From Pretty Polly to Jolie Blonde
This quilt represents the musical journey of an American musician.
The drum of the banjo serves as a magnifying glass over a map of the small Kentucky town where his musical core was born, and at the same time it represents a ship’s steering wheel navigatiing him through his musical life. The alligator banjo head points to his settling place, Louisiana, and the heron carries him continuously to new beginnings.
I was looking for fabric that represented music somehow when I came upon this sheet music cotton. I was disappointed that it was gray and not blue, but figured I’d make it work somehow. I taped it to a wall and borrowed a projector from my brother Wilson’s music venue to shoot a basic idea of the design I wanted, with the actual topographic map of the United States from Ohio to Louisiana, onto the fabric, where I traced it out.
I then made the quilt sandwich with organic cotton batting and a weird, turquoise blue, synthetic fabric I’d inherited from my aunt as the faux backing, then got to work quilting the topographic lines with double threads, mostly inherited from my grandmother and dating back as far as the 1940s ($0.19 cents a spool!!). Once I had that done, I washed it to get the batting to puff back up and when I pulled the quilt out of the washing machine, the backing had bled and turned that sad gray the color I wanted it! Serendipity!
The map of Ashland, Kentucky, was painstakingly embroidered over the course of two months, and the steering wheel was sewn up of scraps inherited from different people. The bear in those scraps was an inside joke from a long time ago.
The Gulf of Mexico was made up of inherited scraps as well—COVID masks, a quilt for a friend who recently had a double mastectomy, and fabric passed on by the mother of my best friend whom I lost due to gun violence.
The little stars spiraling off the quilt are inspired by my dad, who’s always told me I was born under lucky stars (and I believe it!), and this musician friend who recounted the story that, as a young man, he was walking down a path and witnessed two falling stars which seemed to be leading him in the right direction.
This was the last quilt I ever had to make on the floor, as my brother, Joel, and his wife, Effie, made me a beautiful quilting table according to my own design, using reclaimed wood from around our family home.
38” wide by 53” high
$1500
