Interview with Sheila Kramer

Karen Musgrave (KM): This is Karen Musgrave and I'm conducting a Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview with Sheila Kramer. Sheila is in Rockville, Maryland and I'm in Naperville, Illinois so we are conducting this interview over the telephone. Today's date is January 29, 2009. It is now 1:32 in the afternoon. Sheila thank you so much for taking time out of your day to talk to me.

Sheila Kramer (SK): It is a pleasure. Thank you.

KM: You are more than welcome. Please tell me about your quilt "44 - A Happy Number."

SK: Sometime after the election, Sue Walen, who is a member of our quilt guild, made an announcement or sent an email. I don't remember which. That she was trying to put together a show of Obama quilts ["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.] celebrating the election. I was inspired! I love challenges; I love to enter contests with quilts. I've only been quilting for five years and one of the things that I like about quilting is entering my quilts in contests and shows. When she made this announcement, I started thinking about it because I hadn't been as excited about a presidential election since [John F.] Kennedy was in the White House. My maiden name is O'Reilly. [laughs.] We're Irish and in our family when the Kennedys were in office, it was a like a member of our family was in the White House. My mother took my sister and me, when my sister was still in grammar school and I was a freshman in high school, on our first plane ride to come down to Washington [D.C.] in 1960 so we could be in the same town and walk around and visit the White House while the Kennedys were in it. It was a big deal and we were very excited and, of course, heartbroken when Kennedy was assassinated. I never had that feeling of excitement about a new president since that time. Now I have grandchildren and I wanted them to know how happy and excited we all felt in our family that President Obama had been elected. With that in mind, [laughs.] we brought our grandchildren down here from New Jersey and took them down to the Mall one very cold November Sunday and just walked around and took a lot of pictures. We took pictures of them [Jimmy, 7 and Bridget, 5.] standing in front of the White House. [We explained to them about the president and his family, including Sasha and Malia, who would be living there.] We explained that President Obama was the first African-American president and how wonderful this was and what an advance for our country. While we were there we took, as I said, a lot of pictures. We parked right by the Washington Monument and it was a very windy day and the flags were flying and flapping and they just looked so beautiful that I took a lot of pictures of flying flags. We came home and I was still looking for ideas about how to put into a quilt- in some visual way of expressing- how happy [laughs.] I felt about the results of this election and how I could convey that to my grandchildren. I was tooling around on the Internet and came across some interesting facts about the number forty-four. I found out that the number forty-four in mathematics is considered to be, in addition to other things- a tribonacci number, and different other kind of numbers- a "happy" number because if you add the sum of its digits in a certain way it always ends up as being one. That is just the name that they give it in mathematics- a happy number. There were other things that I found out about the number forty-four like that it was the number of Hank Aaron and Reggie Jackson. It was considered to be a "hitter's number." There is a slang dictionary that calls forty-four the location of supreme coolness. There is a dual star system that is called Andromeda 44. So there were a lot of different things and I thought, 'a happy number.' It just really struck me because that is the way I was feeling. I looked through the pictures that we had taken of the flags flying at the Washington Monument and I thought I would somehow superimpose on a picture of the flag the facts that I had found about the number forty-four and that is how I got the idea for the quilt.

KM: How did you put it together? What were the techniques that you used?

SK: I wanted it to be artistic. I didn't want it to look like a traditional quilt because I wanted to finish it in a decent amount of time for one thing, but I wanted to try some new things to be a little experimental with it since it was going to be in an art quilt show. I had been thinking about trying to do something with painting on fabric so I had a piece of muslin and I found fabric paint and diluted it and I did a watercolor type sketch of a flag flying in the background. Then I thought long and hard and tried a lot of different ways to put the lettering on it. I was going to stitch it. I tried that and I wasn't happy with that. I was going to make a transfer and iron it on but finally I decided I liked the way the flag looked kind of homemade. You knew that somebody's hand had actually painted it and I liked that feeling that a person actually put their hand on this material and worked with it so I decided on stamping. It was an interesting process. My husband was very helpful. We tried it out beforehand on paper to make sure we could get the lines to match up reasonably and that it would be centered on the quilt. He helped me a lot with the centering and measuring and that kind of thing. We took a couple of hours going very slowly. He would hand me the little stamp and I would stamp and then hand it back to him and he would have the next letter ready for me to go and he kept track of the words as the text was stamped out so that I didn't mess up or spell something wrong or whatever. When we got it done it looked pretty good [laughs.] and it was right in the middle where we wanted it to be. Then I found some ribbon that had stars on it because I felt like it needed something along the edge of the text. I laid the whole thing down on a piece of black felt and a layer of batting and then I just quilted it, not extensively, just along the stars and stripes of the flag. I found some eyelash yarn in red, white, and blue and some pretty red, silver, and blue star beads and put those on and I thought it looked kind of like fireworks around the border of the quilt.

KM: What are your plans for this quilt when it comes back?

SK: Oh that is an interesting question. I'll hang it in my house somewhere. We have a house in New Jersey where our grandchildren visit a lot so I think I will put it up there where they can see it. They are seven and five, so they are both at the early reading stage and they love to read words and that is almost their favorite thing now. It will be there and they will see it all the time and remember it, I hope. [laughs.]

KM: What is the text that is on there?

SK: Let me read it to you. It says, '44 - A Happy Number. In mathematics, forty-four is a natural number, a tribonacci number, an octahedral number and a happy number. A happy number occurs when the repeated sum of the squares of its digits ultimately equals one. If a number is happy, then all the members of its sequence are happy. In science, forty-four is the atomic number of ruthenium. In astronomy, object forty-four is a double star in the constellation of Andromeda. In sports, forty-four is the retired number of the former baseball players Hank Aaron and Reggie Jackson. The number is considered to be a hitter's number. In urban slang, forty-four is the location of supreme coolness. In history, forty-four is the number of the forty-fourth President of the United States, Barack Obama.'

KM: Very nice. Is this quilt typical?

SK: For me?

KM: Yes.

SK: I don't think I have a typical. As I said, I'm a relatively new quilter and I like to try new things all the time so I'm constantly experimenting and I guess [laughs.] it's typical in that it isn't. I have never done a quilt like this and I probably never [laughs.] will again. It's different from all my other quilts and all my other quilts are different from each other I think. I have a few categories. Like I do some collaging of faces and animals and I have a few quilts that are like that and then of course I have a lot of bed quilts that are pieced but for shows and for any kind of challenge that I am trying to enter I try to do different techniques and I'm always experimenting.

KM: Tell me about your interest in quiltmaking.

SK: I was never [laughs.] interested in quiltmaking. I had a sewing machine that was kind of there for years for doing curtains or sewing hems and every time I tried to use it I swore at it because I never seemed to be able to get the thing to work. I did some crocheting when my children were little and I did some crafty things with ribbons over the years but quiltmaking just never came into my sphere of knowledge at all until my second grandchild was born. I was staying at their house up in New Jersey and taking care of the little guy while his mom and dad took care of the baby. I would get up with him every morning and fix his breakfast. They had this very complicated cable system that involved two boxes and three clickers and I could never figure out how to change the [TV.] channel in the morning [laughs.] So every morning that I got up with him for two weeks it was "Simply Quilts" that was on and I watched "Simply Quilts" for two weeks in a row. I must have hit the best two weeks of "Simply Quilts" that had ever been on. There were famous quilters, Jinny Beyer and Paula Nadelstern, and all these wonderful art quilters that I saw during this course of this two weeks and I couldn't believe it. Jinny Beyer, who made these beautiful quilts, said she did everything by hand. She cut with scissors and she sewed by hand and I thought, 'Well, I could do that!' [laughs.] 'I could use a needle and thread.' I was incredibly intimidated by the rotary cutters and all this strip piecing and measuring everything. I just thought it looked so difficult to do but after I saw her I thought if she can make these fabulous quilts I could certainly try something. At that time, having just started to be a grandma, the legacy factor kind of hit me and I thought, 'I could make quilts for my grandchildren and they would remember me.' [laughs.] So the two things kind of combined and I fortunately live a mile from a wonderful quilt store [Capitol Quilts.] so two months later took my first class, which was a hand-piecing class. I found out that this quilt shop offered a year-long course called "The Complete Course" that went through quilting from soup to nuts. That is kind of my way of doing things. If I'm interested in doing something, I really want to know how to do it and get all the facts. That was just for me. I took that year-long course and felt like I could really dive into quilting after that.

KM: Tell me about some of your favorite challenges and contests that you have been in.

SK: The first one that I ever entered it was when I started to go to a quilt group at a local fabric store here in Rockville. Once a month they would meet and it was mostly sort of a sales session to show you what the latest fabrics were and then at the end there was a show and tell. It was a way to meet different quilters and they would give you a 20% discount card at the end and you could go shopping for fabric. They were going to have a contest; "The Embellished Landscape" was the name of it. I kind of thought about it but I wasn't really serious about it but about a week before it was due I sort of started to feel guilty that I hadn't even thought about putting something in. So I went through my stash one Friday night and started pulling fabrics out. I found this polar bear fabric and this cute little winter scene and there was a technique that I had seen on "Simply Quilts" that I wanted to try where it was just all raw edge and free form and you didn't have to do any piecing and make sure that your inch seam allowance was actually a inch. It seemed like a fun thing to try and do so I set about to do it. I finished it in about three days and it was a scene of polar bears standing around the frozen lake with little houses in the distance and I threw in a choo-choo train because I had a blue train in my fabric stash. It reminded me of an old fairy tale that my mother used to read to us about 'east of the sun and west of the moon.' The girl goes searching [for something] and there is a polar bear in it and I thought that it was cute and that it would interest my grandchildren [laughs.] It was fun to do and it won second place so that set me off. Then I was very excited to enter things into contests and I started to enter shows. I always have something that I'm doing to enter in a show. It just keeps the interest level up for me.

KM: I don't remember in my lifetime a president inspiring so much art. Why do you think Barack Obama has inspired people to make quilts and Sue [Walen.] to do the exhibition?

SK: I think it's a reset. Its something that we never thought we would see in our lifetime that an African-American would become president. I also think that at this time, after the last eight years and two wars, all the negativity and partisanship that you heard coming out of Washington that he is just a breath of fresh air. He is young. He speaks with clarity. I don't know how to say the word, he doesn't obfuscate. He doesn't make things complicated. He speaks simply so you can understand him. He makes common sense. He is not an ideologue. I think we're so tired of that old way that I think it is just inspiring to people. I think he inspires people to take responsibility and I think people are hungering for that. I think after 9/11 people were hungering for that. After Katrina, people were hungering for that, to find ways to make a difference. I think that is how he inspires people. I think that quilters [laughs.] are always looking for inspiration so I think that is what inspired Sue and I think that has inspired all of us to take part in it.

KM: How many hours a week do you quilt?

SK: That is hard to say. I tried keeping track. I'm kind of one of those people that likes to keep track of things but I don't keep track of my quilting because I do it whenever I can. I would say some days I spend from 7:00 in the morning until 11:00 at night doing different [quilty.] things. I live in a house that we bought before I was a quilter [laughs.] so we have had to make a lot of accommodations for my quilting. We live in a town house and so I kind of have stuff in every room and I do a lot of moving around. I cut downstairs in the kitchen and I sew in the guest room if I'm quilting but I piece in the master bedroom where the smaller sewing machine is. I'm all over the house. I tend to do something, stir the soup and then walk over and do something related to quilting. I do it as much as I possibly can.

KM: You mentioned belonging to a guild.

SK: Right.

KM: Do you belong to any others?

SK: I do. I belong to three although I'm going to drop one because I feel guilty because I never go to the meetings [laughs.] or help out. I just like to belong because they have a great quilt show and I like to put my quilts into that one. The other two I actually go to the meetings and for one I'm an officer this year and I will be again next year. Primarily, I like the educational aspects, the wonderful speakers. We are very lucky here to be able to get nationally known speakers because the guilds I belong to are very successful in terms of their shows so they have money in their treasuries to bring in wonderful speakers. So you just learn tons and tons of things. Plus, the members are so talented and are so open about sharing information, especially with new quilters, that it is really inspiring and it is a wonderful community. We are lucky to have it here.

KM: Tell me about the office you hold.

SK: I'm secretary for the quilt guild. I do the minutes of the meetings and I attend board meetings and we decide on things like whether or not to have a quilt show, planning the raffle quilt for the next period of time, finding somebody to deign it and people to work on it and things like that. Then there is the charity quilting. Both guilds that I'm active in have a big component of making quilts for charities and donating funds to charities. It is a way to kind of give back. I just think quilters are people who care about other people and so there is a lot of that to it [belonging to a guild.].

KM: What does your family think of your quiltmaking?

SK: [laughs.] They think I'm obsessed [laughs.] and they are right. [laughs.] I started out as a nurse. I worked in newborn ICU [intensive care unit.] and was head nurse of a newborn ICU for a long time. I went back to school after my kids--one went to high school and one went to college--and got a Master's degree in Special Ed [education.] I worked with infants from birth to three in early intervention as a service coordinator and an infant educator for a long time. That was my career and I had always kind of done crafts on the side but then eight years ago, when we moved down here outside of Washington [D.C.], I stopped working. My mother was ill and my daughter was pregnant and we had a lot of family issues and I just stayed home. I intended to go back to work but somewhere along the line I found quilting and so I started quilting. My family is wonderfully supportive. Of course, they get a lot of benefits out of it because they each have wonderful quilts now. [laughs.] Well, they call them wonderful. [laughs.] They like the fact that I enter things in shows and my husband is very competitive for me and he encourages me. I had a quilt, "Canine-American's Unite," that won 'The Best Pictorial Quilt" in New Jersey in 2007 at a Mancuso Show and that quilt was accepted into Paducah, Kentucky at the American Quilter's Society show. So we took a road trip [laughs.] to Paducah, Kentucky. So that is a supportive husband [laughs.] let me tell you. That was really fun. My daughter requests quilts for special areas of her house to go with her decorating and my grandchildren have so many quilts that they will never be able to be covered by all of them and they love it. Actually, I have my grandchildren making quilts in various ways. The first thing that we did together was with scraps. They were down here for a week, they had a school vacation and my daughter was working so we brought them down here to our house [in Maryland.]. It was a rainy Sunday and I had had them for four days already and I was running out of things to do with them so I just pulled out this big box of scraps and gave them each a little design wall made out of a piece of canvas with felt over it and I said 'make a quilt, just pick out the scraps and we will sew them.' They were maybe three and five at that time. They picked out the little scraps that they liked and I straightened up the edges and sewed them together. Jimmy [grandson.] picked out all different animals and he called it "The Animal Quilt." Bridget [granddaughter.] picked out things like birthday cakes and pandas and little things like that but she also found this kind of rainy fabric and she put it on top of the birthday cake and called the quilt "The Cake in the Rain." [laughs.]

KM: How cute. [laughs.]

SK: Their first quilts are just adorable. [laughs.] They were very proud of those and since then I made one with Jimmy where he drew (he was going through a phase where he was drawing a lot of really wonderful animal pictures) onto Printed Treasures, a type of fabric that you can either run through the printer or just draw on with a fabric pen. So he made these fabulous animals and he called that one "The Home-Made Animal Quilt," he said, "Because the animals are all home-made." Bridget is in the process of doing some drawings for me now so she can have a similar kind of quilt on Printed Treasurers. That's really fun for me to work with them and to take them to quilt shows. The other thing that I did is that I put them into quilts. I made a quilt of a photograph that I had taken of them and the dog, Guinness, looking out the window. At that time they were really into Beatrice Potter stories and they loved the story about the little squirrel, Nutkin, because he was impertinent. In New Jersey we have a house that backs up onto a little pond and I always told them that, when Nutkin is on his little raft going out to the island, that that is out in the middle of our pond. I used to show them where all the little animals from the stories lived in the woods behind our house and they really [laughs.] believed. They were at that stage in their development where they really believed that these little animals really lived out there in the back of the house. There was this picture of them standing in a row, Bridget, Jimmy and the dog, looking out the window. So I did a quilt of that I called "Window Watchers" and they loved that quilt. In the background, I found this Beatrice Potter fabric that had pictures of squirrel, Nutkin, Old Mr. Owl and the other little characters. So I imaged they were looking out behind our house to see all their little friends. Of course they weren't, they were really looking at tractors that were putting in the sod. I made it without a border but I didn't like it. So I framed it by adding a border of dark ivy that I kind of let creep into the sides of the quilt because I wanted it to express the fact that they were at a stage in their development where they had this magical thinking that anything could happen. It was so precious and so short-lived because they grew out of that stage [laughs.] very, very quickly but to me I love that quilt because it is a picture of them at that wonderful time in their development.

KM: Whose works are you drawn to and why?

SK: Of quilters? [KM hums.] I love Paula Nadelstern. I think she is amazing. She is a New Yorker. She grew up maybe five miles from where I grew up in New York. She does these very complicated kaleidoscope quilts and they are beautiful and jewel-like and very difficult to do They involve very precise piecing and I feel like--I have taken a couple of classes from her. If I could ever make quilts like that I would be over the moon. She is inspiring, I love her colors, the way she puts colors together and just the fact that her quilts are so complicated. I like Jinny Beyer's quilts because she uses very wonderful fabrics. She uses mostly her own fabrics and she has an incredible sense of color and that kind of thing. There are people in my guild that I admire and I'm drawing a blank [laughs.] on quilters.

KM: Who in your guild do you admire and why?

SK: Sue Walen, I think she is a true artist and Florence Flam is another wonderful artist in our guild. Ann Datko is an another artist and it is just very inspiring to see their work and just be able to sit there month after month. Lois Smith is a nationally known teacher who also belongs to our guild. They just, do interesting, modern things. They try new things; they are technically very good which I still have problems with since I've only been quilting for five years. I feel like one of my areas of difficulty is the technical, working with the sewing machines and things. The other thing that I just started doing is I'm taking a class from Mimi Dietrich. She is one of the people along with Elly Sienkiewicz who are involved with the whole Baltimore Album revival up in the area around Baltimore. I thought, since I live in this area and it is such a wonderful opportunity, I should try and take a class. It is one of those year-long classes. We meet monthly and at the end hopefully I will come out with enough blocks to make a Baltimore Album quilt. I like doing the handwork. I like the history of quilting and finding out about the old quilts. It is a different community of women; it's more of the traditional and the old quilts and the history. I feel that the guild is more art quilts and that is what I'm looking for out of that. I think I'm really lucky to live near Washington [D.C.] Here the DAR [Daughters of the American Revolution museum.] has [old.] quilts and I try to go to as many quilt shows as I can get to and just see what's out there and what is new and what is interesting.

KM: What are your favorite techniques and materials?

SK: I love Oriental fabrics. I did a quilt recently that was called "The First Five Years" because I had so many scraps of Oriental fabrics. It is all Oriental fabric scraps from the five years of my quilting. I'm not really into color and contrast. I like things that are more monochromatic and subtle, but I like funny things in quilts too. I made a quilt called "Canine-Americans Unite" with a big picture of my dog on it and all these little dogs in the background holding up signs that say 'Guinness for President.' (Guinness is the dog's name.) and 'impeach the dog catcher' and 'repeal pooper scooper laws' and things like that. I was listening to CNN one day and they said that somebody from one of the animal rights organizations thought that we should change the name from "dogs" to "Canine-Americans." You would have to meet Guinness. Guinness thinks a lot of himself already. If he ever heard that he was a Canine-American he would run for president [laughs.] So I made a quilt of this dog running for president and I thought it was so funny that I couldn't express it any other way except by making a quilt and that's what I love about quilting. In a lot of the quilts that I make for shows and things I try to put in [laughs.] something humorous or an idea or I'm trying to say something that is more than "you need to sleep under this thing." That is what I like about quilting- that the quilts we can make today can express ideas. Like the Obama quilts, that they can celebrate a happy occasion.

KM: Do you think you will make anymore Obama quilts?

SK: I wouldn't say no but I don't feel right now driven to do anything like another political quilt or something like that. Maybe when I see the show and see what other people have done I might be inspired to try something else. I might do something with the grandchildren about it, if they came down and we went to the White House or something or if they were interested in doing something about it. I could see myself doing that.

KM: What advice would you offer someone starting out?

SK: I'm the kind of person that I would go sixty different ways to find information. I think a person starting out should join a guild, should find a good quilt shop and take classes. Should get a couple of really good magazines like Quilter's Newsletter and join the American Quilter's Society [Paducah, Kentucky.] and get their magazine that comes out every month or every other month and just kind of immerse yourself. Try different techniques and come up with the thing that you like to do, find the thing that interests you or realize that you are always looking for something different [laughs.] like me where you can try stuff all the time and never be bored.

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

SK: I think one issue is that most of the quilters are getting older [laughs.]. I think the guilds and the quilting establishment need to start reaching out to younger people. I don't know why it is that it appeals to people that are over fifty. I think the average age of quilters is something like fifty-eight to sixty or something like that now. I think it would be wonderful if more people, younger women would realize the diversity of opportunity in quilting and how many different things they can do. It can be art. It can be something that decorates your home. It can be something that you sleep under. It's a way of self-expression. It is a way to fill your time. It is a wonderful way to go shopping [laughs.] to look for fabric. There is so much to it.

KM: Is your guild doing anything to reach out to younger people?

SK: No we haven't really. Actually I just thought about this recently and have been thinking about it because I read an editorial about it in one of the quilt magazines, but I will bring it up at a meeting because I think reaching out to other people is one of the things that is a really good goal for quilt guilds.

KM: Do you have any ideas on how to reach out to younger people?

SK: I think by having wonderful shows is one thing. In both of my guilds, I was involved in their shows this year. We did them at different venues than we usually do and they seemed to get more people that were not quilters, not members of other guilds, more people that just happened upon the show just because one was at a university and one was at a parish hall down in the District of Columbia. One woman walked into one of the shows and said, 'Oh this is art' [laughs.] and it was like not her expectation of what a quilt show would be. I think if we expose more of the general population to quilting and I think, as the art quilt movement becomes more accepted that younger people will get involved. I also think that it is a good thing to start people off on smaller projects and give them the opportunity for classes that are little projects rather than a whole big quilt. Some younger people like my daughter who is so busy with her job and her kids and her husband and her house and her dog and her chickens that the thought of making a quilt, I think, is overwhelming to her. She knits and I think eventually she will probably try to quilt something but I think the thought of making a quilt now is too much. I think a smaller kind of project, offering that to people would be a way to get younger people involved.

KM: We are almost at the end of our time. Is there anything that you would like to share that we haven't touched upon before we conclude?

SK: No, just quilting has brought incredible joy to my life and I hope that people who see my quilts and the quilts of other members of our guild or groups in shows will feel the same way. I hope they will feel that it is a way to tell a story. Somebody recently asked me to give a talk with five other quilters called "Every Quilt Tells A Story" and I truly believe that. I think that it is a way for women (and men) to express themselves. I think a lot of men are interested in quilting now. I think it's a wonderful craft, hobby, life work. [laughs.] I'm thrilled that I found it.

KM: I want to thank you for taking time out of your day today.

SK: Thank you, it was really interesting. [laughs.]

KM: That is good. We are going to conclude our interview at 2:15.