“Of Special Significance – Mementos and Conversations”

Some of us remember moments best in photographs. For others, music can create the nostalgia that triggers a memory.  Still, a great many keep mementos as a means to remember things by. Mementos are like memories we get to hold. To most, these items won’t mean much, and are (sometimes) worthless. To the beholder they are priceless, with connections and stories that have been forgotten for the time being, and tucked away until we get to hold them once more.

My project entitled “Of Special Significance” is a photo collection of mementos. Each one with the short story behind them.

 

IDEA CONCEPTUALIZATION

I thought it would be interesting to collect these photos of mementos and present them on something other than paper. Since mementos often are items that warm our souls, instead of conventional prints, this collection of photos will be transferred onto fabric to create a quilt. Quilts are also saved (and collected), and warm us.

REFERENCES – MEMENTOS
exhibits on mementos and  other things

• https://artsandculture.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/mementos-of-affection-cincinnati-art-museum/UgIy-6ikEsZhIA?hl=en
• https://www.annakatalkina.com/candiesandmementoes
• https://renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/410/kerry-james-marshall-mementos/
• StoryCorps is a website preserving American life stories. This site is a true inspiration, as the stories resonate with many people. Many stories are examples of how most people share the same things.
  https://storycorps.org/stories/

REFERENCES – QUILTS
History

Quilts are an art-form of their own – not just blankets your grandmother made. Whole museums are dedicated to this craft that has a history dating back to 3400 BC. Their history stretches across European, Asian, African and American continents.
Fundamentally made for warmth and protection, quilts were also embellished with decorative elements. The Tristan quilt (portion shown here) dates to 1395, made in Sicily, is one of the earliest existing decorative quilts in the world.
The oldest quilted piece recorded, is a linen rug (100 BCE and 200 CE) found in a Mongolian cave.

 

CONTEMPORARY ART-FORM OF QUILTS – Resources

quilt history

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1993-05-09-1993129227-story.html

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/national-quilt-collection

https://web.archive.org/web/20120404031517/http://www.quiltstudy.org/file_download/5875deb7-a0b1-4cc3-b7d7-e0ff5036517b

quilt exhibits/shows

https://www.sjquiltmuseum.org/about-the-collection-sjmqt-quilts-textiles-sanjose

https://www.saqa.com/events/woman-xiv-created-women-women-and-about-women-online

QuiltCon 2021 Winners

https://www.neqm.org/salvaged-virtual-exhibition

http://www.miriamnathanroberts.com/quilts.htm

 

artist references:

Faith Ringgold

Home

Brigitte Heitland
https://www.brigitteheitland.de/blog/

Sarah Nishiura
https://www.sarahnishiura.com/quilts-1

other references:

https://curatedquilts.com/

 

Sketches

Creative Production (experimentation)

I experimented with several ways to do an image transfer to fabric. Transfer paper is the easiest method. Images can be printed on transfer paper, then ironed onto fabric (see middle image below). There is reasonable clarity but the transfer film makes the fabric stiff. I also tried the Lumi photo printing kit. This method requires printing your image onto a sheet of acetate. A light sensitive paint is then brushed onto fabric, with the negative acetate placed on top and left outside in the sun for approximately 10-20 minutes (depending on how much sunlight you have). This method was completely unsuccessful, as the image never transferred. It’s possible that it was user error, or the wrong fabric was used.

Lastly, I uploaded my images to the Spoonflower website. Spoonflower is an on-demand fabric company that can print custom images. Though all the images we low res (a requirement on the site), they printed surprisingly well. I’ve purchased some fabric to starting layout out the squares.

One soon discovers composing a quilt requires more than just sewing skills. Like the paint on a canvas, a quilt’s paint is the print of the fabric. The vibrant colors and patterns I chose competed with the photo images and did  not produce my desired effect. I found a quilting resource online called Curated Quilts. One of their digital magazines had an article discussing the importance of color, pattern and value. In addition to my fabrics being too busy, I discovered that many were the same value.

Ultimately, the colorway will be more monochromatic, with varied tones. Experimenting in Illustrator helped me visualize tones. Laying out the cut pieces in both ambient and dimmed lighting also helped visualize tonal differences:

         

          

FINAL:

          

I had not planned on making this quilt about me or my family. It was intended to be a project about mementos from people in general, however, it became difficult to find anyone who had kept any meaningful objects. Things had either gotten lost or left behind in a move. In the interest of time, those gathered here are from both my family and those of my husband. The best experience of this project, was hearing stories about where some of these items came from. Conversations and stories lead to more conversations and stories. Most stories brought a lot of laughter and some tears. This process of information gathering became a reunion of sorts. In many cases there was a consensus on histories, and other times discoveries. Partial stories became more whole, putting things in their proper places. Each quilt square has a handwritten history below it. I have expanded some of the information below. Later I plan write the stories in notation form on the back of the quilt to keep as much information I have in one place. Framing the squares, besides the patterned fabric are portions of letters, a matchbook cover, and old photos.

SARA (doll)
My father worked in a Queens factory that manufactured dolls eyes. While they were dating, he gave this doll to my mom in 1956, and named her Sara. They had a party for the doll, and she was baptized by my mom’s cousin who was an alter boy. Lots of photos were taken. I think they did anything as an excuse to have a party. Every Christmas holiday my mom dresses Sara and sets her out for display.

RIBBONS (and box)
We didn’t have much in terms of material objects when I was a child. My parents lived in a small railroad apartment in Brooklyn when I and my three sisters were very young. Money was tight but my mother was very proud – never wanting us to feel poor or in need. I remember a white satin-covered box she would put hair ribbons in. The box was from a silver brush and mirror set my father had given her some time ago. Never letting anything go to waste, she used the pretty box for storing the special ribbons, and would take great care in keeping them wrinkle-free by ironing each one of them.

CAPIAS (favors)
Capias are a Puerto Rican party favor. It is often given for weddings, baby showers and baptisms. They are made with printed ribbons and good-luck coins. This one was from my baptism in 1965. My name is on the ribbon along with two other names – no one remembers who the other children were. The celebration took place in a long gone social club called the Aguadillano. It was a meeting place for Puerto Ricans in East New York, especially those from my parent’s hometown – Aguadilla.

FAN
This fan was from my mom’s quinceañera (15^th birthday) in Puerto Rico in 1953. The wood fan has a painting of a female Spanish flamenco dancer and guitar player in the background – all symbols of the island’s colonial past. Many Puerto Ricans take pride of their Spanish roots, ironically without considering the how colonies created many of the financial difficulties that exist there today. My mom remembers having a special dress for the occasion, but not much else. My aunt, however, remembers a big party. My grandfather invited his local friends, mainly doctors and police. He was a business owner, and a bit of a show off. Many stories about him included the myriad of businesses he owned like a grocery store, restaurant, bakery, straw broom maker, bookie, car service, he organized cock fights, and had a moonshining business. All said, he was an entrepreneur of sorts, but drank his profits away. I don’t have many memories of him since he abandoned my grandmother when my mom was 16 or 17, and seldom kept in contact until much later in life.

COMMUNION ROSARY
St. Rita School in Brooklyn is where I made my first communion. More than the communion itself I remember individual teachers and nuns – many angry nuns. One nun was Sister Genita from Germany. She must have been around 80 years old when she was my second grade teacher. She would often get angry and call us ‘bold pieces of humanity’. Another time, I remember one of my classmates throwing a chair at one of my teachers! People are often surprised to hear these stories when I tell them it was in a Catholic School. I even remember hearing a story about a nun’s romatic affair with the schools’ principal – later leaving the order to marry him. Instead of fire drills we had air raid drills, since this was still during the Cold War period.

GLASS WATER PITCHER
This water pitcher came from a mansion in Boscoreale, Italy. My grandfather was sharecropper there. He tended the orange, lemon and tangerine groves. The mansion was owned by a wealthy lawyer who later moved away to the city and abandoned his home, leaving behind all the furnishings. Sometimes my grandfather would go back for fruit, and other times take old wood furniture for burning and keeping his house warm. As beautiful as the furniture may have been, it was more important to keep his family comfortable. Never becoming a landowner himself, he continued to sharecrop on other properties the lawyer owned even after abandoning the mansion.

RIFLE LICENSE
My grandfather was a farmer in Scafati, Italy. This is his rifle license. He hunted fowl and also used the gun to protect his farm and property. Most of his and my grandmother’s time was spent cultivating potatoes, tomatoes, and cauliflower. My mom remembers the woman leaving the farm earlier than the men to prepare dinner which sometimes included making gnocchi (potatoe pasta). She also remembers, when she was old enough, working in the fields alongside her parents all day and into the evening. When she was younger, she was her grandmother’s caretaker and at a very young age, prepared meals for the family. It was a simple and hard life – one she misses in some ways. When there was free time, she played with cousins since everyone in the family lived very close by, or even in the same house.

POSTCARD/PHOTO (penpal)
Perhaps to make us more ‘worldly’, my grade school had a pen-pal program. Students were given the name and address of someone who lived in a distant location for us to correspond with. My pen pal was from England. This is a photo and a postcard she mailed to me in the early 1970s. The postcard was from a holiday she was on, and at that time I had no idea what a ‘holiday’ was aside from Thanksgiving and Christmas. To me, traveling away for vacation was something only other people did (as I child I only went to the movies once). Pen pals were common at this time. Even my aunt remembers when she was 7 years old and living in Puerto Rico having at least 6 – one from the Hudson Valley (NY), one from New Jersey (where she later moved to), another from Argentina, and two from Vietnam. She kept in touch with many of them for years. One of them she kept in touch with until two years ago, when her pen pal passed away. My aunt is 76 years old!

HAIR CLIPPING
Not sure why I kept the clippings of my children’s first haircuts. I found this lock of hair along with some baby teeth in an envelope. I have three children, and have lost track of who is whose at this point. Luckily I wrote a note on a napkins for this one – it’s my youngest daughter, Eva’s hair.