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Monday, January 31, 2011

Black Threads: Kyra on Sewing with Nancy!

Black Threads: Kyra on Sewing with Nancy!: "Check your PBS station - I had the honor of being interviewed on the famed Sewing with Nancy show during the Nancy's Corner segment. Actuall..."

One World One Heart 2011


Hi Everybody..... I'm sounding pretty casual.... Glad you've stopped by my blog ~ BQuiltin Studio!   I am a working woman: 8-5 pm Monday thru Friday!   But every other hour and day and weekend is spent in and around my sewing room where I create and quilt!   
I plan my months and travel around quilting shops, museums and quilt exhibits where I ship my quilted creations off to.... I love a challenge.  I'm finding my voice in my quilts.   I have a wonderful husband, and three great adult children... who have given us three grandchildren! 



One World ~ One Heart!   Click this link to learn more about our group sponsor.


Join me, peruse my  BQuiltin blog  and leave a comment ..... IMPORTANTLY so that when you post your name and e-mail address --  so I can draw a lucky winner 
and send you a personalized quilting basket of goodies!
I hope .....One World ~ One Heart turns out to be a superb way to meet YOU ++  new friends, find kindred spirits, fellow handy-work artists!  This OWOH event crosses all borders, socioeconomics, political and religious views.........this is about making friends near and far through the world of blogging and finding a common thread.
Lots of love to you!     B'quiltin  ....  Bev Kirk                      Luvin' my quilt journey

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Taking a Break... Making a Mug Rug for

An unknown internet friend....!!!  size 8 x 10"    stitched top... will be quilted !!!

Friday, January 28, 2011

Here's How ONE WORLD ONE HEART works:  On January 30th:  when the event begins - I will make a post clearly stating that I am a participant  (include the logo)....link back to the OWOH blog so others can get information.  I'll introduce myself and post photos of your "door prize(s)" to be given away.  I intend to be friendly and creative since this event is International


Once I post on my OWOH post on or after Jan. 3oth you will then email me the link to MY post to: oneworldoneheart@comcast.net. Please include your country in the email.   The girl over at OWOH will email you if there are any questions or changes or if you don't meet all the criteria.

At the end of the event (Feb.17) I choose the winner of my prizes and announce it on my blog: I'll email the person to let them know and get their mailing info  Send out the gift WITHIN 3 days AFTER the event ends.

This is NOT about free advertising, promotions, gimmicks or adding to an already existing event. I can have whatever things linked in my sidebars so that when people visit they can CHOOSE to see what you do. I'll not require visitors to jump through any hoops.....This is about a simple introduction of  MYSELF allowing people to take a look around as they want and get to know you and your blog in their own way. The giveaway is a "door prize" for stopping by so all my visitors need do is leave a comment and a way for me to get back to them should they win AND for me to visit them and their blog. It's really quite simple. They visit you....you visit them.

FUTHER PURPOSE of OWOH:  Be engaging......be welcoming......Be myself.....this is meant to be fun meeting new people, finding kindred spirits, like minded new friends......fellow artists, writers, photographers, working women like myself....This event crosses all borders, socioeconomics, political and religious views.........this is about making friends near and far through the world of blogging and finding a common thread.

Monday, January 24, 2011

                                                             
I can't resist putting little people in the window sills....



 ahh.... oh well it's too tedious to rip apart paper pieceing... so these spooky pests will remain upside down

Friday, January 21, 2011

Thursday, January 20, 2011

January 2011 UFO Project is NUMBER SIX

This is easy..... wonderful to have it completed and quilted!     Number (6)  is My President's Quilt, Mr Obama..... I've been lacking since the 2008 - 2009 election celebrations!  



Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Why Do I Love to Paper Piece....

Paper piecing gives you beautiful, perfect points every time!




This block is a free pattern by Beth Maddocks at her website  Paper piece   Click here to go to her Tutorial on How to Paper Piece!




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Friday, January 14, 2011

2011 OKC Winter Quilt Show of January 13-15th

 OKC Community Quilt Guild as a vendor!


Happy Birthday Martin!!!!!!!!!!!!
Havin' a great time with Quilt Raffle and promoting our theme of Quilting Thru the Generations!

Friday, January 7, 2011

My Favorite Book: A Communion of the Spirits

Indiana Purdue University

Freeman, Roland L. A Communion of the Spirits: African-American Quilters, Preservers, and Their Stories. Nashville Tennessee: Rutledge Hill Press, 1996. 396 p.
Freeman's life story is inextricably woven into the story of African-American quilters. His passion for quilts began with the spirits he met as a child, when he slept under a quilt made by a "spiritwoman". Freeman reveals, through the quilters he interviews, the special communion with the past and the present their quilts represent. African-American women, in some cases two and three generations, and a few African-American men across America use quilts to tell their families' stories. Maya Anjelou and Camille Cosby ( wife of "Bill" Cosby) are among the exhibitors in this book. Anjelou is a quilter and she displays a quilt that Ophra Winfrey commissioned Faith Ringgold to make for Anjelou. Some quilters use carefully cut pieces to make quilts more in the tradition of European quilters. Others continue the strip designs and appliqued story cloths of Africa. Original designs by Freeman, but made by other people are a part of this story. This new publication with beautiful color photographs is one of the best pieces of photojournalism on this subject. Freeman's text includes insights about his fieldwork and advice about traveling through the deep south to the far north and from the east to the west coasts. This beautifully illustrated book helps to bring a visual reality to other books about African-American quilters. The excellent index , A Bibliography of Influences in the Development of A Communion of the Spirits, and a Gallery of Quilted Photographs are great assets to this title. Jacket artwork is not repeated on the hardcover edition.
Fry, Gladys-Marie. Stitched From the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Dutton Studio Books in Association with Museum of American Folk Art, 1990. 101p.
A scholar looks at African American quilts made by slave and freed black women of the Ante-Bellum South. Fry's research into the history of the quilting traditions of African-American women relied on the following types of sources: (1) official historical accounts; (2) the testimony of former slaves from the WPA Federal Writers Project and other nineteenth-century writings by African Americans; and (3) oral tradition, and primary family accounts pertaining to the provenance of their own surviving slave-made quilts. According to Fry each type of source has its own strengths and weaknesses. This book is a must for everyone interested in slave quilts. It is essential that every reader notes "Link to Survival" and the epilogue on Harriet Powers: Portrait of an African American Quilter. Harriet Powers was born into slavery in 1837, and she died in 1911. Her two known surviving quilts are owned by the Smithsonian Institution. Fry's research also documents the contributions of slave women to textile production. Their contributions were essential for the maintenance of the big house and the slave quarters. Fry concentrates more on quilting, sewing, and knitting as crafts, giving special attention to the quality of the pieces she found in private collections and museums around the country. Fry also recognizes that color preferences and techniques were remembered from Africa, but the act of creation offered an opportunity for the women to leave a "powerful record - a hidden history, of their humiliation and tragedy, the milestones of their time and of their own lives." (p. 83)
Profusely illustrated with color and black and white photographs and daguerrotypes from southern university archives and color prints of quilts from American museums, the Smithsonian and private collections. Table of contents, Notes, and Bibliography but no index. 



Peterkin, Julia Mood. Black April. Brown Thrasher Book. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1988.
The setting of this novel is a coastal South Carolina plantation called Blue Brook. Because of an agricaultural depression which drove all the white people away, and left "a settlement of African American to shift for themselves." Blue Brook is an all black town, comparable, for some critics to Zora Heale Hurston's famous Eatonville. Peterkin, a descendant of South Carolina's slaveholding aristocracy had first hand knowledge of daily activities and routines of the several hundred black tenant farmers who lived in the slave quarter at Lang Syne. Lang Syne was the cotton plantation woned by Peterkin and her husband. (p. 159 - 179)
Chapter 13, "The Quilting" describes slave women's preparation of food, selection of the right cabin, even a listing of all the dishes served, how they were cooked at the fireplace. Peterkin writes, "The choosing went on until eight women were picked for each quilt, four to a side. Then the race began. The two quilt linings, made out of unbleached homespun were spread on the bare clean floor and covered with a layer of cotton. Two quilting poles were carefull rolled on the poles and the pole-ends fastened with strong cords to the side-walls. She describes the quilting as a contest between the two groups who called themselves "Christians" and "sinners". These quilting activities, eating, pipe smoking and gossip are much like reports given to Gladys-Mary Fry.  

African American History Buff.... information via QUILTS

I found Diane Moore on her blogspot:  A word's worth!  She is the author of children and adult fiction, journal articles, and poetry and a native of Franklinton, LA.  CONTINUATION OF REVISITING CLEMENTINE HUNTER 

I particularly like this genealogy bit... it reminds me of my great-grandma Lucinda Smith and her plantation life in Arkansas.....

Here is how Ms Moore talks about Clementine Hunter... her Big House Mistress is Cammie Henry...


According to records at the Roman Catholic Church in Cloutierville, Louisiana, Clementine Hunter was born in 1885, and records indicate that she was baptized in March of that year. She was the eldest of seven children born to John and Mary Antoinette Adams Ruben. Her paternal grandfather was an Irish horse trader married to a woman of Indian and African-American lineage named “Me-Me.” Her maternal grandmother, Idole Adams, was a slave who was brought to Louisiana from Virginia. As a member of a Creole family, Clementine was originally named Clemence and was called “Teba.” Her mother tongue was French, and she did not become fluent in English until her second marriage to Emanuel Hunter.  Her first marriage, at age sixteen, was to Charlie Dupree by whom she bore three children. After the death of Dupree, Clementine married Emanuel Hunter and had two more children. She was born at Hidden Hill Plantation, which Harriet Beecher Stowe had used as a setting for her famous novel, UNCLE TOM’S CABIN. The plantation owner, Robert McAlpin, was the model for the cruel overseer in Stowe’s novel. Hidden Hill, now Little Eva Plantation, lies in the flat Cane River country near Natchitoches. Clementine later moved with her parents to Melrose Plantation, and her memory of the world seems to have begun with the cotton fields and pecan groves surrounding the plantation.

Clementine loved the cotton fields and despised school. “I just run off from those nuns at school every time they would send me. My mama kept sending me back. But all I wanted to do was pick cotton,” she once said. “I finally run away so many times my mama gave up and let me pick cotton.” Later, she compared painting with picking cotton. “Paintin,” she said, “is a lot harder than pickin’ cotton. Cotton’s right there for you to pull off the stalk, but to paint, you got to sweat yo’ mind.”

Eventually, Clementine was brought into the Big House as a part-time cook and maid. She was taught to cook elaborate cuisine by her grandmother. When asked the kind of meals she prepared for Miss Cammie Henry, mistress of Melrose Plantation, Clementine told her interviewers, “hard things. You know, peas, okra, and beans.” It was difficult for reporters to discern if she was talking “tongue in cheek,” or if at the age of almost 100, she had some notion that peas and beans are hard in consistency, rather than foods that are difficult to prepare. The cookbook, MELROSE PLANTATION COOKBOOK, which she illustrated for Francois Mignon, features some of Clementine’s gourmet recipes that are far more difficult to prepare than peas and beans – Game Soup, Piquante Sauce, Parsnip Fritter and Rice Blanc Mange.

Note: The third installment about Clementine Hunter will be published in a subsequent blog. Again, the photograph is by permission of B.A. Cohen for THEIR ADVENTUROUS WILL. 

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

A Common Thread among US .....

 "We each have our own space at home devoted solely to quilting and we love it," .... It is a creative outlet. Quilting brings us joy.  There is nothing better than touching and working with wonderful fabrics," a fact on which all quilters /artists agree.

They Told Us: Lymphoma 8-31-2009

They Told Us:  Lymphoma 8-31-2009

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