![]() Have you ever made a quilt for someone you loved? What was it like to work on a quilt for someone you were close with? So, when she asked me what she was supposed to do with a bag of her father’s ties, I offered to make them into a quilt. When I brought the finished quilt over to her house, I was struck by the power of her emotional response. In our conversations that followed, she expressed how comforting it was to be reminded of her dad every time she walked up her stairs past the quilt. At the time, I was newly enamored with quilting. attorney and, through a host of unfortunate circumstances, the only memento she was able to retrieve from her father’s home was a small collection of his neckties. The first memorial quilt I ever made was for a close college friend whose father died while we were still in school. Tell us about the first memorial quilt you ever made. For example, looking at a particular shirt fragment in the quilt can trigger a vivid memory of a shared experience with a lost loved one. Death and loss sever our real time connection with someone we love, but memorial quilts restructure that pathway to connection through a beautiful, tactile, intensely personal object. ![]() That’s the short answer. Going a little deeper, a memorial quilt both honors the life of someone who has died as well as offers those left behind a way to reconnect through a physical medium. People have been making memorial quilts for generations, and I think people’s definitions would vary slightly depending on the kind of work they do. In the work that I create, a memorial quilt is a quilt made from the repurposed clothing of a deceased loved one. I loved the process and haven’t stopped making quilts since then. No one else in my family was or is a quilter, but my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother were all artists they taught me a lot about how to work creatively. especially when it involved using the sewing machine. I made my first quilt in 1990, while I was in art school at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. The previous semester I had taken a surface design course, so I made my first quilt out of all of the fabric I had dyed and printed. My mother knew how to sew but didn’t enjoy it, so I became the chief mender in the family. She graced us with an interview, so without further ado: When did you first start quilting? Was anyone else in your family a quilter? Lori takes meaningful fabric, from clothing or anything else of someone who died, and turns it in to breathtaking memorial quilts. From the moment we saw her quilts, we couldn't wait to share them with you, along with her story. But what is equally striking is that Lori's quilts embody so much of what we talk about here on the blog: remembering loved ones, continuing bonds, and using creativity to express and cope with grief. It is hard for us to even wrap our heads around the skill and patience that go in to Lori's quilts. When we first saw Lori Mason's memorial quilts, we were blown away. When we attempt to use a sewing machine, it typically ends in injury or nests of knotted thread jammed in the bobbin.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |