Category Archives: Hearts for Charleston Quilt

Frost and fiddle heads

Woke to frost but – oh happy day – many of the ostrich ferns are showing signs of life. I love their dramatic unfolding: first a hint of green; then clear curls showing themselves; and finally, the swift, miraculous reach for the sky. I am particularly grateful for their emergence because I wasn’t sure any of them survived our first year with Finn.

Thanks to Home Depot and my husband, they will be protected this season (thank you for the gardening tips, Mo!). By the way, does anyone know what you call the fern’s brown husky base? A ‘brown husky base’?

A slightly more decorative fence for the bottle tree-bed, below.Meanwhile there is still a lot of mud to deal with. Last night, I couched black satin cording for the Sanders/Jackson label and embroidered the barber stripes. I’m finding it discordant with the other labels. Will look at it for a bit. We are off to Montreal soon in any case. Packing up Son Number One. The end of another era.

Susie Jackson and Tywanza Sanders Hearts for Charleston Quilt

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On June 17 last summer, the Jackson family of Charleston lost three of its members: Susie Jackson, her cousin Ethel Lance, and Susie’s nephew, Tywanza Sanders. Because Tywanza Sanders tried to shield his aunt from the shooter and then reached out to comfort her as they both lay dying, I stitched their names on the same heart. Their funeral services were held together.
Susie Jackson, the oldest person slain last summer, was a trustee of the Emanuel AME and a former member of the choir. In this article from “The Post and Courier”, she was remembered as “a family and church matriarch.” According to the same article, Ms. Jackson “volunteered in myriad ways over her many years of constant faith and fidelity.”

Because of her love of music, I couched some black satin cording in a G clef for the back of the block.

At their joint service, a rousing performance of “I Can’t Give Up Now” was sung. Here’s a link to Lee Williams singing a version of same.

I learned from a “Post and Courier” article that two caissons carried the caskets of Susie Jackson and Tywanza Sanders from the church.

Before he was shot, Tywanza stood between the shooter and his Aunt Susie and said, “You don’t have to do this.”

He was said to possess a brightness of spirit and such brightness is very visible on his instragram feed. “The Post and Courier” quoted a friend as saying of him that he had a “majestic and contagious smile few people have”.

From the next quote, you can see why the article about him was headlined: Poet, Hero, Tywanza Sanders.

“He was remembered for his artistry. A poem of his was read that spoke of social conscience and ended, “divided by color/So we are all trying to be equal.” It was titled “Tragedy.”

Mourners kept coming back to Sanders’ last moments. The family’s remembrance of him in the program said his last words were, “Where is my Aunt Susie. I’ve got to get to my Aunt Susie” as he reached for her.”

Tywanza was also entrepreneurial and hoped to establish a barber business. He already had his license and undergraduate business degree. I am about to stitch the barber pole with the signature red, white and blue stripes.
Liz Ackert contributed some unbelievably beautiful labels recently and I will post about them this week.

On a completely pedestrian note, it continues to be unseasonably cold here. I keep thinking I can put my down-filled coats away and then finding myself wearing them. Today I added a wool scarf for my neck!

To read more about this project,
please refer to the the sidebar category:
“Hearts for Charleston Quilt”

To investigate this style of quilting more,
please visit the inspiring and generous master quilter, Jude Hill
at her blog “Spirit Cloth“

Snowy April

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Hearts for Charleston Quilt – Depayne Middleton Doctor

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This is the back of the heart dedicated to Depayne Middleton Doctor. She was 49 when she was slain last June during a Bible study circle at the Emanuel AME in Charleston. She left behind four daughters. So many people came to her funeral, they had to set up televisions in an overflow room in order to accommodate another 150 people.
According to “The Post and Courier”: ‘Middleton Doctor retired in 2005 as Charleston County director of the Community Block Grant Program. Last year, she began working for Southern Wesleyan University as admissions coordinator for the school’s Charleston learning center.’

The same article quotes a friend saying of Middleton Doctor’s singing voice: “So angelic it could move the very depth of your heart… How do you describe an angel?”

I made this heart and it was meant to capture a very rich personality, with some of the expansiveness of the heavens (the dotted dark cloths look like night skies to me).

Find out more about this remarkable woman and the family she left behind here.

To read more about this project,
please refer to the the sidebar category:
“Hearts for Charleston Quilt”

To investigate this style of quilting more,
please visit the inspiring and generous master quilter, Jude Hill
at her blog “Spirit Cloth“

disappearing, disappeared

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The “Hearts for Charleston” quilt has been set aside for personal, holiday sewing. But I wanted to post some of the photos that I continue to obsessively create on my iPhone (with the dianaphoto app). For some reason, these photos have a way of making the awful shooting of June 17, 2015 more real to me. Perhaps it’s their haunting quality. Or maybe it’s the way that the heart can be made to disappear and how that hints at loss in a potent way.

This pink heart with a shibori’d circle will be dedicated to Myra Thompson, who was 59 at the time of her death. A proper post will follow down the road, but here are some of the photos, starting with the ‘straight up’ quilt block front and ending with the actual block’s back.