from "Anonymous Was a Woman"

When I read the quotes about quilts by Aunt Jane of Kentucky which were provided for our class, I immediately thought of my paternal grandmother.  She was born in the mountains of eastern Tennessee and later moved to West Virginia. She spent all of her life learning and doing the countless mundane tasks involved in taking care of her family and home, and did them with much love. She only went to school through eighth grade, was not well-traveled, and was a little suspicious of restaurants, but she could make beautiful clothes for my Barbie doll out of scraps and quilt with tiny hand stitches. I remember her working on this log cabin pattern quilt, which she later gave to me for my high school graduation. I was fascinated with the way she pieced together the lights and darks from scraps she had accumulated. I knew I wanted to use this quote and somehow picture her quilt. The assignment was to use pressurized Romans, and while they seem formal for a quilt, to me they give a timeless “not forgotten” sense to the words.

My son helped me take photographs of the quilt with a good camera then I had them printed at a FedEx office onto Arches 90lb.HP paper because I initially wanted to write directly on the photograph. However, that seemed much too “busy” and just didn’t work. I mulled over many possibilities and finally settled on a very simple design using a photo of just four squares of
the quilt. I tore the edges of the HP paper and glued it on the larger piece with YES! paste.

I lettered the last words 1 inch high on a grid, cut them out and pieced them together for spacing, then put them under Arches 90lb. HP paper (11.5” x22”) on a light board. They were written with the #2 Mitchell and EF66 nibs in gouache mixed from WN primary blue and white to coordinate with the blues in the quilt. I used clothesline lettering for the first part of the quote to
represent one of the many chores my grandmother did. After several sketches, I penciled it directly on the paper, lettered with the edge of a waterproof blue Zig marker, and used a very fine point waterproof marker for the clotheslines. Then I used WN watercolors for a light wash of colors in between the lettering to evoke the mountains. My grandmother ain’t forgotten.


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