#The Quilt of Memories

[queersatanic]

Happy birthday, Duane.

[tj-crochets]

The memory quilt is washed and ready to be mailed out with all four bears! I really love how the bears and the quilt look together

[orthopunkfox]

My great gran made this quilt for me when I was small. The front is a patchwork of heavy cotton cloth while the back is light canvas. It was designed "for little people and their big messes" as my gran used to say, designed to be durable and easy to clean. It was also designed to be put in the fridge or freezer to make it cold. The cool weight often brought much needed relief to a sickly kiddo who battled frequent ear and lung infections with raging fever. I wrapped myself in it in cold nights, held it tight when I was sad, been sick on it when I had stomach flu. It's served as cape, picnic blanket, and camp sleeping bag. It has never once torn nor frayed. I wrapped my oldest child in it when he was sick with croup. Just today, my youngest wiped his jelly-covered face on it. My gran definitely knew what she was doing and made this quilt to last as long as her legacy.

My gran was not a wealthy woman. She grew up very poor, lived fairly poor, and died only slightly less poor. But she took care of the people in her sphere of influence. There was a home for orphaned and troubled boys near her house on Morris Street. Every Christmas she would invite the boys who had no home to her house for a home cooked meal (complete with pie), and a stocking for each which included chocolate, a small toy or game and a piece of citrus fruit they didn't normally get. Her favourite saying was "there's always room for one more at the table, we can add one more potato to the soup, the gravy can be watered down a little more."

I don't think she ever knew the great many lives she touched, not how great an affect she had on people. I think she would've been embarrassed to know. She was a modest woman and just as soon forget her good deeds. But the people she blessed never forgot.

At her funeral dozens and dozens of men came to pay their respects. None of my family knew their names or had ever seen them before. One by one they began to introduce themselves and a story began to piece together. The home had closed decades ago and the boys had grown up, some had left the state. But when one of them found out about my gran's death, they mustered themselves and came from all over. They were her Christmas Boys and they had come to see her one last time.

[photozoi]

He arrived over 10 years ago....

... a very small Pyncheon rooster.

We named him Quilt, and he was perfect. He went for walks, took care of his hens (most popular rooster on the place!) and kept us all entertained with his opinionated observations.

He ruled the hen yard fairly and with a light touch, and was well behaved on his many sojourns into the house.

(Quilt joining us in a game of Wingspan. In his estimation the eggs were very puny. His girls laid much nicer ones.)

Yesterday he left us, quietly and without fanfare. He was old and it was his time. His favourite hen was at his side. He will be sorely missed.

[rumade]

I'm going to cut up this dress today 🥲

Well probably, anyway, unless I chicken out. I've had this dress since about 2008 (age 18) and stopped wearing it around 2015 when the zip broke. It was in a pile to be fixed but I never got around to it, and it has some clay staining on it too

This dress... man I loved this dress. I had to hard-core persuade myself to buy it at the grand price of £42 (about £68 in todays money, yikes), but convinced myself that if I wore it 42 times, well then that would be just £1 a wear. And I wore it so much, it fit so well and felt nice on my skin, made me feel put together and pretty, and was breathable because it was cotton. It was handmade by someone in Reading and was in a Traid Remade charity shop. The person who made it probably has no clue how much joy their little canary dress brought me.

I wore it to art galleries (see me sat upon Ai Weiwei's Tate Modern sunflower seeds below), dates with both boys and girls, trips to the park, my mum's Open University graduation, and many other places. Countless units of alcohol were consumed in this dress, and I'm sure a fair few lovers unzipped it too.

Anyway, goodbye dress! I'm going to cut you up and use some of you as backing for my family heart scrap quilt, and then keep the rest for another sentimental quilt I will make one day with lots of bits of important clothes in it. I loved you so much. Thank you for being part of my transition from teenager to adulthood 🙏 mwah mwah mwah 💋💋💋

[thesiouxzy]

The AIDS Memorial Quilt is made up of panels that are 3 ft by 6 ft, which is about the size of a grave. The panels are then sewn together into 12 ft by 12 ft squares, and the entire quilt covers 1.3 million square feet and weighs 54 tons. The size of the panels is meant to represent how much land would be covered if all the people who died from AIDS were lined up head to toe

I saw the AIDS Memorial Quilts exhibit when they came to Ft. Worth in 1993. It was such a powerful & emotional experience that I'll never forget. I still have the shirt from it

[bevanne46]

I'm back working on #1 or 6 again. Pinning the batting on.

I layout a plain white cotton sheet, then lay the batting on top of the sheet. Next I lay the top on the batting and pin the heck out of it. Once all pinned, I take it my sewing machine to sew the edges and do my quilt stitching.

Once the quilting is done I will layout my backing, usually flannel or fleece, on my table and put the top (with batting) on it. I will wrap the backing around to the top to make my edging. I don't do a seperate fabric edging. I again pin the edging in place and repin the whole top to the backing.

I do a fancy stitching around the edging and then will do a seam or two across the quilt to hold the backing in place. And it will be done.

This quilt will have a matching Purple Flannel backing.

[the-hot-zone]

i saw the AIDS memorial quilt for the first time this weekend. nothing prepares you for seeing the size of the panels in real life: the average size of a grave. the grief makes you want to lay down into a panel to fit yourself to a grave's dimensions. the quilt is one of the largest pieces of folk art in the world according to one of the volunteers & each square is so meticulously personalized with poetry, words in other languages, music, photographs, handprints, messages, and more--you can feel the grief physically. and it remained one of the emptiest locations at pride for the entire weekend.

[cerealbastard]

Duane Kearns Puryear photographed with his square of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Washington, D.C. October 1988

“The Crow Museum has three panels from the Names Project’s AIDS Memorial Quilt on display. One of them is a Dallas panel that is the most requested piece of the Quilt of the 50,000 panels.

That panel contains the quilt for Duane Kearns Puryear.

The powerful message on the panel reads, “My name is Duane Kearns Puryear. I was born on December 20, 1964. I was diagnosed with AIDS on September 7, 1987 at 4:45 p.m. I was 22 years old. Sometimes it makes me very sad. I made this panel myself. If you are reading it, I am dead…”

Duane died in 1991.

He brought the panel to Washington D.C. for an exhibit of the quilt on the Mall. There are pictures of him in Washington holding it.

On the flight home on American Airlines, he left the panel in the overhead compartment and it was never found.

After his death, his mom reproduced the panel from the photographs of Duane in D.C. and that’s what you see here. From the time she finished the reproduction until it was submitted to the Names Project, this panel hung at Resource Center.”

from the Dallas Voice, Jun 23, 2021 “AIDS quilts remain on display at Crow”

[bunnies-and-sunshine]

Little quilting assistant.

I just finished hand sewing the first four panels of Mom's memory quilt and her grandbunny, River, has given it her chinning of approval!  (The navy blue pieces are from her 52 year old wedding dress.) 

Mom loved the ocean and since her clothes were nondescript, I decided to draft the designs of the birds and seashells.

Here's all of the panels laid out.  The appliqué is tacked down with school glue stick and needs to be sewn to the panels yet (one of each type is completely finished). The solid colors of the birds, border, hearts, seaweed, and shells are cut from the clothes of hers I had to work with.  The finished quilt will be 55 x 65 inches.

I have a lot of hand sewing to do yet and as this is my first quilt, I'm learning as I go!  It’s a good thing River is patient.

[tj-crochets]

The memory quilt is done!! These pictures don’t do it justice, it’s ridiculously warm and cozy, the backing fabric is so so soft, and I absolutely love how the quilt top looks

[miloisstupid]

The AIDS memorial quilt, shown below, would take up well over 1 million square feet if displayed in one place.

there are almost 50,000 panels. It displays over 110,000 individuals of the 700,000 people in the US alone who died due to HIV/AIDS.

(there are some panels for non-us residents, but the vast majority are residents of the us)

More panels of the quilt:

the standard size of these is 6 feet by 3 feet, the dimensions of a coffin.

[rumade]

[Video description: a tour of a quilt top stopping at various blocks to better show the fabrics. And a hole. ]

Decided my next project is going to be finishing this family scrap quilt that I started 10 years ago

It's got a hole where the seams didn't line up that I need to fix, and it's pretty wonky, which is probably why I got frustrated with it and put it away. The fabrics mainly come from my mums stash and there's some really fun ones in here including a scrap from making the curtains for my room at university, scraps from dresses she made, and various outfits from over the years. Lots of silly sentimental bits.

Measures about 1.6 × 1.7 metres at the moment. I've got to decide what to use as the backing as I have buttloads of fabric in my stash that could finally get used.

[thesiouxzy]

“I know that a lot of younger gays are tired of these stories. But these experiences molded us. They are ingrained in us, they shaped who we became. We look around and there should be so many more of us old queers. But so many were taken. Please indulge our reminiscing. We have so many loved ones that are alive only in our memories.” — by Mark #whatisrememberedlives

[sleepycatmama]

So I'm up in the wee hours stressing out about the upcoming quilt guild meeting this week.

This month, rather than a speaker, they're asking people to bring their favorite quilt and tell the story of it. Well. There is no question of which that is. It's a Carpenter's Star quilt that I made in a class at a Fort Worth quilt store, one where they had you just pick a certain number of fat quarters for the different star colors. When I was working on it, my youngest child decided she loved it and it was going to be HER quilt. Okay, sweetie, it's yours. I had it long-arm-quilted with a pattern of hearts, and it went on her bed.

She was later murdered by a really awful scary teenager we didn't know who lived in our neighborhood. He's in prison now. For her funeral, that quilt was used as the pall for her coffin. After the funeral we took it home. I kept it folded away for some time, and then later, when the pain was less sharp, it became a throw quilt for our couch. It's the first thing we reach for when someone is cold. We are reminded of her when we use it.

It's been over 10 years. You never really get over the grief in some ways. The weight of it lives in your heart. But time wears away at the sharp corners that rip you up at the beginning. You don't move on from her, I did not like that being said, but you do eventually move on *with* the grief. I see her pictures every day. I know how old she should be, and miss getting to find out what she'd be like at this age. We remember her and talk about her.

I'm afraid that if I take that quilt and tell this story, people will get freaked out by it, find it too morbid, or just generally not know how to deal with it. We moved a year and a half ago, nobody I meet here already knows about it. But if I take some other quilt and call it my favorite, I would feel like I was betraying her memory. I have a couple of family quilts that my mom just passed on to me, I could take one of those, although the one of those that has a story is also a tragedy.

I don't want to skip the meeting. I missed the last 3 because of stuff with my parents' house hunt and move, and because I'm new enough and don't know people enough to feel comfortable going to the holiday party in December. My birthday is this month, and traditionally when it's your birthday month you bring things to go into a raffle basket, I do not want to miss out on doing that, and I have my contribution ready.

So I'm not sure what to do and it's making me worry and brood in the wee hours

[bevanne46]

Memorial Quilt #8 of 8 is now complete! These tops were made from the clothing of a woman who passed away in 2021. The backings were made with Flannel that wraps around to form the edge binding. This one was made with the Quilt-as-you-Go Method and measures approx. 60”W x 72”L. I will be delivering #7 & 8 tomorrow (she already has the first 6). I also made matching pillowcase for these.