Interview with Phyllis Benedict

Karen Musgrave (KM): This is Karen Musgrave and I'm conducting a Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview with Phyllis Benedict. Phyllis is in Paola, Kansas and I'm in Naperville, Illinois, so we are conducting this interview over the telephone. Today's date is August 3, 2009 and it is now 1:05 in the afternoon. We are doing this through the American Heritage Committee for the Kansas State Society Daughters of the American Revolution. Phyllis, I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to do this interview with me. Please tell me about your quilt "Celtic Appliqu."

PB: I started the quilt in 1997. I took a class on Celtic appliqu because that was something I had never done before and was just interested in the whole style and the design. Besides that, the Celtic clan started the design work in the 1700's and it was primarily in Ireland and Scotland and since I have Scotch/Irish heritage then to me it just seems like a real good way to click with my own ancestry and bring some of that into my own life and into that of my family. The Celtic quilt starts with a blank background fabric and then you trace on the appliqu design. You take black bias tape and follow the lines. Celtic knots are like an unending cording of twisted and intertwining lines so that you can take one big long piece of bias tape and twist it all around to make all of these intricate designs and then you have to appliqu it down. It is called a blind hem stitch and you go all the way around both sides of the bias.

KM: Do you do that by hand?

PB: Yes, you do that by hand. Some people now have a special attachment on the machine that you can do it with, but I just always thought that the hand appliqu was so much prettier and I like the end results better. It took about ten hours for each of the 12 blocks to do all that, the appliqu and then I put the blocks together with the sashing and the corner stones and then put borders around it. Then it took about 750 hours of hand quilting to quilt all the, because you had to quilt around all the knot design on both sides to make that stand out and then I did a cross hatching on the background of the block and then for the sashing and corner stones I hand quilted Celtic design so it took a long time to do all that.

KM: You kept track of your hours?

PB: Yes. I figured that is how long, because I would work on it for three or four hours every week and figured out how many weeks it took me to do it.

KM: How did you decide on the color?

PB: I don't know, the yellow fabric has a real tiny black print and I thought that would show up really well with the black bias and then there was a little bit of where the knots would overlap you have just a little bit of spacing so I put some green in there and then I used the green as the border and another black border around that.

KM: Did you also create your own bias tape?

PB: No I didn't. Actually at that time, they had just come out with some new bias that you could buy and it was on a roll and it had adhesive so you could just lay it down and iron it on and it would stay until sewn. Before the only way to do the black bias would be to take it and pin it down and you would have to pin it like every half inch or even closer if you were doing the curves and stuff. This new bias with the adhesive on the back was really it made it so much easier to lay it out. Then you iron it down and then as you are hand quilting it if something came loose you could always just take your iron and tack it back down again and it would stay until you stitch it down. It was truly helpful to hold it in place. I think that is about it.

KM: Tell me why did you choose this quilt for the interview?

PB: Actually I belong to Three Trails West Kansas DAR and they were having a [quilt.] contest on American Heritage in the Fiber Arts Division, So our regent had seen my quilts and she suggested that I enter the contest. I didn't know for sure which one to choose, but then they said that one of their requirements for the contest was that it had to have been completely made by the DAR member and it had to have something to do with American Heritage. I thought with my Scotch/Irish ancestry that this would be the perfect quilt for the selection, and as it turned out, it was a really good choice because it took first in State, first in Division, and then actually tied for first at National and it was on display at Washington, D.C. for the Continental Congress in 2009. I was really thrilled about that.

KM: Were you there at the Continental Congress?

PB: No, I wasn't able to be there. Some friends of mine were there and took pictures, so I have a picture of it displayed and it was really nice.

KM: What are your plans for this quilt?

PB: Actually I don't know. I like to display my quilts. I have this quilt rack on the wall and I change them out through the different seasons, but then eventually I plan on passing them down to my children.

KM: Tell me about your interest in quiltmaking.

PB: My grandmother and my aunt were both very avid quilters and I always enjoyed working with them when I was small, but I actually made my first quilt when I was in high school. It was just a real simple design. Then after my grandmother passed away I inherited a lot of her blocks that she had that were samples of blocks that she had made and there were also some blocks that were her mother's that were made out of the 1890's fabric. "Mourning Cloth," they called it. I joined the quilt guild here in Paola, the Miami County Quilt Guild, in order to learn how to put all these blocks together into one quilt because they were all different colors and all different sizes. They offered a beginning quilt class and I took that and learned all the basics and then I had to come up with a background that would kind of go with any of the colors in any of the blocks and I made the blocks all the same size and then a couple of coordinating colors for the back. It took me a year to do that but that was my goal for joining the quilt guild and then after that I was just kind of hooked on it. They had a lot of different workshops where they would have people come in and teach you different techniques and different quilting things. I did a really neat one on, it was the miniature quilt blocks so I made a 12 inch quilt out of these because we had 3 inch blocks and one of the blocks had over 50 pieces in it, so they were all pieced blocks and it was really a challenge, but I really enjoyed that. [coughs.] Excuse me. We also have some classes on making quilts that are strip pieced and I really enjoyed that.

A friend of mine had the quilt shop over in Osawatomie not too far from here and I ended up getting so involved with her and her shop that I helped her make a few quilts and worked for her for a while. The strip piecing goes so much faster and if you're making an utilitarian quilt that you are going to be using on the bed, they go together real well, you can use all the different colors and fabrics and then when they are hand quilted, or machine quilted they do hold up better for washing and things like that. A couple of the quilts that I have made are hand quilted and those are the ones that are real special to me.

KM: How many hours a week do you quilt?

PB: I used to quilt a lot more. Right now, oh I'll maybe do probably five or six hours a week if that much. Usually if I get onto a project, once I get started on it I don't stop until I'm completely finished. In years past, I have made quilts for all my children and my grandchildren and my nieces and my nephews. Then I got kind of burned out for a while. Now I'm getting interested in it again and starting up.

KM: What does your family think of your quiltmaking?

PB: I think they like it. Some of them are really impressed with some of the different types of designs and the piecing because some of it is real intricate piecing. They sometimes take quilts for granted because there's always been, my mother always had handmade quilts and I've been doing this for so long and my kids just think, oh well I'll have another quilt. I enjoy making them.

KM: You metioned a lot of different techniques, what is your favorite technique?

PB: I think probably the one I like best is stained glass. I enjoyed the Celtic and working with the bias so much that I found a similar technique in stained glass quilting and that is my favorite. [instead of long woven pieces, you use short overlapping pieces. flowers or landscape design are cut out of different colored fabric then laid out like a puzzle.] Anything that you can do with stained glass you can do with fabrics and then the black bias is like the leading on the stained glass. There are just so many different options and with all of the batiks and the new fabrics that they have out now the colors are just overwhelming.

KM: You mentioned working at a quilt shop. Tell me about working in the quilt shop.

PB: Yes, my friend has a quilt shop in Osawatomie and I started out just sort of working on my own stuff and she liked the way I was doing my sewing and everything so she asked me if I would mind helping her out a little bit and so I ended up sewing quite a bit for her, making a lot of the quilt tops and we would work together on putting the different colors together. Then sometimes she would have quilts that she would have to design and I have a little bit of background in drawing and sketching and everything so if she needed something enlarged or a design draw up I would draw it for her and then we would incorporate that into the quilt. That was always kind of challenging and it just made it a lot more fun.

KM: You no longer work there?

PB: No, I do a little piece work for her now and then, but when I went back to work full time I had to quit doing so much quilting. Now I've been laid off again so I'm starting to do that again, get back into quilting.

KM: Describe your studio. Describe the place that you work.

PB: Actually it's, when my daughter [Kristie.] graduated from high school and got married, I converted her bedroom into my sewing room and I have dressers full of different fabrics and they are all laid out in different color sequence. I also have my sewing machine and my iron in there. [recording is stopped for about 2 minutes to change batteries.]

KM: [recording restarts.] Go ahead.

PB: I don't have room in the bedroom to lay out a quilt but I can lay out a king size in my family room. It works well for the scrap quilts and samplers where you need to rearrange colors. I also do that for the Color Wash quilts. Color Wash is a design that I came up with. My friend at the quilt shop had a lot of leftover pieces and there were too many pieces to just throw away so I decided I could take the scrape pieces and cut them into 6 inch blocks and then lay them out and make the color wash. I would have all the darks on the outside of the quilt and then you would go to the medium colors and then with the lighter shades in the center and it really makes an interesting quilt. She had quite a few of those that she sold at quilt shows and craft shows. I was happy to design that one for her.

KM: What advice would you offer someone starting out?

PB: If you like to sew, quilting is a great way to do that. You can always start out with something simple and then as you get a little more comfortable with it then move on to something a little more intricate and just do what you like. You can't really go wrong with quilting because you can always use your creative license to make whatever you want. It is just all a matter of personal preference and you can incorporate your own personality into quilts if you like.

KM: How do you think your personality comes through in your quilts?

PB: I don't know, a lot of my quilts are just kind of light and airy, I don't like real dark prints. I like the smooth flowing, something with a little suspenseful intrigue in there, you wonder how it's going to turn out.

KM: What do you find most pleasing about quiltmaking?

PB: I think it's real relaxing. If something is bothering you, you can pick up your quilt and you spend so much time concentrating on your quilts and the work that you're doing that everything else just sort of fades into the background. For me it's a great way to release stress.

KM: Tell me about the quilt that you sleep under.

PB: Actually I have several and I usually change them with the seasons. The one right now is a Carpenter's Cabin. It's like a Log Cabin style quilt but in the center it has a large carpenter's wheel and I always liked that one because my great grandfather was a carpenter and that always reminds me of him.

KM: What color is it?

PB: It's monochromatic shades of green, green and white.

KM: Is that your favorite color?

PB: Yes it is. I'm surprised at how many quilts I end up making that have green. [laughs.]

KM: Tell me about your quilting bee.

PB: When I joined the quilt guild and they had a group of about 12 ladies that would get together from the quilt guild and then we would have our own little quilting bee. We would bring our lunch and quilt all day and it was so much fun because I could, there was such a difference in the age groups that we could learn a lot about each other and different backgrounds and talked about the clothes changes and stuff from bloomers in the old days to peddle pushers and all kinds of things like that. I realized how the old fashion quilting bees must have been. This was such a nice group of ladies that we all enjoyed visiting and we only had two rules, you didn't gossip and you didn't rip out. [KM laughs.] They would let anybody come quilt and it didn't matter if you had great big stitches or little bitty stitches and I had some great big ones when I first started, but the more I quilted the better I got and the smaller my stitches became. I was really proud of the accomplishment that I made. It was lots of fun to do that.

KM: How many quilts do you think you've hand quilted versus machine quilted?

PB: I think I've hand quilted five and I've probably machine quilted 40 or 50. A lot of the quilts that I've made that I've given away have been to nieces and nephews and nowadays when something gets dirty you just want to throw it in the washing machine. The hand quilted quilts you just really can't do that so I save the hand quilted ones for very special people.

KM: Is there any aspect of quiltmaking that you do not enjoy?

PB: I think the hardest part for me is picking out the colors that go together. Like some of the quilts you have to have 12 or 15 fabrics and you have to make sure that they all go together, they are in the same color scheme, the same hues, or that they transition well and for me I think that's the hardest part.

KM: Do you work on more than one thing at a time or do you just do one thing at a time?

PB: I usually, I do more than one at a time, especially if it is a small project or even a quilt top. I'll work on the quilt until I get the whole top done and then I may not go ahead and get the borders on it or have it quilted or quilt it. I just save that as one of my UFOs, unfinished objects, that I will save for next time, or maybe I'll save them for my daughter, like my grandma did for me. [KM laughs.]

KM: Whose works are you drawn to and why?

PB: [pause.] I really like Eleanor Burns [Quilt-in-a-Day.]. She used to have a show on TV and she would get so animated with quiltmaking that there was such an enthusiasm there that I got all excited about quiltmaking too. I really do like her quilts and I've made three or four of those.

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

PB: A lot of it anymore seems like finding good fabric because so many of the fabric mills have closed and it seems like you have to go and search out a little more to find enough fabric to use.

KM: You mentioned batiks, what are your favorite materials to use?

PB: It kind of depends on what kind of quilt I'm working on. A lot of the newer ones are the batiks, but then if I'm working on an old fashion quilt I may use the Aunt Grace fabrics that resemble the 1930's feedsack material.

KM: You like to do a lot of different styles.

PB: Yes I do.

KM: Do you have a typical style?

PB: I've made lots of Carpenter's Cabins and I don't know, basically I like pieced blocks. I don't know. There is another style that is called the Bargello and you take the fabric and you cut it into different, or cut it into strips and then cut the strips into different widths and then you put different, you sew different widths together and then you kind of make it zigzag and I've made a lot of those. Those are real fun to make and they look so much different depending on which colors you use. There again, you have to have 12 different fabrics to do one of those quilts and it just surprises me every time I see it done in different colors because it looks so totally different from the one before.

KM: What do you think makes a quilt artistically powerful?

PB: I think the use of colors and the design work especially is the most important thing.

KM: How do you want to be remembered?

PB: [pause.] I guess I would like to be remembered for my quilts and all my artistic abilities.

KM: Why is quiltmaking important to you?

PB: I think it's like continuing a tradition, because people have been quilting for generations and you hate to see all that die out and I think it's just fascinating to introduce this trade to the newer generations and to continue, continue it so that it doesn't become a lost art.

KM: What do your friends and family think of you winning the award?

PB: Everybody was really excited. I think they were all sufficiently impressed. I got cards and letters from a lot of my friends that had seen it and everyone was really excited and especially everyone in my DAR Chapter. They were just ecstatic about it. Somebody asked me if I was going to do this again next year and I said, 'How can I compete? I don't want to suffer by comparison,' but I'm sure I could come up with another quilt that might work.

KM: Do you have a picture of the other quilt, the quilt that you tied with?

PB: Yes, they were exceptional work. The one was like a Baltimore Album and that is another quilt that I've always kind of wanted to do but never quite had the courage to do, so I think that is going to be my goal is to do one of those in the future.

KM: Do you feel more confident now that you've been awarded the first place?

PB: Oh yes, I had never dreamed that I could ever do anything that would go this far. I mean I was really excited when I found out it took state, let alone all this other. I'm still kind of in shock.

KM: Was it difficult to let the quilt go to the Continental Congress to ship it off?

PB: It was a little bit. All those hours that I'd put into it and I thought, oh what if this gets lost in the mail or something, but it is kind of like sending your kids off to college, you just kind of have to let go. [laughs.]

KM: You've mentioned that you've had your quilts quilted by other people, is that correct?

PB: Some of them, yes.

KM: Tell me about that. Were they done on a longarm?

PB: Yes. This friend of mine that has the quilt shop has the longarm and I even tried doing some of that, but that takes a lot of skill and coordination and I think maybe that is better left to other people [both laugh.]

KM: That's kind of my impression. Did you have say into how the quilts were quilted or did you just kind of give them over to the person?

PB: They have lots of different patterns to choose from and so you could just pick out whichever quilt design you wanted for your quilt. There is usually the overall pattern you can use or I have one that I had done that had, it would be a pieced block and then a plain block and then one that was pieced, so in the plain block they would do a medallion cool thing design and that always made it stand out and look really nice.

KM: Is there anything that you would like to share that we haven't touched upon before we conclude?

PB: I would just like to thank my grandmother and my aunt for teaching me this skill that I could carry on their tradition in the family and hopefully pass it on.

KM: Have they been able to see your quilts?

PB: My aunt has seen, but my grandmother passed away before I really started into it.

KM: What does your aunt think of your quilts?

PB: She just thinks they are wonderful, but she says my hand stitching could use a little work. [both laugh.]

KM: Do you think she will think differently now that you've won first place?

PB: Maybe so, yes. [both laugh.] I'm pretty sure.

KM: How is her hand quilting? Is it good?

PB: She does like 12 to 15 stitches to the inch and I just never have been able to get that small. She has been doing it a lot longer than I have. She has been quilting since she was 12 and now she is 90.

KM: Is she still quilting?

PB: She still does some piecing but she doesn't do the hand quilting any more, she has arthritis now.

KM: I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to do this interview with me.

PB: Thank you, I really appreciate the opportunity to get to do this.

KM: We are really happy to have you in the project.

PB: Thank you.

KM: We are going to conclude our Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview and it is now 1:46.