Hands To Work

“HANDS TO WORK, HEARTS TO GOD,” read an embroidery on my mother’s dining room hutch, tucked behind her spools of thread and stacks of phone messages scrawled out in hurried script. My mother always admired the dedication to quality and craftsmanship in Shaker design. Many of the furniture pieces in her home were Shaker style. Simplistic, yet functional, this made for a wise choice when raising seven children. As the youngest of the bunch, I got to stick around while everyone else headed off for their miscellaneous endeavors. I spent a lot of time in that dining room looking over the items that represented my mother’s love for crafts. This embroidery she made years before I was born with the saying synonymous with the Shaker lifestyle proved to me that there’s a rich history in craft practices. One that I was only beginning to discover…

Growing up, my mother owned a little quilting fabric shop in my small town. I would work there over the summers and she would have me walk with the kind older ladies through the aisles, with their projects in mind and patterns in hand, helping them pick out their batiks, their conversationals, any fabric they would need for their next creation. I loved it when the ladies in the shop asked what I did, and instead of telling them I was a middle schooler, I would say “I’m a quilter too!” They would get a kick out of that. My favorite part of the job was the swift sound of the rotary cutter on the cutting board and the snip, snip, snip of the fabric scissors heard in the background amongst the constant conversation.

I fled off to college, years later, to continue exploring this creativity and curiosity that my mother imparted onto me. I studied Textile Design and Art History and obsessed over learning every craft technique that I could: knitting, crocheting, weaving, screen printing, painting, embroidery, the list goes on. All the while though, I missed my hometown and my mother’s house. That’s where I felt most inspired. I could never quite get into a good rhythm in this new city, it being so different from the little neighborhood I grew up in. I decided that I needed to bring the focus back onto what inspired me to be so interested in crafts in the first place. I remembered the textiles I was drawn to at a young age: the old fabric bolts I found in the attic from my great grandfather’s factory, the fragments of material on museum display. The reason I was so fascinated with these was because they tell a story, they have a history.

The work I started creating is not only a celebration of my locality’s history, but also a continuation of my mother’s work. The pieces are grounded in an interest in Shaker lifestyle, but also reminiscent of my historic childhood home and an idealized simplistic life once had there. The weavings, prints, embroideries, and quilts I make bring forth a sense of nostalgia with their attic found, home-made, and folksy sense of design. The work hearkens back to childhood ways of making, focusing on colored pencil drawing and simplistic embroidery techniques while also referencing Shaker folk art in the form of devotional drawings, neighborhood maps, and distinctive furniture pieces.

The feature of my college thesis collection included a quilt that I made in its entirety on a visit back home in my mother’s house. The design of it combined the quilts I remembered my mother sewing when I was young and the style of Shaker quilts that I had been obsessing over. I got my mom’s assistance during the last step. We sat there knotting the quilt – bringing the needle down through the three layers of fiber, back up, tying the ends together, and snipping the ends off of the knots. I felt the connection of making this quilt, in the home that I learned to sew in, with every snip, snip, snip of the scissors reminiscent of the beginning of my love for textiles in my mother’s shop.