Conversations & Reminiscences

Conversations: Three Conversations

Ida Wright

These raspberry leaves are very, very good...if you are going to have a child it's best to start drinking raspberry tea three months before you give birth and I was brought up that a gypsy woman could have her child, wash it in a mud puddle and walk off, and one of the reasons was they drank raspberry tea and had a very easy labor. The Indian women did the same.

I grew up in Vermont , just across the river. My grandfather came down from Canada; he was Indian so we used a lot of these things (medicinal and wild edible plants) at home always. My mother used some of these things in cooking, during the depression years. My father didn't have work then so we used a lot of these things; some of them, for my mother, the first time. My mother's ancestry was English and she just had never had much chance to learn these things. I learned it mainly from dad and his sister.

I always had a great interest in flowers and what was this and what was that, and I can't remember when I didn't have a guide of some kind. I was encouraged to look things up by myself as well as being told what they were. When I was 11 I went and lived with my grandfather's half-sister and her husband and they tried to take the Indian out of me, but they couldn't do it. They really encouraged me to learn the names of plants. But they used to scold because I had a bunch of flowers in one hand and a rock in the other most of the time and they were trying to civilize me. But they didn't. I often wonder now what they really would think to know that I'm teaching the things that they tried to break me of the habits of using. In fact they knew I wanted to teach when I got out of high school, but they didn't believe in borrowing money so you could go on to school. So I got married and started my own kindergarten—we had six kids that lived, we had ten children. My husband wanted 12; I would have stopped at two. After my second child was born, a breech birth, the doctor said, "You'd better not have any more children for a while," I told my husband. He said, "Huh, my mother had 13, you can have more than two;" so I had ten. A lot of people say how did you raise such healthy children? When we were on the farm we never had more than $5,000 a year for years, most of their growing-up years. Five or six, seven thousand at the most would take care of the cattle and the family. I tell them, I brought them up on dandelions and venison, what do you think?

I've taught some of my children about plants. I've got daughters-in-law that listen, but don't quite believe. My husband used to say, "I wouldn't eat that, it might be poisonous." I’d say, "What did you eat for supper tonight?" "I don't know, somethin', whatevever you put on the table." I'd say, "Well, you just ate it; have you died?" He's beginning now not to talk that way. It was a long time now, but for years he'd been eating these things and I just didn't talk about what I put on the table. Then I began teaching a college course, and he began saying, "Oh, I didn't know about that." I was ever so happy when college came nearby and I could go to school; I'd always wanted to. I got my diploma when I was 49. I was determined I was going to get it before I was 50. I made it.

I do all the canning by myself now. I taught my daughters to can. Yes, it is a lot of work, but I've done it so many years that I wouldn't know what it'd be like to have a summer vacation and do nothing. I would feel all the time that I should be putting away things for the winter. During the time I had polio I never knew that it had been discussed, but I just was told in my hospital bed that welfare was going to give money to help feed my children. They evidently had not asked because I had 500 quarts of canned goods for my family to use.

Until recently I thought everybody knew something about some of these wild plants. I've always lived in the country and people around me always were using things like dandelions, marsh marigolds and milkweed. There's so many things, and just never time enough, nor hands enough in my life. This summer I've had the best time because I did have someone who could drive, who was willing to take me wherever I wanted to go. There's so much still undone.

Dora Schochet

I was born in Bialystok . That was Russia then, now it's Poland . I'm 47 years here, and I came here I was 26, 27. I came on Thanksgiving day; the boat came here on Kosciusko. It docked, I went right to the turkey. It was already different times when I came here. Times weren't good. My two girls were born. I had a lot of time in Europe. I never worked in my life. I was not a millionaire's daughter, but a comfortable parents' daughter. This work was having friends, going out. In Europe a girl is not working. Only boys, and boys are in the business or going to school. When I started to go to school, first I learned Yiddish, then I went to public school; it was Russian. When the Germans came in, I learned German. Then the Polish came in; you changed for Polish. And then I was married. I came to this country; I went a little school here, and that's it. Now it's a dream, what it was. We were girls thinking of good times. My mother always wanted I should go to school and learn how to sew, but I never went. I learned it all myself. When I became of age, 10 or 12, she bought a machine and said, "You must sew on a machine, because I could never do it." We used to wash the whole week. Before washing, you had to fix things, darn things, iron things, but my mother, she didn't know how. So my mother always thought I should know a little. She always wanted me to go to a dressmaker and she will pay to teach me, but I never wanted. I did things that I like to do myself. Maybe I was 12 or 13, I started. I was making my embroidery for myself, for my children. My mother told me it was to prepare for marriage. You always prepare. That's why I thought to make so many things. I thought for children, and I didn't think of selling it. Oh no, I would never let Babe sell them. Not selling. She can give to her daughter.

The colors I always did on my own. I chose the pictures to my taste. Things that I felt, flowers, faces, lots of curls. You like green, I like blue. I didn't make the designs. I used to buy them, like a pattern, and we used to trace them. This was so beautiful when it was done, like a picture of angels. After all, angels should be naked, but how could you have a picture with naked angels. Here was white, here was pinkish satin; this was white wool, like a bear on a floor. Satin like a curtain. This was apple green silk; real silk, beautiful silk. It's not such a nice face one of them, because angels should really have nicer faces than that, but that was the pattern, and I couldn't do any other way, because I wasn't to change the painting. You see, I criticize my own work. Change it? I could not do it. I only could embroider. This has to be done this way, according to the design: some smaller stitches, some longer. Some day I'll wash it, like in Woolite; I'll iron it, and I'll frame it in nonglare glass.

When I came to this country you know I had a lot of stuff. We didn't have television, only a gramophone, then later on, we had maybe a radio. In my house my girlfriends and I used to get together. So we did work; all day long the young women, the elderly women...We came here; a friend of mine gave me a lot of stuff to sell for money; but nobody wanted to look at it. So I packed it and sent it back. I kept mine, put it away, packed and unpacked, put it away, air it out, put it away again, air it out and put it away again. I made everything to be used. Definite, I thought. When I was here and nobody wanted to look at it, I was very much disappointed. I worked so hard. That's why I stopped to do it here. Look, I could not even give for a gift what I made. They made fun of it. Sure I thought it was art. I thought it something worthwhile to do it. In Europe handwork was very much important.

I'm married 55 years, so I could write a book with a lot of trouble. When I started embroidering I didn't have any trouble. I did it for pleasure. I didn't think of it as a career. Maybe if I was to live now, if I would be as young as you, I wouldn't want to be a housewife, because, let's face the facts, it's a waste of time. It's not appreciated, if you like. Keep on being what you want to be, be successful. I admire women that's going to work now. I say, it's really lovely that my daughter Evelyn goes to work. She's a person, she's somebody.

Georgina Garcia

What I do is embroider. This is the kind of embroidery I do at work—it's called cross-stitch. It's a sample for a blouse to see if the color is all right. Here in New York is where most of this kind of embroidery is done. I'm the "sample-maker." Let's suppose that you're a customer, you come to see it, you like it and you order three or four thousand dozen to be made for you. Then that order goes to the embroidery machines and while I can embroider one piece, those machines can produce 250 pieces. There are a few women who are watchers, who for example put the cloth on the frames and take care of the machines, but they're almost always men. Five or six girls work on each frame; there are helpers there also to change the thread, to mark where the embroidery goes. No one actually draws. The machine works on a key punch. It's beautiful, the embroidery problem. I love it; it's beautiful. The "sample-makers" are always women. My work is always done by machine, but there are companies that do hand embroidery—like the sweaters that are embroidered by hand. The company I work for has 14 women who work in their houses because they have children. In one hour, I can do both flowers. You have to keep counting the stitches continually or else you're lost, the flower loses its shape completely. You have to have a lot of patience. When you do the first one it always takes longer, but I've had so much practice; by the time you do the second or third it's much easier. I taught myself how to embroider in Cuba. In my house, as in practically every other house in tropical countries, there was a sewing machine, a Singer. But, as a young girl I liked to embroider so much that I embroidered sheets. Before I got married I made my whole trousseau. Completely. I used to get my designs from people who I saw embroider, and used to see the designs in magazines. I have a dress I made when I was 17 years old; I made the whole yoke by hand. I saw the style somewhere, then I planned out the pattern myself. My mother, she didn't embroider but she sewed. Look, my two sisters work as duplicate makers in dress factories and they do well. They went to school in Cuba for two years and got their degrees in sewing.

In Cuba there was no remedy, if you were from the poor classes, but to learn to sew or embroider. I lived in a rural town in the Las Villas province . The first job I had when I came to this country was making wedding veils. For one year I sewed on the crowns by hand. After that job I did part-time embroidery because I wasn't practiced enough on the electric machines. In Cuba you have to use a foot pedal. Then I stopped doing the embroidery that I had done for myself because they paid me more for doing something that I liked. When you go out for work you have to be practical and leave

behind...I don't have a chance any more to do work for my house. Just think, I work at the company for seven hours. Those who embroider get left without their sight. You can't do this work for many years without losing your sight. Everyday that passes I'm left with less sight. After I come home I work for another four hours. I start at about 6:30 and it's 10:30 and I'm still sitting at that machine. Tired. Dead, dead, dead, tired, tired. But I need it. I'm paying for my daughter's college. On Saturdays I work at home till about three or four. And if I don't finish then I finish Sunday morning. They pay me by the hour.

There's no difference at all between the work I used to do for myself and the work I do now. I think it's art. Because not everybody can do it. In my company I've brought out three or four stitches that they didn't know. I've seen them in the beautiful embroideries that come from Switzerland that are done on special machines. I put myself to it and figured out the stitches. Because I love it. I can't explain it, I was born with it. More than any kind of embroidery I like doing the work I do now. I don't work for the money alone. I need to work, because no one works unless they have to, but when I make something I put all my concentration on the job. I do everything I can to see that the work comes out pretty. And when it doesn't come out good I take it out and embroider it again. I love my work, that's the truth. I mean look at that picture, I was 17 and I already knew how to sew with ease.

Silvia Kolbouski, Judy Silberstein and Jean Wagner are artists who live and work in N.Y.C.

Edna C. Miller

Edna C. Miller is a member of the Amish Community, Arthur, Illinois. Age 53, she has nine children—five girls and four boys (ages 9-30). A widow, she supports her family by running a restaurant in her home; her traditional craft is cooking. Edna Miller would not allow her photograph to be taken. The passage from Exodus, "Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image..." was given as justification.

Nancy Davidson is an artist and mother presently teaching at the University of Illinois.

Mrs. Bund, My Father's Brother's Wife's Mother

Mrs. Dora Bund, 86 years old, is my aunt's mother. Earlier this year, I visited her in the hospital where I conducted this interview. She has a heart condition. Also present were Mrs. Bund's daughter, Beatrice Butter (Beaty), her daughter-in-law, Marcia Bund, and my mother, Selma Butter.

Hannah Wilke is a woman-person-artist who has exhibited at museums around the country and is affiliated with Ronald Feldman Gallery in N.Y.C., Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles and Marian Deson Gallery in Chicago.

Sarah Mandell and Enid Aljoe

Sarah Mandell, grandmother of Dee Shapiro, is 84 years old, Jewish, born in Russia. For the past 13 years she has been living with her daughter. Enid Aljoe is 55 years old, born in Jamaica, West Indies . She has been the housekeeper in Dee's mother's household for 23 years.

Judy Henry is an artist who lives in N.Y.C. Dee Shapiro is a pattern painter who lives on Long Island.

Kathline Idella Thompson, My Mother, and Dora Lucinda Johnson, My Maternal Grandmother

Dora Lucinda Johnson is 82 years old. The mother of seven children, she resided on a farm in Seneca, Maryland for 70 years. Since the death of her husband in 1974, she has lived with her daughter, Kathline Thompson, in Philadelphia. Kathline Idella Thompson is a widowed mother of four children. Presently, she is a tax examiner for the Department of Internal Revenue in Philadelphia.

Phyllis Thompson is an artist and teacher. Presently she is an Assistant Professor of Printmaking at Cornell University.

Else Graupe

My mother, Else Graupe, was born in 1912, in the town of Rheda, Westphalia, Germany.

Grace Graupe-Pillard is a painter who lives and works in New Jersey and shows at Razo Gallery in N.Y.C.

Ida Kohlmeyer

The first woman of importance to me was one of my art teachers, Ida Kohlmeyer. I made a special trip to New Orleans to interview her and to speak of her past and our relationship at Sophie Newcomb College where I studied art in the 1960s.

Lynda Benglis, an artist, was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1941. She left Louisiana in 1964, lived in New York from 1964-1973, and since 1973, has been living both in Venice, California, and N.Y.C., spending an equal amount of time in both places.

Stella Chasteen

Cakes are like clowns. Both are so deeply imbedded in our culture that their strangeness is ignored.

The day I got married the car broke down so my parents drove us to our wedding. I sat in the back seat looking up front at the cardboard box which held the cake wedged in between my parents. Two circles had been cut out of the top so that the heads of the tiny china bride and groom had enough room to peek out. It looked like people in a surreal sweat box.

In Florida I once had a student whose art was all about food and feeding people. In one piece a thin girl lay still on a table for hours, wearing the entire meal which spread down around her in careful patterns. Spectators consumed bits from her throughout the evening. Ethel Ann's real piece de resistance was her Master's project: an exorcism of her marriage. She made a gigantic wedding cake carved of wood and foam, complete with doves, net, roses and festoons. In the performance she stood on the cake, wearing her wedding dress, talking out her marriage. A man in a tux acted the groom and other performers straightened up, made beds, fetched and carried. She also baked a traditional wedding cake and mixed some punch which the audience consumed. Her work-for-money and her art work overlapped. She cooked each week for an entire church congregation—shopped, baked and served the Sunday meal.

Stella Chasteen lives in Woodstock with her three children and her husband. Trained in art academies in London, she came to America in the sixties. She stopped painting because she "didn't know what to paint." Her cakes, which she makes as an act of love for her children, are wonderful.

Barbara Zucker is an artist who teaches, writes and loves her daughter.

7 Women in New Jersey: Part of a discussion by Dee Shapiro and Madge Huntington

Part of a discussion by Dee Shapiro and Madge Huntington

Dee Shapiro is a pattern painter who lives on Long Island. Madge Huntington is a self-taught artist working with fabric collage wall hangings who lives in N.Y.C. with her husband and children.

Reminiscences

My grandmother loved flowers. I remember the garden. There were hydrangea, bouncy and big on their wood stems; violets and lilies-of-the-valley that we learned to search out in the shadowy spots in our own yard and pick for Mother's Day, roses that grew on crooked, thorny stems with rough, toothy leaves, each one a simple perfection out of which my grandmother picked Japanese beetles, dropping them with their glistening green-and-purple backs into a rusty can of kerosene.

There was a cherry tree whose fruit we never ate because the birds got there first. Beyond that was the vegetable garden. There grandmother's flowers found a place, one corner graced with arching stems of bleeding hearts and regal purple irises. The house was big, open and inviting, full of textures and smells and old-fashioned colors. The wallpaper in the foyer had little pastoral figures repeating themselves in identical landscapes along the stairs. The paint on the ceiling above my bed was old, peeling off in places and resembling in one spot an old hag with a long nose. My room was papered pink and green, my grandmother's favorite colors, and had the musty, long-used, faded smell that pervaded the house. My grandmother had a wringer washing machine in the cleaning room off the kitchen. It had its own smell of old clothes and soap, and the clean/rotten smell of potato peelings and other organic leavings that were kept separate from the burnable garbage. On the door she kept an old calendar with the saying, "Oh, Lord, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small."

She braided rugs. She bought old wool coats at rummage sales, tore them apart, cut them into strips, folded, stitched and braided them into long coils. One of these rugs was on the floor of the dining room, all dark browns and greens and tweeds. My grandmother kept things. In her sewing room there were always piles of clothes from rummage sales, dresser drawers filled with jewelry, gloves and other fine, delicate things. Knick-knacks were all over the house, and a wonderful eight-day clock under a glass bell sat on the mantle in the living room.

She wore dark print dresses that came down past her knees, and she looked like I thought all grandmothers looked: solid peasant stock from Eastern Europe, apron tied at her waist, hands gnarled from tending her flowers, smelling wonderfully like her kitchen or the earth in her garden.

There is a church in the town, and my grandmother often provided flowers for the altar from her garden. I used to tremble when my grandmother, in her goodness, walked right up to the altar and arranged the vases on it. The Church teaches humility and service through its female saints; certainly my grandmother belongs with that long-suffering celestial choir.

Why are there no flowers on my grandmother's grave? Since she died, eight years ago, I have grown up, and my memories of her have been disturbed by the glimpses my mother has given me of another side of this woman.

"She was very bitter, she was ready to die," my mother told me. My mother's own anger distilled into bitterness as she talked about my grandfather's travels with his new wife. My grandmother had always wanted to travel, but never had. "She would not see the priest who came to visit."

"She...had to lie in the bed she made for herself." What a cold, cruel thing to say. She had encouraged my grandfather to play the role of a man as she knew it, and he did. He hung around with the boys. They grew apart. When she died, my grandfather married a woman who would be a companion.

My grandmother was caught in the center of a web of caring she had spun around all of us. I find I never really knew her. No one talks of her, no one reminisces. The family has scattered, the children have grown, the house is no longer the center of a vital network. Weeds have taken over the garden; I believe my grandfather has mowed it down.

Grandmother's bitterness seems to have come from what she did with her life. Yet for me as a child, she was part of an undifferentiated environment of warmth, comfort and beauty.

Kathi Norklun is a free-lance writer and art historian living in N.Y.C. She has been working on an exhibition of women's domestic imagery.

Betty Klavun

My first clear memory of my mother is of her fishing in hipboots in a northern lake, casting with one of her own flies—gorgeous bugs with fantastic wings which she had tied herself from brightly colored feathers and bits of materials.

In the late thirties Mother and a group of her friends became interested in stenciling. They researched old designs and redesigned them for application on trays, lamps, chairs, boxes. The stencils were cut from a very hard waxed linen paper so that the edges stayed sharp and clear despite much use. To celebrate my wedding Mother stenciled a design on the walls of our living room. These women worked hard and were very serious about their work. They were middle-class women without aggressive or competitive ambitions in the business world. They didn't object to working commercially but did so only if asked. One might illustrate a child's book; one might paint greeting cards. Mother even translated children's books into Braille. Despite the professional quality of these womens' work it was primarily for their own pleasure and that of their families. The quilts they designed and sewed went on their own beds. The rugs they hooked or braided went on their floor. My father, however, brought my mother's stenciled trays to elegant stores like Hammacher Schlemmer's to sell with the outdoor furniture which he designed and built after his retirement.

Most discarded items or worn-out materials were preserved as grist for the household mill. Stockings and clothes were kept for rugmaking or cleaning rags. Broken bottles were for scraping furniture, paper bags for absorbing cooking grease, newspapers for laying fires with one special pleated fan to dress up the kindling. The recycling was continuous. It was part of running a home.

Mother invented all sorts of gadgets which my brother tried to patent. Every possible drawer in the kitchen cupboards opened into the dining room as well as the kitchen. There was a special holder for soaking brushes upright, a knitting yarn winder and lamps that swung on long arms.

Mother respected and understood the unpredictable in nature. She studied the agricultural information published by the state, learning about crop rotation, and even after we no longer had animals, continued to cultivate the fields for hay. She never quite believed that the flowers she crossed and the trees she grafted would take.

Mother made a vegetable and berry garden, a flower garden and a rose garden. In the cellar under the carriage barn, she grew mushrooms.

The planning of all her gardens was quite similar to outdoor environmental sculpture. She never imposed a formal design but used the land as she found it. Rocks were centers for small flowers, "hens and chickens," succulents and herbs. An existing shrub might be tied into the rest of the garden by more massive clumps of tall plants. The land was planned with appropriate flowers for knolls and valleys, sun and shade. In my memory all the flowers were an exaggerated extension of the wild flowers in the field around them. My sister calls this an old-fashioned garden.

When we had cows, mother made butter and cottage cheese and buttermilk, the by-product. The milking was done by hand and then came the separating of the milk and the cream. There seemed to be a countless number of discs to the separator. Then came the slow endless turning of the handle of the big wooden churn until the butter suddenly came. Mother also raised bees and for a short time we had our own honey until Mother, who scorned most of the protective bee costume, nearly died of bee sting.

She took great pleasure in growing vegetables and fruit and canning them. We all gathered berries for her jelly making . She was a champion blueberry picker. She made both elderberry and blackberry wine. We probably had one of the first freezers, a memorable event. Half of our favorite vegetable, peas, instead of being eaten fresh, were frozen.

Late in life she became excited by the possibilities of reproducing old china designs, pots of her own, and glazing. She enrolled at the Sharon Art Center nearby and eventually had her own kilns and worked at home.

She was a shy, small woman, prophetic in her time, generously responsive, filled with a natural curiosity and a great love of the earth.

Betty Klavun is a sculptor interested in doing pieces that involve people.

Luchita Hurtado

My family lived in Caracas, Venezuela. Ladies at that time, nervously twirling their rosaries, drove down the perpendicular dangerous road to bathe in the sea. It was believed that the ocean had curative powers. Huge bathhouses stood on the coastline, waves pounding and resounding in their cavernous interiors, the dusky air pierced with streaks of sunlight while crabs walked the high ledges and the women and children squealed with delight. It was during a sojourn at the beach, a little over half a century ago, that I was born. Memories of my childhood still invade today's reality. Padre Peñalber, our parish priest, is at least partly responsible for my lifelong aversion to a certain shade of pink. He was a short stocky man with very bushy eyebrows and a thunderous voice. Cassock swinging, he walked staring at the line of children waiting to hear what the color of their angel dresses would be for the Easter mass. At that time dark complexioned children were thought to look best in pink and so I would try holding my breath, hoping that perhaps my complexion would change. I was invariably unsuccessful in these attempts for when he looked at me, he would always say, "Pink. You are a pink angel!" Little girls with papier mache wings strapped to their backs were placed on a scaffold around the altar kneeling on a space hardly larger than a small cushion. I never knew whether I had suddenly grown too tall to be an angel or whether, rebelling against the pink I wore, I disrupted the mass by falling asleep kneeling on one of the higher platforms. Whatever the reason, I was never again chosen to be an angel at Easter. Being a painter, color has always been a very important part of my life. I go through color periods when anything purple or red or green or blue seems magically endowed, but never ever a certain shade of pink. Venezuelan girls were taught to sew at an early age. They didn't knit—the tropical climate cancelled out any warm clothing—but they did sew, crochet, embroider and make beautiful lace. I don't believe I ever saw a group of women working together on a common project; rather, they worked alone, even if in a group, spending long hours embroidering a pillow case or making a lace doily.

My grandmother, Rosario, taught me how to sew. If she caught sight of me sitting under a tree enjoying the afternoon breeze, she would ask me to bring her my favorite dress. "Idle hands tempt the devil," she would say; then together we would undo the hem. Once done, she would say, "Now, sew it up again and let me see how well you can do it." It never occurred to me to ask her why it was that when I daydreamed I was tempting the devil, whereas when boys daydreamed they were lost in thought, planning some great project.

I didn't like to sew then, and it took me years to discover that it could be a pleasurable experience. When I became pregnant with my first son in New York, I learned to enjoy sewing. In the forties, when he was born, the only maternity clothes available in stores were called "butcher boy" dresses with an ugly hole cut out in the skirt. I had a vision of a long, silk, black and white striped dress with a velvet ribbon and red geraniums and promptly began to make it. It took me weeks and because I set the sleeves in backward, I had to stand with my shoulders at an odd angle. However, what I remember most is how good I felt when I finished and wore it. When my son, Daniel, was born, the dress had been so constantly worn that, like the placenta, it was discarded in the process. I went on sewing then whenever I coveted some imagined piece of clothing or visualized my infant son in a red vest with blue satin ribbons. Sewing has afforded me great satisfaction through the years.

Luchita Hurtado is a painter working in Santa Monica, California. She has four children.

Ann Sperry

I was a Scotch lass one fall, a Russian princess the next winter. I had feather or fur-trimmed hats to match every coat and lace-collared, lovingly hand-tucked party dresses. The buttons on my blouses were ceramic fruits or mother-of-pearl hearts; enameled flowers closed my sweaters. I was the embodiment of my mother's fantasies—the outlet for her frustrated talents. Trained in Poland as a fine seamstress, she emigrated to America at 18, took a course at the Traphagen School of Fashion and became a dress designer. My father believed that a wife's place was in the home, and even though her income would have been a welcome addition to the small salary he earned as a Yiddish poet working for the Yiddish newspapers, she stopped working to take care of their home, and me, their only child.

She designed and sewed every kind of clothing for the two of us; shirts, ties, jackets, pyjamas and bathrobes for my father; curtains, slipcovers, bedspreads for the house. Her sewing machine in the bedroom was overflowing with projects. Scraps of fabrics and pieces of thread were always on the rugs and floor.

Sometimes she took me with her to hunt for the fabrics—remnants were all she could afford. We would plow through rolled up bundles of cloth wrapped around the middle with a strip of brown paper. The material would tumble out when you pulled one end of the string that tied it together. We searched through boxes of laces, trimmings, scraps of fur, end pieces of embroidered ribbons, all scraps that could be bought for a few cents by anyone who could think of a way to use them.

Usually the remnants were wrapped the wrong side out. It wasn't until we got home and opened them that we were able to see their full beauty. My mother always knew what treasures she had found. "Look," she'd say, fondling a piece, "this French silk moire, how it reflects the light; this Italian knit, it must have mohair in it, feel how it moves."

There was such challenge and excitement when she started making something. Almost always, the pattern called for more yardage than was in the remnant, and she would hover over the fabric on the floor, clouds of pattern pieces surrounding her tape measure draped around her neck, folding and unfolding in every conceivable way until she managed to maneuver the two-and-five-eighths yard remnant to make a three-and-a-half yard skirt. It was magical to me; she could make something out of anything, out of nothing. I could almost see the fabric grow to fit the need. Then she would pick up her enormous shears and begin to cut. (I once used those shears to cut out some paper doll clothes, and got one of the worst spankings of my childhood—those shears were only for fabric.)

This past summer I found myself in a junkyard, trying to pull a beautifully patinaed piece of two-inch pipe from under a pile of I-beams. It was a hot, muggy day. I was going to the beach when I spotted this likely-looking heap of scrap, and felt compelled to stop. As I tugged at the pipe, sticky and sweating, trying not to stab my sandaled feet with a sharp rusted iron bar, cursing, I wondered: What in the world am I doing here? Why this need to stop and explore every junkyard? Why is my studio full of scraps of stéel pipe and sheeting and odd iron shapes?

Ann Sperry's sculpture combines fluid painted steel elements with rusted found objects. She lives in N.Y.C. with her husband and three children.

Faith Ringgold

I remember once when I was about 12 years old I tried to make a pair of sandals and a brassiere from some pink satin scraps of material my mother, Willi Posey, had given me. She was the first person to teach me to sew as her mother, Ida, had taught her. The tradition of teaching and sewing in our family probably goes back to our roots in Africa. My mother remembers watching her grandmother, Betsy Bingham, boil and bleach flour sacks until they were "white as snow" to line the quilts she made. Mother also remembers Betsy cutting out basket shapes, triangles and circles out of brightly colored scraps of material to create the design of the quilt.

Susie Shannon, Betsy's mother, had taught her to sew quilts. She was a slave and had made quilts for the plantation owners as part of her duties as "house girl." Undoubtedly many of the early American quilts with repetitive geometric designs are slavemade and African-influenced.

Ida, my grandmother, made clothes for a living when she came north from Jacksonville, Florida, after her husband died in 1910. He had been a teaching principal setting up schools in Florida and South Carolina, moving frequently to the next place that needed him and could pay for his services. Ida taught with him in the South, but up North there was no job for her and she still had two young children to support.

My mother made our clothes, and sewed for friends free during the depression years. She created original designs and made and cut her own patterns. By the forties, no longer a housewife, she was making a living sewing and giving seasonal fashion shows of her designs. Many are high fashion today, such as the bat-wing sleeves and knee-length pants.

My mother was always an artist, but she thinks of herself as a business woman, and measures her success by the number of steady customers she designs for during each season. Today she is in her seventies and her five or six steady customers keep her in business wearing "Posey" originals.

Faith Ringgold, artist, teacher, writer, is currently completing an autobiography and lecturing and exhibiting nationally.

Helene Aylon

I just came across this photo of my mother in-law, Celia, now dead. She had nine children and lived in utter poverty in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her husband worked in a sweatshop and studied the Torah.

Celia's art was "making do," patching up, stretching the dollar. She boasted that the only thing she threw out were eggshells—"and to begin with, the eggs can be bought cracked for next to nothing." She knew of a place to buy stale bread which was "better for you than fresh bread." She'd cut up old telephone books into six-inch squares and use this for toilet paper. Once she came to my house and stared at the soapy water gushing out of the washing machine into the sink. With the speed of lightening, she was triumphantly caught the water in a pail, so that it could be used for washing the floor.

Now that I think of it, there was one extravagance: the small bouquet of fresh flowers that traditionally enhanced her "Sabbath Table." This she would arrange and rearrange.

Helene Aylon is a New York painter who left to live in Berkeley, California, four years ago. She shows at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York and feels that the Art World is a better place since feminism.

Joyce Aiken

Many of my childhood memories center around the women of the family and their work. Both my mother's and father's parents lived 25 miles from us in a small farming community and we visited them each Sunday. My maternal grandmother lived on a ranch that grew grapes and peaches. My twin sister Janice and I never looked forward to those Sunday trips, but our boredom was relieved when Grandma was making a quilt. We would quilt while the men went outside to smoke or sit under the umbrella tree. Sometimes the quilting frame stayed up for weeks and no one thought it strange that it took up most of the living room.

The depression had brought renewed interest in many kinds of needlework because of the poor money situation and the need to use spare time profitably. The women's magazines were filled with needlework patterns for embellishing dresses, towels and table linens. Neither my mother nor my grandmother could read a crochet pattern, but both could easily work from a piece already made. With friends they formed a women's group in the early 1930s to trade new ideas for crochet projects or stitches. In 1934 after we moved to a new town Mother went to the Methodist Church once a week to make quilts for the missionairies. She would take us along and we would play on the floor around the "sewing ladies." Within a few years this group would be sewing for the Red Cross and the war effort. Twenty-five years earlier my mother had learned to knit for the service men during World War I.

My father's mother, Emma Braun, was a rugmaker who had learned her craft as a child in Canada. There was a small room in her house that held her rug frame, fabric scraps and burlap. She was constantly searching for good burlap sacks and wool clothing from the Salvation Army stores. When wool was hard to find, she dyed cotton sheet blankets for rug strips. She designed her own patterns and carefully drew them on the burlap before starting to hook. I was about 11 years old and visiting her in the summer when she taught me the process of washing and preparing the rags, stretching and sewing the burlap to the frame, and doing the hooking. Rugmaking is a solitary craft and Emma Braun was a very private person. She said that when other women went to quilting bees, she preferred to stay home and spend part of each day working on a rug. She hooked about 40 rugs in her lifetime, the largest one, 8' x 10'. The last rug I remember her making was made for me when she was 82.

There are few days in my life when I am not involved with some kind of handwork. My mother and I talked about it recently and discovered we were both filled with guilt if there was spare time available and we had no "projects" to work on. She thought it was our nature to be that way. I think it is because neither of us ever saw our mothers idle.

Joyce Aiken is a Professor at California State University at Fresno in crafts and feminist art. She has published a number of crafts books and works in fabric and wood.

Paula King

I am an ex-mother, ex-housewife who grew up in a home where evidence of my creative heritage was displayed on every bed. My mother never completed a quilt herself—they were all given to her by women relatives for her wedding—but she sewed all our clothes, made curtains, slipcovered couches and insisted that my sister and I learn to sew well. When I was married at 18, she gave me a sewing machine.

During my ten years of marriage, my need to be creative was suppressed, except for decorating the house, making things for the kids, conquering new recipes. Following my two marriages I spent five years in the heterosexual Left at a time when both feminism and art, of any but the most blatantly political kind, were condemned as a bourgeois self-indulgence. It wasn't until I stopped doing political work with men and began to identify with the women's community that I felt supported enough to deal with my own creative needs. The fact that quiltmaking skills have become a focus for me is tied up with my former identification as a homemaker and with my self-image as a nonartist. Although I am now a lesbian and no longer have any but minimal duties as a mother, the home and all the roles connected to it are still potent material for me. It is with women in those roles that I mainly think of sharing my work.

I have been doing stitchery for three years now. 1 restricted myself to using a needle, thimble and a hoop and set out to experience how it was that women had sewn for most of their creative history. I began to understand that both the form and the content might have political meaning, and that the very act of making stitchery in a way that was respectful of tradition could be a celebration of the creative spirit of generations of women who have never been considered artists. This last year most of my energy has gone into developing stitchery as a political art form. I am not at all interested in having stitchery elevated to its rightful place among the arts. That would make it susceptible to male standards of criticism, and stitchery, at least at the amateur level, is one of the few crafts still controlled by women.

Because stitchery is not defined as art and because many women have some knowledge of the skills involved, it is not as intimidating as other art forms.

Paula King is currently employed by Rape Relief Hotline in Portland, Oregon. She is involved in organizing around the issue of violence against women, and—along with 95 others—was just acquitted of criminal trespass at the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant .

Deborah Jones-Dominguez

When I found a beautiful quilt in my aunt's closet recently I remembered a little Bo-Peep quilt I had had as a child and the stories told to me by my father about his family.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, his maternal grandmother and her sisters came to America from the British Isles. They brought with them the lore of quiltmaking. Orphans, they had learned needlework from the women in charge of the households in whih they were raised. These women's lives were practical and unadorned. They lived in rural communities, and during the long winter months mobility outside the home was curtailed. The men, railroaders and coal miners, were gone from the home for long periods, leaving the women time to work at quilting in the evenings after their chores. From their elders the young girls learned stitching and other "womanly" skills. Their abilties were increased by working very young in factories producing needlework.

The process of quiltmaking began with a metal template for shapes to be used in the designs. From this template a dozen cardboard copies were made of each shape. The cloth was then pinned to the cardboard and cut around its perimeter. The women were able to cut these small shapes quickly and precisely from whatever goods were on hand, such as ginghams and calicoes.

In piecework the cloth shapes were laboriously sewn together a piece at a time, joining the units from the center outward. The components of many quilts were worked on at the same time and were stacked, ready for use. In designing the quilts the women were self-sufficient; the home magazines that published quilt designs were seldom used. When the women were not pleased with their work, they stripped the threads out and cut the cloth to use it as another shape in a different design. They continuously rearranged colors in the designs or made variations on shapes to create their own unique patterns. Once they established what was best for that particular "block" or circle they took care that the symmetry and sewing were precise; there was nothing ever left over.

Appliqué differed from piecework; the units were hemmed to one another piece of cloth, which served as a base to form a design, instead of being pieced together. All the raw ends of cloth were turned under and sewn around the edge with small, invisible stitches. Often the symmetry of the appliqued design was stitched into the quilted background. When they gathered around the table to work together, the women sometimes joked about friends whose stitching was coarse.

When the clans came together for quilting bees, many of the women brought unfinished quilts already cut and assembled. It was a time for catching up on all the family news. During the bees they applied the units the the base. They knew the overall plan and moved easily through the process. Then there were two long poles about two feet apart stretched eight feet in length across the old-fashioned dining room. They were unwrapped from one end to the other with the quilt. As one pole wrapped, the other unwrapped in front of it, traveling in tandem as the work progressed. Four women worked along each side of the quilt while an additional two worked on the borders.

Women studied their friends', neighbors' and relatives' stitching and designs. They copied from each other and each was proud when she created something unique. Cloth was traded among friends from as far away as 30 miles. This compensated for the sameness that existed in a neighborhood in which there was heavy trading. People went out on their swings in the evenings, sauntering around the neighborhood exchanging pleasantries and inviting friends in to "see my quilts." The quilts, carried around on family visits for display, kept the tradition alive. Sometimes one would hear stories about very old and valuable quilts, made of cotton with cotton seeds still in the fiber. This was not seen as a sign of imperfection but age; old quilts were more valuable because the cotton used was not refined by cotton ginning.

Deborah Jones-Dominguez is a painter and teacher who lives and works in N.Y.C.

Mimi Smith

Sarah Lyman Bayard, my grandmother, lived to be 84. She had no formal education. As a young girl she boarded a ship alone and sailed from her village, her parents and ten brothers and sisters to America. Her entire life was spent doing work with her hands. She had no concept of what I call art, and the only time I ever heard her mention the word was shortly before she died. She told me that upon arriving in this country she had worked as a stitcher in a sweatshop. After her children were born she earned money by sewing piecework at home. She would spend many, many hours making men's suits. "When I finished a man's suit it was a work of art."

During the last seven years of her life she moved all of her belongings into a room in my parents' house. Her most prized possessions were her pictures. They covered two pieces of furniture in her small room. She had certain systems for arranging the pictures. Some were pinned to each other in rows with straight pins, others were just piled or leaning against each other in groups. The arrangements and displays were constantly changing. Guests were always invited to see the changing exhibitions. She was always seeking newer pictures. She told me that she had never had her own life and that all of the people in the pictures had been her life. She said that dusting and hanging the pictures were now her work. She died in 1975. This photo was taken a few days after her death.

Mimi Smith is an artist who lives in N.Y.C.