Memories

When I ask people about their memories, the first thing that comes up is how simple things were “back then”.  We remember riding our bikes without a helmet, sitting in the front seat of the car, eating watermelon with seeds, or when a phone had a rotary dial and was attached to the wall with a cord.  My, what a simpler time.

My quilt represents how we start with a very simple beginning and as we branch out, our lives become more cluttered and full.  Even when I think about my early quilting days, I started with a simple pattern, a few colours and quilting that blended into the background. As my quilting has progressed over the years, the patterns have become smaller, the quilting more detailed, more colours are being used, different threads and even the odd bead has been added.  I cherish those early memories, but also look forward to continuing on the road of creating more great memories in my future.

Techniques:    hand applique, hand embroidery (French knots, running stitch, whipped running stitch)

Materials:       commercial cottons, embroidery floss, beads, perle cotton thread

TBCBEM

Memories, how do you chose one? I couldn't.
So I decided to try and represent them all using colour and then  explore the way memories are formed, reinforced and then lost through fragmentation. Research of scanning electron microscope photos and the explanation of the formation of memories  gave me the starting point for the quilting patterns.
The colours: walking through long grass, misty mornings, joy, pain, all can be captured through colour.
The strips and dots are memories, some overlapping, some being reinforced and some disintegrating. The quilting well that's the science and then the recall of events. Hanging from the bottom are the ends of the binding cord with a knot, so I won't forget.
And that weird title, that happened when my daughter, a psychologist, walked in and saw the quilt and said that's the bio cognitive basis or explanation of memory It's unwieldy but the perfect name and it stuck.
The quilt is made from cottons, some commercial some hand dyed, Super soft polyester wadding, cord, beads and 100 weight invasafil thread. The background is pieced and the surface fabrics stitched down with straight stitch close to the edge. this will allow the fabrics to fray over time much as memories do.

 

Margy

MORNING APPLE

This theme was the easiest for me among the previous ones.

We all are full of memories especially when the half of the life has gone. These memories are different – good and bad. I try to keep in mind only good memories and very seldom remember bad things.

I made this quilt in memory of my grandmother and it has taken only two days, may be because I wanted to make something about grandma for a long time.

My grandma had a long and very difficult life. She was born in 1890 and gave birth for 8 babies but only 5 from them grew till their twenties. These five were two sons and three daughters. Her husband died when she was 40. One son had disappeared in 1941 during The World War II and grandma has been waiting for him till the end of her life…Second son was killed in 1945 during the war between the USSR and Japan. Daughters were with her till the end.

I spent each summer at grandma’s house. It was really small house with only three little rooms which were full of things that grandma made including weaved rugs. So I put similar little rugs in my quilt. My grandma lived in a village close to the mountains and there were two rivers which skirted the yard so background symbolizes mountains and rivers. Water in the rivers usually has looked grey that’s why I chose this color for background. There were also a lot of linen things at grandma’s house: curtains, table runners, towels. So I decided to use this fabric for background.  But the best of all was big orchard that she owned. There were different kinds of apples each summer so I sewed apple from many pieces which symbolizes different tastes and colors of apples. I'm an early bird. And usually first thing I did at grandma's after awaking I went to orchard, picked apple which was covered with morning dew and ate it. That's why there are beads on apple.

The Lost Garden

I had to go far back to find my memory, from my early childhood. We had a cabin back then, out of the city, with a garden full of flowers and berry-bushes, which my grandmother planted in the 1930s. There also were a lake near by, where we used to go bathing with our row-boat. @I decided to go abstract, seeing the flowers in the front, and an overview with lake and forrest in the background, as if seen from above.
Mono-printed and painted calico, machine-quilted and hand-embroidered.
And some close-ups:

Greta

Givergny

The difficulty with this theme was deciding which memory I would turn into a quilt.
I am currently hand-piecing a quilt using a multicolored batik fabric in soft pastel hues that ofen reminded me of Monet's wonderful garden in Givergny. While I was stuggling with my first idea a few weeks ago several of our group members wrote about their visit to Givergny. I decided to take this as a sign that Monet's garden in Givergny would be a much betterstarting idea for a quilt.
I first saw paintings by Monet at the musée du jeu de paume in Paris during a one day class trip in 5th grad. Later I saw a few paintings by Monet in a museum in New York the first time I went to the USA. As I grew up near Paris about one hour drive from Givergny I had had the opportunity to visit this garden several times. For years I have had two reproductions of  pictures of the water lilies hanging in my home.
The quilt is made using the english paper piecing technic with 1/2" hexagons. This technic holds also memories of my City and Guild course where I used it for the first time.

As I wanted to give the quilt a more modern look I decided to machine quilt with a zig-zag stitch around each flower and each flower center using two different variegated threads.

Material: batik fabrics, cotton thread for piecing and quilting, poly-cotton batting

Technic: english paper piecing, machine quilting

Sabine

Holiday

This theme was quite a challenge. There were so many thoughts about this word, many positive and some negative, so my first thought was to make a weave of positive and negative memories, printed words on dark and light fabrics and then weave them together.

The word "Memories" also made me think of all those lovely holidays I and my family spent in Italy every spring for many years , about 35-40 years ago. Trying to interpret this lovely time I painted, with acrylic paint, a seascape with sand, water and sky. The beach is stamped with  irregular circles also  seed beads and some cotton beads and stitching were added in order to attain texture.  Parasols, sun and glitter were fused. The piece is hand quilted with silk and metallic threads.

My intention for this quilt was to make a simplified seascape which should give an impression of a peaceful and lovely time on the beach.

This was the first time I made a wholecloth quilt painted with acrylics.

Material used: Cotton fabrics, acrylic paint, seed beads, cotton beads, silk and metallic threads, cotton and polyester batting.

Snookums

Some memories are strong and return like waves on the shore.  This memory is over 60 years old!  

At a very tender childhood age I was admitted to a hospital for treatment to my damaged finger.   My hospital room in a big old house looked out onto the seashore and I could smell the sea.   I remember so clearly how scared I was in that big bed, until a trip to the toilet acquainted me with the hospital cat, Snookums. 

Snookums came back to bed with me for comfort, but that didn't last long!  

 I have always loved that cat and all cats ever since.

Further on, most childhood weekends and holidays were spent on family sailing adventures. The movement of waves against the hull and wind in the air is instilled into my memories.

My choice of blue fabrics relates to memories of the seaside.  Also a more recent visit to Yves Klein exhibition knocked my socks off me with his use of blue.   My range of fabrics relate to Klein blue, as close as I could manage, moving to greenish shades of the sea. 

From my large scale naive sketch of a cat (to reflect my childhood), I machine appliqued pieces over white fabric background using button hole stitch.   The facial features were machine stitched for additional enhancement and bugle beads finished the watchful eyes.  

No binding was applied - rather a pillowcase finish allowing the waves to continue the rhythmic motion of memories. 

Remembering

I thought a great deal about this theme.  As part of my process, I asked my mother to send me pictures of the two of us together, hoping that one of the pictures she sent could be recreated for this challenge.

As it turned out, it was the combination of the note she sent to accompany the pictures she selected that led me to this piece.  My mother sent pictures from a family vacation.  In her note, my mother wrote, "Do you remember this wonderful day on the dunes?"  Well, if you saw my face in the picture, you'd know that I had a completely different feeling about the day and hence, a completely different memory of it.

That got me thinking.  Two people may share some of the same facts of an event (dunes; summer vacation; Mom, Dad, and me), but our emotions, circumstances, and biases can tumble up those facts into a completely different recollection.  As time goes by, our memories often become more of a collage, as opposed to a clear picture, of what happened.  Let me reference the following from documentation from the New Jersey criminal court system, describing in-court instruction for witness identification:

Human memory is not foolproof.  Research has revealed that human memory is not like a video recording that a witness need only replay to remember what happened.  Memory is far more complex.[1]   The process of remembering consists of three stages: acquisition -- the perception of the original event; retention -- the period of time that passes between the event and the eventual recollection of a piece of information; and retrieval -- the stage during which a person recalls stored information.  At each of these stages, memory can be affected by a variety of factors.[2]   

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[1]            State v. Henderson, 208 N.J. 208, 245 (2011).

[2]            Id. at 245-46.

With all this in mind, I decided to created a piece that tried to visually represent the passage of time on memory. Acquisition, retention and retrieval  -- three different elements of remembering -- are braided together to create our personal memories.

Looking for inspiration

I had an idea for Memories, but it didn't work the way I wanted, so I went to my fabrics and thread to find inspiration. This fragment of fabric from past work, together with the silk embroidery-thread from a forgotten century - maybe they will play a part?