Ashley Johnson English 1010 The Kinship Quilt- A Response to Susan Roach Susan Roach’s article explores the stories behind the quilts that are such a large part of her family’s history. She records and later documents the conversations of a family quilting bee in the summer of 1974. While there have been many books explaining how to make these extravagant quilts, there aren’t any about the stories behind them, I think that was her objective in writing this article. Recently, my life has been influenced by quilting.
This past Christmas, my mom decided that instead of the usual gifts she would make us something special. She had everyone in our family choose 20 of their favorite pictures from birth to present and all the important events in between. Then, we all went to the fabric store and got to pick out three of our favorite fabrics. We were ready to begin making our quilts now.
She had the pictures put on fabric and we each made our own quilts. Before that experience, I thought that quilting was sort of boring and pointless when you can just buy blankets and they work just the same. One of the main elements in Roach’s article was the family’s religion. I think that that was the main reason that they quilted, it goes along with everything that they believe in, hard work, recycling of things, not being wasteful, and family togetherness. I think you could find religion in a lot of quilting guilds. I know that my mother’s religion plays a part in her quilt making.
The Essay on Family Traditions 2
How does The Keeping Quilt help you understand traditions and what they mean to families? The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco shows how immigrants came to a new country and passed down traditions to their family overtime. It also shows how traditions are integrated with other cultures to create a new culture. The Keeping Quilt demonstrates how historical and cultural traditions, teaching ...
The idea of recycling fabrics from clothes to make quilts was an interesting idea to me; it made me think about how wasteful we are these days. I mean, if something doesn’t fit us today, we usually don’t even give it to charity; we usually just throw it away. Not only do they pass down clothes from older to younger kids, but then when they didn’t fit any of the kids, they keep old clothes until it matches a quilt they are making. I also liked how she talked about using old fabrics that you hadn’t seen in years, and how they bring back the memories of the days that you wore them.
I thought that the part in the article about sex discrimination was sort of funny. I almost felt sorry for the little boy. Even though this event took place almost thirty years ago, I think that sex discrimination still exists in this field, maybe even more so now. It makes me also think about age discrimination, because when I think about quilting I think about old retired women who have nothing else to do, even though I know this is simply an incorrect stereotype, my mom proves that.
The quilting bee not only fulfills the objective of bringing the family together, but it also has many practical functions. The quilt itself can be used as an art object, as a ‘baby pallet’, or an extra bed covering on really cold winter nights. A baby pallet is a safe place for the babies to play; it is placed in the center of the room so that all of the adults can keep an eye on the new babies. This assignment was sort of a difficult one for me to write. I kept trying to analyze it instead of respond to it. I believe it’s hard to have a strong response to something that you don’t really have an opinion on, and this is one of the few things that I don’t have an opinion on..
