist-style baptism, zero Christians, one nude pagan – in a creek, river, pond, lake, marsh or similarly untamed waterbody. I typically vary my dipping sites, using the project as a springboard to local exploration (though repeats are allowed). If I miss a day, I’m required to dip twice the next day at a pair of distinct sites, no exceptions (rarely do I miss a day). Eventually, in September or early October, fearful of inducing a heart attack, I abruptly quit.
Leaves fly. Snow falls. And then, in May or June, with a hot morning hike – my streak begins anew.
I’ve heard countless authors (E. B. White of Charlotte’s Web fame, for instance) insist that if you wait around for “perfect” conditions – quiet house, inspiration, zippier coffee – you will fail to write a sentence. I.e. you have to force the issue of composition. The same could be said for summer at 8,888 feet in the Rockies. Summer? What is this summer of which you speak? A childhood pal from Vermont passed through one July, and after waking up in my yard with a frost-coated sleeping bag, he furrowed his brow and asked me, “So, like, you don’t have summer, huh?”
“Nah, we do,” I replied, “but it’s, um, unique. If you’re swaying in a hammock, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, hair damp from a dip, hey, it’s got to be summer, right?”
Okay, but there’s more to this pastime than merely conjuring the season against its will. A few paragraphs ago I referred to myself as a pagan, a word initially employed to designate those subjects of the Roman Empire who practiced polytheism, who revered a plethora of gods. The etymology is interesting – Latin paganus (“villager, rustic”), from pagus (“country district”) – and seems to point directly at this remote valley in the Elk Mountains.
I’m wary of wilderness-is-my-temple talk, so please don’t misunderstand when I offer that the fiftyish dipping sites I frequent – a micro-waterfall at treeline in Rustlers Gulch, an irrigation ditch edging Town Ranch, the gamut – smack of the spiritual. I don’t mean they are metaphysical entities, nor do I mean they are loci of innate religious power. (To label X sacred is to effectively desacralize Y and Z.) I only mean that they receive my attention, my devotional ablutions, and that this imbues them with a mysterious significance. Quite literally (due to the shallow character of most Crested Butte swimming holes), they make me bow.
It’s good to be attentive, to be devoted, to bow. Yet for all this highfalutin’ spiritual mumbo jumbo, ultimately my Wild Dips project is profane, insofar as it’s motivated by a desire for pure raw fun. Granted, not the fun of sipping cocktails on a deck at sunset, but fun nonetheless – what endurance freaks and climbers with bloody knuckles term Type II Fun. The fun of painful physical engagement. The fun of suffering and suffering’s relief.
Reflecting on the pleasure I derive from (oh sweet merciful...) the worst brain freeze in the history of the world, the image that arises in my mind, oddly, isn’t of the infamous Blizzard Dip or the infamous Sick-with-a-Fever Dip or the infamous Tarn-at-13,700-Feet Dip. Instead, what I see is my two-year-old niece and her best friend, a cornflower-blue stuffy, Sparkle Bear. It’s an apt moniker, as his pelage magically
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glitters, as though the Chinese factory workers who assembled him had access to industrial-grade fairy dust.
Sparkle Bear. The moniker is likewise apt for me, a gentleman who becomes semi-feral during the summer – who extracts himself from a murky puddle or an aquamarine pool, packs the tobacco pipe, shades his pale, burnable nether regions with a topographic map, and reclines into the shimmer and shine of his body, the environment, everything.
Last summer, when my niece visited Crested Butte, I explained that her beloved ursine friend isn’t so different from us: We, too, can feel our skin glitter, our cells and organelles tingle, our souls giggle and shout and screech and sing. She looked at me like this was totally obvious (which I suppose it is), then she reached up and grabbed my hand, smooshing Sparkle Bear between our palms. Like that, the three of us strolled over to Totem Pole Park, waded into the water fully dressed, and splashed each other until giddily saturated.
A day later it rained and, of course, we did the same. Once more unto the breach! b
Sophia Chudacoff
virtually staged virtually staged
virtually staged
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