Interview with Betty Colburn

Karen Musgrave (KM): This is Karen Musgrave and I'm conducting a Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview with Betty Colburn. Betty is in Portland, Oregon and I am in Naperville, Illinois so we are conducting this interview over the telephone. Today's date is January 26, 2009. It is now 5:08 in the evening. Betty, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to do this interview with me.

Betty Colburn (BC): I was delighted.

KM: Please tell me about your quilt "Obama Drafted for NBA."

BC: This quilt was made particularly for an exhibit ["President Obama: A Celebration in Art Quilts" from February 9 to March 5, 2009 in the main gallery (King Street Gallery) of the Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Arts Center, Silver Spring, Maryland.] that will be opening at Montgomery College in Washington, D.C. on February 9. It was made by a group of quilters who came together as a subgroup of the Quilt Art List and then formed their own Yahoo group. They sometimes refer to themselves as the Obama Mamas. It is people who were excited and delighted that Barack Obama was elected president. The group formed just after the election and we had, some people, had already made quilts, others were made for the occasion. Mine was made for the occasion. I began thinking about it when Sue Walen proposed the group. I had an interest in making an Obama quilt because I had made a George Bush quilt in February of '03, which is a bit of a different story and I may talk about that a bit later in the interview. I was ready to take that quilt off the wall at my house and was very open to replacing it with a quilt about the new president. My first thought about this quilt was that I wanted to portray the nature of the challenge that our new president was facing: these are very troubled times in terms of both at home and abroad, there are many, many problems to be dealt with at all levels of society from the individual up through the entire system and so I wanted to portray the fact that this new young president we have is facing a lot of different challenges. I already knew, through my husband, that he was a basketball player and I began thinking about how to incorporate that and it occurred to me that juggling basketballs might be a good analogy for the kinds of issues that our new president was facing. I was thinking, 'Okay, I want to do a particular kind of sort of whimsical kind of approach where it would portray the head and shoulders of our new president juggling basketballs and have the words of the title printed on the quilt itself.' I've done quilts like this before. For instance, when I broke my wrist ten years ago I did a quilt at the end of my physical therapy for my therapist called "A Hand for Lisa" It portrayed a hand holding a bunch of flowers in the center of the quilt. It was appliqud with a pieced background. I've made other quilts of that kind before. For the Obama quilt, I pieced a background of pale blue squares without a lot of contrast. The very center square was a photocopy of Barack Obama's head that I got from Wikipedia. They list on the site that this was a government photo that had no copyright on it so I felt free in using it in my art and so the center rectangle of the five block by five block grid in the background is his face. I then cut and fused, using Misty fuse, a suit coat and hands and the basketballs overhead. There are five basketballs and they don't represent any particular problems. People who saw me making the quilt would say, 'Are you going to label the basketballs with the problems?' I chose to leave that more ambiguous. The title soon came to me as "Obama Drafted For NBA" because I know that if he were not president one of the things President Obama most like to be is a basketball player and so I asked my husband, who is an avid street ball player, to help me find an acronym for NBA that means doing a lot of different things. Twenty-four hours later he said 'National Balancing Act' and that stuck. I put the words 'Obama Drafted for NBA' at the top of the quilt and at the bottom it says, 'National Balancing Act.' The border fabric is a piece of fabric that I've been sitting on a long time, the copyright on the selvage said 1993. It was 'See the USA in your Chevrolet' fabric so it has little caricatures of all the states and sometimes things that are important to them like on New York there is a Statue of Liberty and then there are some cars, kind of nineteen fifties style cars pictured around. I've been sitting on that piece of fabric for a long time, like a lot of quilters do, and when I went looking for a border and back for this quilt that fabric jumped out at me so it became the border. Now the techniques that were used included fused appliqu. The fused pieces were then satin stitched around the edge to hold them in place and I did that with all of the lettering too. The quilting on the background is meant to portray the parquet floor on the arena that the Boston Celtics play in, the Boston Garden. Let me think about what else I did with this piece. It's wall size. It is about 28 inches by 35 inches.

KM: Is that a typical size for you?

BC: That's a typical size. Well I do a lot of bed quilts. I haven't done a lot of quilts in the last five years. I've been doing clothing in the last five years but that is the size that historically I've done a lot of wall quilts either on commission or for myself or for family or friends. It's a nice size for a lot of people's walls and you can do a lot with it in a reasonable amount of time. I've made some larger quilts but when I want to submit things for competition I generally make them larger more like 60 inches by 80 inches but not really bed size but as show quilts and then those quilts once they come home from a show end up being stacked up on a bed so I've kind of gotten away from doing that kind of size in recent years.

KM: What are your plans for the quilt?

BC: For this one? [KM um-hum.] It is actually too big to hang in the spot that would replace the George Bush quilt. I have had a few people ask about buying it. I may sell it and make a slightly smaller one. My husband would really like to have this quilt and if he comes up with a spot where he wants to hang it I probably will keep it. I don't know. He is rather taken with it.

KM: Let's talk about your Bush quilt.

BC: My Bush quilt. In February of '03, I was living in Austin, Texas where I lived for thirty-five years or so. I was very unhappy about what was going on, very frightened about the build up to the war in Iraq. It seemed inappropriate to me. It seemed a distraction from the business that I thought needed to be done and so what I thought about then was that it was a no win game and the quilt itself is called "W's No Win Game." What it portrays is a tic-tac-toe game of the kind that is called the Cat's Game where almost all of the squares are filled. There is one square left to fill and whoever fills it nobody is going to win. It is like a hung game of tic-tac-toe and that is in the bottom two-thirds of the piece. The piece itself is shaped with a curve at the top as though it was a tombstone and it has a sign at the top that says "W's No Win Game" and then it has some commercial fabric appliqus. I did this one very quickly, within twenty-four hours, so it was just sort of off the top of my head. I went through my commercial fabrics that had figures on them, things leftover from making baby quilts, and cut out a car and some Monopoly fabric. The piece that says luxury tax and a cowboy boot and a Statue of Liberty and it has the cowboy boot kicking the head of the Statue of Liberty, has a gray cat which represents my cat at that time, which represents the Cat's Game. Some other things like that that are kind of scattered around on it that just portray that this is not where we need to be right now, lets get out of here. The back of it has a whimsical fabric that is a Day of the Dead fabric. It has a black background with white skeletons and the skeletons are all playing ball games using pumpkins as the balls so there is a tennis one and a baseball one and volleyall, they are all pumpkins that the skeletons are throwing around. At the bottom of the front of the quilt I put a dinosaur. IT is a bony dinosaurs not a caricature dinosaur, dinosaur bones and I appliqud one of those to the bottom with the idea that there was a connection to the issue of oil and the dinosaurs and the tar pits and it just sort of seemed appropriate to have a dinosaur on it. I posted that one to the QuiltArt online exhibition called "Quilts Not War" and it had hung in my house since that time so it came down during the time that I was making this new one.

KM: Have you made any other political quilts?

BC: Yes [laughs.] I have. One that comes to mind is when I first made the George Bush quilt I was working part time for a large nonprofit agency in a call center. I always had small quilts in my cube and everybody at that point had American flags and Support our Troops signs and that sort of thing. When I made the Bush quilt I hung it up at the office. Everybody had always been very positive about the quilts I brought in before that. This time, within twenty-four hours my supervisor told me that they had a new policy against political statements and I had to take it down. I was not real happy about that but I took it home. That night I stayed up all night and made another quilt that, to me, had the same message but it wasn't obvious to the casual observer. It was a Double Nine Patch in black and white and on it in red letters it says, 'Everything is Not Black and White in the World Today.' I left a lot of red threads hanging off of the letters, kind of like drippy blood stuff; I'm sure people who didn't ask me never knew what it meant. They let me keep that one up.

KM: Good for you.

BC: Yah, yah. Most of my quilts have a story. I'm a social worker by training. I worked in mental health for twenty years and so whenever I hear something or think about something it always sort of gets a story attached to it. When I was in Texas, I was doing quilts on commission, so I would always interview them about what they wanted from the quilt and what the recipients interests were, not just colors but motifs and stories and that sort of thing and I would try to incorporate that sort of thing in whatever I did, even baby quilts.

KM: Tell me some more about your interest in quiltmaking. When did you begin?

BC: I really started making quilts in 1993 after we moved into a new house. I wanted a new bedspread and I didn't see anything out there that really grabbed me and so I decided to make one. I hadn't had any training in quiltmaking. I had done one quilted object before, in 1980, while I was visiting my mother along with my then two year old son. My mother and my sister, who were 1970's quilters, had made quilted jackets with a flip and sew technique. My Mom asked, 'Do you want to make a jacket like this?' I said, 'Sure.' My mother babysat my son for three days while I made the jacket. That was really the only quilting I had done up until 1993. In '93, I decided to make a bedspread. After I finished the first one, I told my son, who was by that time fourteen, I would make him a quilt. He and I designed a quilt for him. He is a plain and simple kind of guy so I thought of Amish stars. He wanted baseball cards on it. He chose baseball cards that he owned or were pictured in a book that he had. I photocopied the cards and set them into the center of the stars on this Amish style quilt. That quilt is the only thing I ever hand quilted and it nearly killed me. It was very hard on my hands. I'm a machine quilter now. I probably made that quilt in 1994. In 1995, after I joined the Austin Area Quilt Guild at the urging of one of the employees of the local quilt store, I was excited that Harriett Hardgrave was coming to town to teach for the guild. On the day that Harriet was flying in, I got a call from somebody in the guild who said, 'Harriett Hardgrave, is coming in an hour and the person she was going to stay with is sick. Can you go out to the airport and pick her up and have her stay with you?' I said, [laughs.] 'Yes.' [laughs.] Harriett stayed with me for three or four days while she taught. I learned so much from her; it was like a whole paradigm shift in my life as a quilter. One of the things Harriet said when she saw that Amish style quilt, was you've got to double the amount of quilting you do on things [laughs.] so I actually did go back and put, not double the amount but significant amount of more hand quilting on that one and began in earnest trying to learn how to do an adequate job of machine quilting.

KM: What does your family think of your quilting?

BC: My husband is my best fan. He thinks it is wonderful. He falls in love with the quilts and sometimes when they go away I have to make another one for him, although we certainly have more than we could ever use here. My mother and sister quit quilting about the time I started and I think they are a little bit in awe of the fact that I've stayed with it and have chosen to enter competitions with them. My daughter-in-law would rather that I make clothes. She dragged me back into making clothes about five, six years ago when she became involved with the family. She asked me to teach her to sew and her interest was definitely in clothes so I got back into doing that. Right now I'm kind of sitting halfway in between and not sure which way I'm going. When we moved to Portland, three years ago, I opened a business of my own doing dressmaking and alterations and I'm finding that to be a lonely path. I belong to the Association of Sewing and Design Professionals. It's not exactly where my heart is and I feel myself sort of going back to quilts. I think I will always kind of live on both sides. I don't do home dcor, you know the pillow kind of stuff. [KM hums agreement.] It's just doesn't appeal to me. I don't like production sewing although one of the interesting things to me about quilts is that when I'm making blocks for a quilt, I can sort of get in a zone with the production and it is satisfying. But as far as making six bridesmaids dresses. [makes dissatisfying sound.] It doesn't do anything for me. I think I've decided at this point that I would rather do social work to make money and sew as an avocation. I'm just sort of right in the middle of that decision process. I have been thinking about it since some time in December, so it is not very old. I've tried to join guilds here. Well I joined one guild when I first got here and I never found a small group. I live in East Portland and there are only two or three members in East Portland. I use public transportation here so I really can't get to meetings on the West side of town efficiently. I'm not going to join a group that takes an hour and a half on the bus to get there and an hour and a half back. I joined another guild recently and I'm afraid I'm kind in the same position with them. I really liked their show when I went to it. It's a guild that limits membership to one hundred and fifty and I had to be on a wait list to get in but once I got in I found that the people are by in large on the other side of the river from me so I'm kind of giving them a chance to see if I can find a group that fits for me. In Austin, the guild was a really important thing for me. I like both the solitary and the social aspects of quilting. I like being a part of a small group but in general I like working alone. I guess a lot of quilters are like that.

KM: Tell me about competing, entering into quilt shows.

BC: When I was a kid I was in 4-H and I really enjoyed the competition. I did dress review and the cooking competitions. I hadn't done anything like that until I got into quilts. The first year I went to Houston for the big show was '96, it was like, 'Wow!' I had no idea that this little hobby I've gotten involved in is such a big thing and I was just really excited by it. I decided to try to submit things for juried shows. I always entered the local shows in Austin and got, I enjoy getting feedback from judges. I particularly like it if they give you real feedback about what they liked and didn't like an what can be improved. That is one of the things I like about small groups too. It is hard to find a small group where you can do real critique where nobody gets offended and people say what they think but aren't unkind about it. It is all in the spirit of learning. I guess it is about learning and I like seeing my stuff hanging with other neat stuff. It's sort of a thrill and one other thing, if I have a piece in a show I will go hang out near my piece but with my nametag covered so people don't immediately know who I am, and just listen to what people have to say and get involved in conversations. Sometimes I tell them who I am and sometimes I don't. It is another way of getting feedback about what I'm doing.

KM: Did you ever hear anything really interesting?

BC: Let me think about that. It is interesting to me that some people are open to a lot of things and other people have preconceptions that keep them focused on only a certain area--some of the art quilters won't take a look at a traditional quilt and some of the traditional quilters don't think it is a quilt unless it's got blocks and is done in a certain way. Some people are into only hand quilting, although I think there are fewer and fewer of them. I like it when people respond to the basic design and the colors and are curious for new things and get excited about whatever they see.

KM: Whose works are you drawn to and why?

BC: Whose work? Okay, well a lot of different people, lots and lots of different people. Some of my favorite stuff right now is by my friend, Kathy York, in Austin. She does real, real neat whimsical stuff and she just keeps stretching herself. She had a piece accepted for Quilt National this year. I saw it when I was in Austin at Christmas and it just blew me away. It's extremely 3-D. I mean to me it takes a leap, an innovative leap that I haven't seen before. Basically she made all of these soft sculptures and appliqud them onto a background and managed to quilt the thing and it is amazing. Her use of colors, she works with bright colors. I like most people who work with bright colors. I like Laura Wasilowski, Robbie oh--

KM: Eklow, Eklow.

BC: Robbie Eklow. Yes, I love her stuff. Then again Kathleen McCrady in Austin does beautiful stuff and I'm so glad she is doing shows again. For years and years she would not compete in the local show in Austin. She would occasionally put things in for display only. I'm so glad she is back and putting it out there for competition because she does such neat stuff. Other inspirations, well in terms of learning when I was in Texas, I went to Houston International Quilt Festival every year for a full week so the classes were wonderful. I have gotten to the point where I don't want to bother with a half day class and a one day class is maybe, okay. I haven't been to many classes in a while because I can't afford to go to places that have two and three day classes. I miss that. Somebody else whose work I really like is Gwen Marsten. I had some of her books early on and was privileged to be in a class with her at the Empty Spools program at Asilomar, in 2000. I was already doing some informal, free piecing at that point. She really inspires me.

KM: What advice would you offer someone starting out?

BC: Practice, practice, practice. Don't be too self-critical. Keep doing what you like and keep learning. Take classes. Experiment. Get involved with a small group. That's really been a good thing for me and I really hope I find one again.

KM: I hope you do too.

BC: Let me think about that. I could talk about my own favorite piece. It was for a challenge. I do my best work if I have a frame work, a challenge or a goal of some sort. This one was for an Austin guild challenge called "Once in the Blue Moon." My piece is "More than a Blue Moon." It is a variation of the Moon over Mountain block. It is a four block piece. It is probably 30 inches by 30 inches. It was made from fabrics I had been sitting on for years. Of the four moons one of them is basically blue and one of them is basically red and the other is sort of an aqua green and the other one is yellow so it is like primary colors and there is a lot of transparency in it. The pieces of the mountain and moon have been broken up into several pieces. You can see through the moon in places into the sky. I had the idea for it but it was kind of a busy time. It was 2001. I was signed up to go to the quilt restoration workshop in Omaha, Nebraska because I had an idea that I might want to do quilt restoration. I keep looking for where I belong. I'm sort of a jack of all trades master of none sort of person. Once I get proficient at something, I'm ready to learn something new. I was at my small group on the Wednesday night before I was supposed to go to the workshop and the deadline for the challenge was the next week. I was telling people, 'I've got this neat idea for the challenge but I don't have time to do it.' They said, 'Betty, you do it. You just go home and do it.' So I went home that night and in an hour and a half I had laid out the pieces. Pulled the fabrics, laid them out, cut--I think I may have already made templates for the pieces and cut them out. It occurred to me that I could hand piece this one so I took it with me and hand pieced it while I was at the workshop. And came back and it needed a border so I got some quilter's lame in a color that sets it off and it was done in time for the challenge. It won the challenge and has also traveled in the In the American Tradition exhibit. It is my very favorite because it's got such good transparency. I really would like to do more stuff like that: block based with interesting color effects. Kind of like what Joan Wolfram does.

KM: What do you think is the biggest challenge confronting quiltmakers today?

BC: Wow the bar has been set so high at this point. Every year it seems like there are people doing new wonderful amazing things. I personally feel like I'm always a little behind the curve in terms of new and innovative. The biggest challenge, it certainly is not materials. We are definitely in the golden age of supplies. I don't know what would be. So many barriers have been broken; the acceptance of machine quilting, including the rise of the longarm. The biggest challenge maybe personal time to do the work; everybody's life is so complex at this point. I would have to say that is a challenge for me to stay focused and organized enough to do the work that I want to do.

KM: Describe your studio.

BC: Oh my studio, okay, it is in the basement. Our house is 1500 square feet, half of it ground floor and half of it basement so the room is I believe its 9 feet wide by 14 feet long. I'm trying to do both clothing and quilts in it so I've got a lot of stuff in there. I have one sewing machine set up. I have one other sewing machine. I'm not a sewing machine collector but I have one other sewing machine that I take to classes and when I go away from home to sew with me because my Bernina 1230 doesn't like to travel. When I take it away from home it always misbehaves and then when I bring it back home it is fine again. I have a serger and a blind hemmer. The machines are laid out along the long wall. I keep my quilt fabric in wire grid drawer shelving and it's all filed by color, folded in 6 by 6 inch bundles. It stands on end so I can pull it out and see all of each color, pull it out what I want, cut it and put it back easily. I used to make horrible messes. I would have everything--I would have this huge pile of fabric that I cut pieces out of and it was just too much trouble to have to put it all back at once so I try to put it back as I go. I have a small design wall, it's 4 feet wide so I can't lay out a huge quilt on it but it's enough. The rest of the room is mostly storage. I walk down the hall to iron which actually is better for my body I think. I can't see having the iron where you just turn around and iron while still seated, that would be too sedentary for me. My studio is not terribly well organized but I can usually put my hands on what I need pretty quickly.

KM: Do you ork on one thing at a time or do you complete things and then go to the next one?

BC: That is an interesting evolution. When I did only clothes I never had more than one thing going at a time. Cut it out, finish it, it's done. With quilts, I find it necessary to let things sort of percolate and I do have a box of unfinished projects that are either waiting for inspiration or time. I'm just not sure where I'm going with them so they go away for a while and they come out after a while and I look at them again. Hopefully I will come out even at the end of my life and not leave a bunch of unfinished projects. I have a lot of things lined up to do that have never been cut: assemblages of fabrics and ideas that are projects in the waiting. I can think of many, many more things that I want to do then I have time to do. Sometimes those things later on don't seem like such a good idea and I will put the fabric back where it belongs and sometimes I will leave it together for long periods of times and sometimes the projects actually happen. The funny thing is my favorite quilts are all pieces that I think of and then make immediately.

KM: How do you want to be remembered?

BC: As a good friend and I like it when people think I'm creative. Probably kind, thoughtful and creative if I had to write something on a tombstone.

KM: What do you think makes a great quilt?

BC: The first thing is design and the second is color. Good workmanship needs to be in there too, it, I find things that are very sloppily done somewhat irritating. I'm okay with raw edges though. The seamstress people I know don't like the current raw edge clothing and I really kind of like that. I think it is just a different thing. Well executed, whatever it's intended to be it needs to be well executed. I don't like things that are going to fall apart. Design first. It has to be interesting, pleasing to the eye. Balance yet not boring.

KM: Why would you say quilting is important to you?

BC: I guess it is my creative outlet and it's also, it is something that I do when I'm troubled. In the year 2000, 2001, the Texas economy was hit hard by the dot.com crash and the business that my husband and I had was heavily dependent on the people who lost their jobs in the dot.com crash. We were really struggling and I was afraid our business would fail. I keep scrapes, strips, cut off pieces, triangles, whatever. In the evenings I started just sewing pieces of fabric together, making sort of manufactured fabric. Once I got a piece to something that I could cut into, a 6 inch by 6 inch square I would put it aside. I just kept doing that and made a bed quilt out of it. It's really chaotic except it is tied together with the stashing. I was in the mood right then to use the yellow color called cheddar, so I put cheddar posts between the strips of burgundy sashing. It forms a lattice work over all of the chaos. This project really sort of held me together during a difficult time. If I'm worried about something, I go to my studio and just start playing with fabric. Sometimes it turns into something neat and sometimes it doesn't and that is okay.

KM: We've been talking almost forty-five minutes now. Is there anything that you would like to share that we haven't touched upon before we close?

BC: I've talked about a lot of different things.

KM: You did a good job.

BC: You know sewing is very important to me. Touching the fabric is important and the meaning that I get from what I make with fabric is probably the core of what I do, While I like to compete essentially, it's my own thing. I mean I went a few years without making anything that I felt like I would submit anywhere. It seems like it's a balance of both inside and outside: inside myself and outside myself. Just like the solitary versus the social.

KM: Thank you so much. This was a great way to conclude. We are going to end our interview at 5:53.