Blessed Are the Piecemakers

Repost from June 10, 2020.  This quilt is included in Photo Memory Quilts featured last week and is currently touring with the Sacred Threads Quilts 2022 Travel Exhibit.

This quarantined spring has been a time to get ideas out of the head and onto fabric.  Sue's mother Marie passed away on May 29 of 2019, and ever since she has wanted to honor her memory with a quilt.  With outside activities cancelled and so much time at home, the opportunity presented itself to bring these ideas to life.  The quilt she made is a tribute to her mother as a maker and her working life spent as a sewing machine operator and sample maker in garment factories in Berks County, PA. In addition to sewing for a living, she sewed clothes for her 3 daughters, and taught them all to sew as well as other handcrafts.  This post is intended to give some of the backstory of the quilt as well as a look at the construction process.

The project started out by photographing and making Thermofax screens of Marie's tools of the trade, which included scissors, 2 sewing machines, an oil can and thread stand, and notebooks where she kept records from her factory work.  One of the sewing machines is the Necchi domestic machine she sewed on for many years, and taught her daughters to sew on, the other is a Merrow overlock machine from the last factory she worked in.

These images were printed on both natural and colored linen.  The color scheme came from a piece of fabric that is used in the piecing as well as on the back of the quilt.

There are also screen prints of Marie, and the quilt title "Blessed are the Piecemakers", chosen because factory work is piecework.  Sewers receive bundles of garment sections containing a dozen pieces, and pay is based on completed bundles.  Each segment of the construction process is a "job", and each job has a code number.  She worked in several different factories, from making men's cotton underwear to hosiery to women's clothing.  She was skilled enough at the various jobs and machines to become a sample maker.  The last factory she worked in closed in 1984 as more and more of the garment industry moved first to the south and then offshore in search of cheaper labor.    

Texture was added to some of the fabrics and linen prints by Geli plate printing with bubble wrap.  Paint is rolled on the Geli plate (in this case a circular one), then the bubble wrap is used to pick up paint and transfer it to the fabric.

After making various components, it was time to start playing with the layout.  This was one of the beginning ideas which you'll see changed a bit in the final product. The vertical fabric strip helped set the color scheme.

This version is closer to the finished piece, with eliminations and additions and moving things around, but still needing a spark.

These buttons and old spools of thread (from Marie's collection) were also made into screens. You can see them printed on the quilt in the picture above and below.

Above Sue was trying out a black & white stripe fabric to add the missing spark.  There are also some dyed laces added.  All of these required taking some seams apart to make the additions.

This is the finished quilt, with a black & white fabric also used for binding, and below is a close up.  

The quilting is simply wavy lines with bubbles in a few places so as not to detract from the graphic images.  Interspersed in the piecing are strips with the handwritten story of her life as a maker, meant to be visible but not necessarily readable.  

The piecemakers put a lot of effort into the American economy in the 20th century and made us proud to wear the "Made in America" label. They worked hard for their wages and were able to support their families and move into the middle class to provide a better future for their families.  Blessed are the Piecemakers.