Margaret's Kawandi

hi i'm joe cunningham and i'm here today to introduce you to my friend my compatriot margaret fabrizio and to get margaret to tell you the story of how she came to make quilts and subsequently kawandees margaret's a fascinating person she's uh one of my favorite human beings i ever met i met her in 2004 i'd received a grant at that time to have my own quilt museum for six weeks in the presidio of san francisco and met margaret at a party one night and we learned that we both made quilts and i invited her to come and see me which she did and brought a bag of quilts that her grandmother had made she was wondering what to do with them and we talked about that and one of the quilts was a yo-yo quilt that needed some attention some of the threads that hold the little individual fabric yo-yos together had broken and i don't know why since i don't do restoration work i offered to repair that yo-yo quilt for her i thought there was a few dozen broken threads it turned out there was a few hundred broken threads um but i just wanted to spend time with margaret and so she sat at the quilt frame with me that week as as i worked along on both the quilt that i was working on and on hers and we got to know each other and have been friends ever since i learned a lot about margaret i learned that she had been a music professor at stanford for years a specialist in harpsichord music from bach right on through to uh significant modern composers uh she was a real virtuoso and had a long career as a musician i learned that she had studied uh with a master and learned how to make kimono and yukata i learned that she took everything seriously the books that she read and she has read them all she takes notes on those she takes notes on the movies that she watches she takes notes on the people that attend her dinner parties her wonderful dinner parties uh where you'll have place cards and you can sit where you're told to sit beside the most interesting people that she could mix together and uh serve fantastic food in a stylish manner anyway margaret takes everything seriously and uh so i was curious uh when i uh uh got to know her what it was that had uh caused her to take up an interest in quilts and i thought that's where we'd start today i thought i would ask margaret what it was that prompted her to make her first quilt here's what she said hi joe mike and santa cruz quilters thanks for inviting me to be part of this your february meeting sorry i can't be there sorry i can't even be in the next walk but we'll do it this way what prompted me to make my first quilt meeting meeting someone i had always sewn sewn all my own clothes my daughter's clothes done fabric projects i had never made a quilt although my grandmother made quilts and i used to go to the church quilting bees with her i'd been exposed to quilts my mother didn't make quilts i was never i was busy living my life and you know quilts take time but then i met grace earl and that's what did it she had recently moved to san francisco she'd been a art and design teacher at the chicago art institute for many years and had retired and she had decided that she was going to start making quilts this was before the term art quilt but that's what she was doing she considered a a new art form so i decided to jump in and i was about two-thirds of the way through making ocean wave blocks uh before i actually talked with her about that project and that was my first quilt 1986 and she officiated at the the quilt unveiling my first quilt unveiling so that was margaret's first quilt unveiling she unveiled this quilt right here it's called ocean waves it was her first quilt and even on this quilt you can see the uh sophistication uh with which she started making quilts uh margaret's aesthetic sense was already very finely developed and she brought that to quilt making um this quilt looks like the work of an established master right it's so good um and uh the and the unveiling idea it's so uh much fun to experience an unveiling at margaret's place she'll invite 25 or 30 people over and um we will have snacks delicious food not snacks delicious food and drinks of the afternoon and the quilt will be on the wall covered by a sheet and at a certain point margaret removes the sheet and unveils the quilt and someone will have been asked to uh speak about this quilt and give a short speech about it and uh everybody gets to say what they want it's really fun and it's a great ritual to have i wish more people would have quilt unveilings and i intend to start doing that myself anyway like i said margaret's aesthetic was already very finely uh developed and uh we became quilt buddies we would go around to shows and stuff and one time margaret called me she had been to see a show of kawandi that's a the sidi people s-i-d-d-i that's their name for quilts these are descendants of slaves african slaves that were brought to the indian subcontinent on the west coast of india somewhere a long time ago their descendants made these kind of quilts it was a show at the museum of the african diaspora here in san francisco and she asked me if i would go with her uh and i did we went to the show together and um well i liked the quilts a lot but why don't i let margaret tell you the story of what it was like for her to encounter these kawandi well it was a discovery that changed my life you're pretty lucky when you can get a whole new life at 81. i went to the exhibit at the museum of the african diaspora in san francisco it was called soulful stitching patchwork quilts by africans in india the cd people in addition to to the fact that these pieces were so moving uh deep i was very strongly affected by the mystery of them but what was even more so i couldn't figure out how they were made they even had a little movie there uh i couldn't make sense of it i went back with you joe um and you couldn't figure it out either we we were stymied in those days we'd never seen anything like this and so what to do i just had to go there and find those people in the forest in karnataka so in typical margaret fashion since neither she nor i could figure out how these kawandi were made she decided she would go to india and find the cd people and learn how they were made during these years margaret was spending most of every winter in india anyway she would go uh during the high theater season and send back dispatches of her adventures in india that were incredible uh you know she would be at the the small little place she was staying to some remote location where the demons would come out of the forest with firebrands and dance around them these stories were just incredible that she would send back so she was used to going to india margaret has gone and spent part of the winter in many parts of the world bali and europe and kenya and oh on and on but so this was not as daunting to her as it might have been to other people like it would have been to me but she decided to go and find the cd people and i was uh fascinated to hear about this and i wanted to know what was the journey like what did it consist of and what was it like when she arrived there well it wasn't easy i asked at the museum nobody there knew where the women were i wrote a few emails to henry drewell who had arranged the exhibit and never got any answer from him so i went online that's the way things happen and i posted on youtube what i was going to be trying to do and within a matter of hours i had a a message from him telling me the five stages i had to go through to finally get to the seedy women [Music] first i flew from san francisco to bangalore i spent the night there and then i took a an overnight train to hoobly there was no first class car so it was second class wooden bench i'm 80 81 sleeping on that wooden bench then when i got to hubley from then on it was a matter of hiring cars two different towns when i got to the next town i was to go to the catholic church and ask for father jerome who would arrange me to get a car to go to the next town and when i got to the next town i hired a car to take me to the place where the catholic sisters had a an enclave there they took care of the zidi people so i went to them and that was the trip well i happen to know from personal experience that margaret is a big presence in the room uh you're aware of it when she shows up and i could only imagine what it must have been like for the cd people to see margaret coming into their village uh with some kawandi that she had made herself and uh for her to make it clear that she was interested in learning how to do this and i wondered well how did these women react when you showed up what was that like well i don't recall them reacting to my work i didn't actually do much uh i was watching uh their big reaction was amazement that i was there how how had i come into the forest like this wanting to learn how they made kawandees so i sat every day for two weeks on dumgy's front porch where she worked and sometimes with her neighbors and there was no language a company there was no no way she could tell me anything so what she did the second day i was there she had a very small piece of fabric there and some scraps and she made it clear to me that she was going to make this for me and so then i could watch every step of the way and uh i took an immense amount of footage of her working over those two weeks the way we learn things uh and how deeply our learning goes is really an interesting question to me uh i've had people wanting me to teach them how to make quantities [Music] you can like follow directions uh when i've made them like it while i was having an exhibit somewhere and would be working on something nobody ever really watched for hours they'd watch for maybe five or ten minutes and get the general idea that was all they needed [Music] i don't know there's no substitute for just giving up what it is you want to do and watching for hours because there were so many little things maybe she only did two or three times as needed if i hadn't just been sitting there hour after hour i would have missed them and they were really important little things um so i wouldn't i don't know how she got you'd say she guided me she just did what she does because she couldn't say anything she couldn't tell me anything so i had to just be watching sometimes she might point to something like that you know this this is pretty important but generally she was just living her daily life there there was there's no substitute for learning that what what i couldn't learn was the heart her heart their heart you can imitate [Music] indigenous peoples work you can copy it try to do it the way they're doing it and you might be able to do it exactly like they're doing it but you don't have the heart it's not in your blood it makes a difference so i know i had a problem with this when i got home uh i was so in love with their work the and the way their work moved me and when i would make kawandis here at home they never had they never had that mystery and that bothered me a lot i i was crying on youtube all the time about why why why don't they look like theirs i'm doing it doing the crafts right but i don't i'm not a cd it's that simple so i finally gave up on that and just went my my own path uh people i respect a lot were just calling me on it and saying they're gonna be yours and so i've just surrendered and just did my did my made mine uh i like mine i don't i don't have a problem but they're not i don't think a a uh a caucasian person can dance balinese dance and have it have the same spirit that a balinese person dances we're different we're different i got a little off the subject there i did the way they guided me ultimately was i went back the next year i went to their monthly meeting where they submit their works for approval to be put into the uh the bank for for selling there's a very high standard and they they have to be unanimously approved anyway i went to that meeting that's another story um they were they were surprised the first trip they were really surprised the second year when i went back with pieces i had made in the meantime anyway i did get some suggestions at that time that were very helpful things that they thought i could have done differently so so that's another story really well i want to hear it i want to hear what was the meeting like i want to hear what kind of guidance they gave you did how and how did they guide you and uh what tell me about the meeting i wanted to know all about it so i asked margaret to please go on i timed my trip the following year to coincide with their monthly meeting because i wanted them to see what i had done so the meeting was pretty incredible uh in the morning they started appearing uh in this large room about the size of a small gymnasium and some had walked some distance and they were flinging their kawandees all over the floor it was covered with kawandes uh it was pretty amazing then they were judged because they try to keep the quality high uh for the quilts that are then going to be presented as uh possible sales and uh if somebody's quilt wasn't quite right for one reason or another they could either fix it there that morning or bring it back the next month so i waited till that that meeting was over and then then i presented mine i think i took four or five small pieces i had made they were very surprised and uh seemed quite delighted the only criticism that they had was that the rows of stitching were too far apart so i just went to my room in the next few days just filled in between every row of stitching and they did look much better it's true the the reason for them being the stitching having to be farther apart was you shouldn't be able to put your finger in there because if you could put your finger in there you could you know catch it or it's not a good sign so anyway it was a fabulous fabulous time i don't think i'll ever go back though it's physically extremely demanding that trip so margaret returned to the states and resumed her kawandi making this time with a passion she attacked the idea of making a kawandi with all the seriousness with which she attacks everything else in this life she wanted to make her work as much like the ones that she was modeling as possible and it was a beautiful thing to see the progression of her work it just got better and better and better i was her photographer i would photograph the quilts as they got done and so i saw this happening then gradually over the years what i also saw happening was margaret's evolution the way i saw it uh to a more personal style the original quantity had been almost all relatively symmetrical all four corners were relatively the same and it became and they were mostly abstract and they started to become more asymmetrical they started to have more what i saw as subject matter and they seemed to be more personal so what i wondered was it a conscious decision for margaret to leave the seedy way of making quilts of making kawandi behind and to launch off into her own way of working into her own style so i asked her about that i didn't decide to let go of the cd way at all i think i'm still making quilts in the cd way that's why i call them kawandi the cd word for quilt they're directed by imagination as i go making it up as i go no plan ahead of time no program i think that's the cd way there's the system of the way you put it together and there's the uh approach to what you're doing or how what you want to make so it's driven by the imagination and the extemporaneous way in which you make it up as you go along like jazz people have asked me because of my longer career playing bach how this how this relates to music i would say that the traditional kinds of quilts are like bach they're very carefully thought out and measured and there's all kinds of math involved um in in much of the tradition of western quilts the kawandis are like jazz you're making them up as you go along that's what i'm doing with the kawandees i'm not doing it's it's different making the traditional quilts so i don't think i let go of anything i gave up wanting to them to have the same magic quality that the cd quilts had because i realized i'm a different person and that mine were not going to look like theirs so once i accepted that but i don't think i i i quit the cd approach or or gave that up or did anything [Music] to decide to go some other way it just happened i just realized i was going to just have to back off and see what happens see what happens discover try things so of course then sometimes my imagination i would have some idea of what i wanted it to look like and i might have to invent some new trick to to to do that but that's not i don't consider that giving up uh on the the things that i learned from the cds at all so one thing that i wondered was if going through this process of acquiring these new skills this new way of thinking about the work had any effect on her quilt making kawandi making is obviously much different and i wondered if uh that had any effect on the way she approached the making of a well i i guess a traditional quilt it as traditional as she gets um you know a pieced and hand-quilted quilt here's what she said not that i'm aware of because when i'm working on a quilt that i have pieced and the whole process is so rigid compared to a kawandi that i'm going back and forth now a lot between uh making quilts uh made up of a pieced top and kawandees i don't feel at all the same when i'm working on a pieced quilt i don't feel like i'm having an adventure that i'm going to be surprised that uh i'm dealing with an unknown part of myself i don't feel like that when i'm working on a quilt whether what i'm getting as a result with a quilt because of having done kowandes i don't see it myself others may i did some pretty wild quilts and the katakalli quilt and the certainly super quilt now are those traditional quilts they're pieced tops i'm not clear at all about what traditional quilt means but i i just differentiate between the pieced tops and the kawandees because when you're making a kowandi you're you're setting off on a trip you don't know what's going to happen um you're starting on the edge you're you're adding pieces that that strike your fancy uh from the edge uh it's just it's just so different um so that puts you in a certain frame of mind and i'm not i'm not in that frame of mind when when i'm making a pieced quilt even if it's irregular there's lots of measuring involved cutting and of course the sewing machine well like you can see from all of her backdrops the kawandi and quilts they have a wide variety of fabrics in them and one question that i wanted to be sure to ask was this one right here i wanted to say margaret where do you get all those fabrics the good will salvation army the sidewalk dumpsters friends giving me scraps old clothes other people's old clothes some guy's tie that i had always coveted and he finally got a gravy stain on it traveling i don't go to fabric stores to shop for fabrics for a quilt recently somebody made a post on youtube asking the question what do you think people don't know about your quilt making your your friends what do you think they don't know hundreds of people made comments and the majority of them said they don't know how much it costs everybody was talking about how expensive it is to make a quilt stop shopping you don't need to shop if if all of the quilters alive today never bought another piece of fabric they would never have to stop quilting when you go into a store to shop for a quilt it's already over you've closed the door you decided what color palette you decided what you what you wanted on the quilts and so the fun is over now it's a matter of well spending money and no surprises no challenges of how could i work that in would that work i'd like to give a special thanks to the pajaro valley quilt association for asking me to put this presentation together and thanks to margaret for all of her work and honest answers it's been a thrill i wanted to finish up today with a demonstration remember how margaret learned to make kowandi from the cd women by sitting and watching well that's what you're going to have a chance to do here just like doongi made a small kawandi to demonstrate the techniques to margaret margaret made a small kawandi for you so the next few minutes are going to be uh silent not exactly silent you'll be able to hear her picking up tools and setting them down and the needle going through the fabric and everything but there'll be no dialogue for a while it's just going to be the video of margaret making a small kawandi for you after that there's a gallery of images and you can stop the movie at any time and study these uh quilts and kawandi in more detail you can find out more about margaret the the links will be part of this uh presentation you'll be able to see grace earl making a uh um a speech at her first quilt unveiling and find out how to learn more about margaret okay thanks very much here now is the demonstration so so so so so so foreign you

Channel: Joe the Quilter Cunningham

Views: 5,998

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Id: Jw1MwU7DRMg

Length: 46min 7sec (2767 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021