I made this textile piece for Salina Clinic, and it is framed by NDN Art Gallery in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Remember those wonderful aprons you might have seen your grandmother wearing when she was haning out clothes on the clothesline? My grandmother, Lizzie Carter, had one that had big pickets and contrasting piping, and it had a bib front with a button or sash in the back. Some of those were made from flour sacks. Back then, in the days before carry-out food, women cooked every meal at home and men would sometimes carry a lunch pail or come home for lunch. People mostly lived on garden goods which they grew themselves. My grandmother lived near the peddler man whose house was on Lee Street. He would come around in a cart drawn by a horse or horses, with a load of produce on the back in a cart, and right there at your home you could pick out some great food grown fresh, to fix for the next few meals. My memories are from the 1960s in Tahlequah Oklahoma, but my father Gene Carter remembers earlier days. Women would buy bulk flour and sugar in big sacks about the size of a pillowcase, and they'd rip the seam open, to make a yard of material. At the store you could choose which fabric sack you wanted, and women would save them up for sewing a dress, apron, shirt or quilt. Flour sack quilts and yard goods in the 1930s were bright and colorful--- social historians say that folks wanted bright colors because the economy made their lives drab. But I don't think life was that drab. Earlier colors were, though--- the dark and sad shades of the nineteen twenties and teens gave way to these bright colors, about when new dyestuffs and chemistry were being innovated. An earlier blog featured "Trip Around The World" variation quilt--- one in my collection of antique quilts. This little quilt is a miniature abstract variation on that vintage quilt, and it features authentic reproduction fabrics documented for that same time period. Not all of these designs were flour or feed sack or cornmeal sacks. Some were yard goods of the time. Back then, bolts were usually 28 inches wide in cotton, and printed using a roller method on one side of the fabric.
This mini was made by stripping reproduction fabrics then turning the "stripes" sideways and making each one into a square... or often a rectangle. Then I used black to pair the postagestamp blocks into one-inch blocks (approximately) and pieced them like a log cabin, only in reverse. The resulting optical effect is a spiral moving from the center, outward, clockwise like the passage of time. In the middle is a Cherokee Star. That's a golf ball at the bottom. It was phtographed behind a golf ball, sort of by accident.
This peice is spoken-for and will be acquired by Cherokee Nation Entertainment. Cherokee Nation passed a law allocating a percentage of each building's construction budget for the purchase of original Cherokee art for the building decor. That's a wonderful law because it keeps artists fed, and keeps the arts communital in vitality. Thanks to Cherokee Nation and CNE for buying this textile art.
