In the spring of 2018, I paused on the steep, tightly coiled stairs that lead up to the third floor of Beardsley, catching my breath. I was on my way to a class that I was more excited about than any class I had ever taken in my life, the kind of class for which I had rearranged my entire schedule and waited with bated breath to see the lottery results. It was Black Art: Quilting as Culture, a passion project put together by Professor Allison Dorsey, and I was one of twelve lucky students who had the opportunity to attend. The class was taught jointly by Professor Dorsey and Alicia Ruley-Nock, a local Black quilter who would be teaching us the basics of quilting.
The class was transformative for me. I learned a landslide of information from Professor Dorsey, which shifted the way that I thought about and understood art. I grew up on the Dena’ina Athabascan land known as Anchorage, Alaska, and when I went to the museum or art galleries downtown with my family, the most beautiful and compelling work was always produced by Alaska Native artists. Many of these beadings, paintings, and carvings were on traditional clothes and tools, so my personal definition of art had never excluded the objects we wear, use and play with.
In that room on the third floor of Beardsley, however, I learned that the Western definition of art often excluded works that were meant to be utilitarian, such as the quilts created by the Black women of Gee’s Bend. The strangeness of this foreign concept re-solidified my belief that art is not only for display or observation: it is to be touched, used, and worn until it’s taken apart once again.
The concepts I learned became fundamental to me, but what I connected with most deeply was sewing. In the warm room, I leaned over the brightly patterned cloth, pressing the seams flat, listening to the soothing chunka-chunka of the sewing machine. A few years later, in my Psychology of Well-Being class, I would be able to identify the feeling as flow, a key element of the engaged life that forms one of the three fundamental types of happiness. Flow is utter immersion in the present, a state of enhanced creativity, bliss and relaxation. That was quilting. At the end of the class, Ms. Ruley-Nock slipped me a few pieces of fabric and some of the basic tools that are essential to the craft. I brought them home to Anchorage in my carry-on suitcase, too nervous to let something so precious out of my sight. In the spirit of the quilts I had studied in the class, I spent the summer taking apart old sheets, old T-shirts and cloth scraps from my home, and made two quilts.
When the pandemic struck, sewing was one of the crafts that kept me sane. My mother and I dug through our linen closets and basement, finding all the ripped, stained clothes and linens that we didn’t wear or use anymore, and I set myself to cutting them apart, making them many pieces before making them one. I returned to campus in the Fall of 2020, knowing only one other person who would be present on campus too, resigned to knowing my friends only as voices over the phone until February. I made dear new friends that semester, but I also missed our family sewing machine and the fabric that was sealed up in plastic totes. In November of 2020, I walked through campus as the wind roared, and thought about the motif I had learned about freshman spring, an African motif that was often replicated in quilted projects: a tree representing family, community, life.
At home in Alaska, there is a certain storm called a chinook, a warm wind that comes out of the south in the winter and melts all the snow in sight, leaving deep puddles over slick ice. We don’t have snow days in Anchorage schools, but we do have ice days when the roads become too dangerous to drive on. The chinook comes with a raging fury, with winds at speeds of 80 to 100 miles an hour. As a child, I lay in bed and listened to the gusts approaching, to the shriek and protests of the trees far away, the wind growing closer until it became a high-pitched whistling scream and the house creaked and groaned underneath me. I looked out the window and saw the trees bend so far it seemed they couldn’t possibly stand up straight again. When the wind finally stopped, sometimes days later, the ground was always thickly littered with splintered branches, and a few fallen behemoths.
The pandemic, it seemed to me, was like a chinook, a strange reversal of ordinary nature: cold became sudden and ominous warmth, gatherings of people became dangerous instead of joyful. The later months of the year 2020 were all marked by the same sense of unreality I had felt when I stepped out of my home in January and felt the brush of warm wind across my face, when ordinarily there would be friendly biting cold. An image came to me as I walked across Swarthmore’s campus, between the deserted academic buildings, too-silent libraries, and cafes where no students sipped coffee. A vast, multicolored tree bent nearly to the ground in a terrible wind, twigs and leaves ripped away and spiraling off to rejoin the earth. A deep-rooted tree that would survive this ferocious storm, but not without crying out in pain and grief as parts of it were ripped away.
I started drawing the outline when I got home to my dorm room that night. I reached out to different offices and areas of campus, trying to secure a place to work, funding and support. I had tried to get other passion projects off the ground in my time at Swarthmore and knew that it was a difficult thing to do, but I was still startled when I ended up logging ninety-five hours of logistics and emailing before even touching a piece of fabric. I hope that efforts can be made to give these passion projects more streamlined institutional support in the future.
Midway through that logistical process, I sent out a community-wide email requesting fabric donations and had no responses a day later. I told my mother, startled at how much it hurt, and she hugged me, reminding me how much stress we were all under and how many other things were on our minds. I downsized the project from queen-sized to wall-sized, reminded myself that I had other things to do senior spring anyway, and resolved to bring all the fabric myself if necessary.
People came through, though, responding to the email, reaching out over Facebook, texting me and offering their old shirts and bandanas. One of my mentors, Professor Sara Hiebert Burch, sent me a big bag of scraps from the masks she has been sewing since early 2020; those fabrics form the bulk of the quilt’s central panel. I collaborated with my friend Powell Sheagren ’22 and his crafting club, S.U.C.K., to give free embroidery kits to students in exchange for a piece for the quilt’s border.
I learned that the Makerspace was in possession of the supplies purchased for the original quilting class. Jacquie Tull, the head of the Makerspace, eagerly lent me everything I needed and fully supported this project, for which I am deeply grateful. In fact, I have lost count of the number of people in this community who have touched this project through their donations, kind words, and contributions. I have been sending out biweekly updates on the quilt’s progress, and I have always received numerous messages of extraordinary kindness and encouragement; through this difficult final semester they have been a true gift. I am grateful beyond words for everyone who has impacted this project in so many ways.
In February, I gathered supplies from the Makerspace as well as the Office of Student Engagement and the Center for Innovation and Leadership, which funded the supplies that needed to be purchased. I set up shop in Singer Hall, which was facilitated by the wonderful people in the Events Office.
Quilt-making is separated into distinct stages, each with their own joys. I designed the pattern for the quilt, which I developed myself based on the fabrics that I was given. I tried to find balance between making the tree detailed enough to be recognizable and simple enough to complete in four months.
Second after design comes cutting. The quilt comprises some 1,080 pieces, including 32 hand-embroidered border pieces. Each piece needs to be cut with accuracy within an eighth of an inch for the whole project to lie flat. The Community Quilt is only my fourth quilt, and cutting skillfully takes a great deal of practice. I sweated over this step, knowing that I only had so much fabric to make mistakes with. After cutting comes layout.
I laid the pieces on the fuzzy cotton batting to keep them from flying away at a puff of wind and stood as far back as I could, wondering if there was some configuration that would look better with the colors. Then every piece needed to be ironed, so that the cotton interfacing that stabilized the stretchy T-shirt fabric was flat and even.
The process of piecing began then, with hundreds of yards of cotton thread flying through the sewing machine that Professor Dorsey had bought three years earlier. On a few occasions, I stayed late enough in Singer that my fingers strayed dangerously close to the flashing needle. That was always the signal that it was time to pack it in before I added a hospital bill to my list of quilt-related expenses. Piecing made me a better student and a worse procrastinator. I worked on my homework right away so that I could go sit over the sewing machine. My friends often kept me company, working on their homework or the embroidered border while the machine gossiped busily with us, chunka-chunka-chunka.
Before each seam was sewn, it needed to be perfectly aligned and pinned. After each seam was finished, it needed to be carefully pressed with the iron, first closed and then open. The process was long, but it was sweet. Doing classes on Zoom doesn’t feel as though you are doing anything, at some point. There’s no printed final paper to turn in, no physical test to check over and then chuck thankfully into the stack at the front of the room. As each of those 1,080 pieces passed under my fingers, I felt as though I was actually accomplishing something.
After the quilt top was finished, I taped it to the floor of my room and pinned it securely to the backing of the quilt and the batting that forms the middle layer. Then came the slow, delectable process of hand quilting. I’m still in that stage now.
This is part of the beauty of quilting: it is intimate. I carry the quilt, with the section I’m working on squeezed into a traditional quilting hoop, with me to the Science Center and stitch as I listen to class lectures. It lies on my lap during the day, and when I’m working late into the night it often ends up sleeping with me at the foot of my bed. When Willets was still chilly earlier this year, I reached for it to cover my bare legs, tucking the fabric that was once part of a mask or a friend’s shirt around my ankles to keep me warm.
I embroidered twelve of the border squares that form the edges. Each of them was about some aspect of the past year, something that had gotten me through. My favorite one depicts a tiny seedling. The leaves are made of a tiny scrap of African-print fabric that I took with me from that classroom on the third floor of Beardsley, too small to be reused by Ms. Ruley-Nock. It’s been traveling around with me in my sewing bag ever since, intended for a purpose that I had not yet understood. In the roots of that seedling are the names of the mentors who shaped this work: Alicia Ruley-Nock, Allison Dorsey, and Selina Alexander, the Koyukon Athabascan artist who taught me Native-style beading in Sitka nearly ten years ago. I will carry those lessons with me forever. Ana basee’, mi sagaa’na.
In a few short weeks, I will depart this campus for the last time, and this quilt will carry with me the memories of this strange, sorrowful, lonely year. I will forever remember this time, both for the struggles we have endured and for the astonishing kindness, compassion and community that emerged. For every piece of cloth given, for the names and words written on the back of the quilt, for the kind words in hallways and emails and Zoom rooms — thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I am deeply grateful to this project, these people, and the roots that have allowed us to endure until some time in the future when this chinook will come to an end.
