Interview with Raymond Houston

Karen Musgrave (KM): This is Karen Musgrave and I am doing a Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview with Raymond Houston. Raymond is in St. Louis, Missouri and I'm in Naperville, Illinois, so we are conducting this interview by telephone although I would really love to be doing it in person. Today's date is August 20, 2008. It is 8:30 p.m. Thank you so much for taking time out of your evening to do this interview with me.

Raymond Houston (RH): You are more than welcome.

KM: Thank you. Please tell me about the quilt you selected for this interview.

RH: I call it "LOLLOO[/P4/.]III" and it's obviously the third in a series of quilts. My design system involves a series or set of squares with a single line drawn through them. There are thirty-two of them. They are lettered A through Z, and AA through PP. I was asked by a friend or commissioned by a friend to make a quilt that he could donate to his church for a raffle. Generally, since these squares with lines in them are lettered, I ask for the client's name or initials to pick which lines get used in a given design. Well, the church's name was Our Lady of Lourdes so there was an "L" and there was an "O," and I go there is also a "LL" and "OO," so that's where the name comes from. The four lines went into the square and then I played with how to arrange them. I picked a rotational sort of design, where the same little square is rotated in ninety degree increments around itself, and then those four squares are repeated to form the overall pattern. When I got to looking at it, I realized I had a tessellation, a single shape that fit with itself seamlessly, much like the work of the Dutch artist MC Escher, who I'm a great fan of. I made the quilt and originally I made it in blue and white, blue being the color of Mary, who was Our Lady of Lourdes, and white, and this is a very good color scheme. The guy loved it and the church loved it as far as I could tell. I wanted to do the quilt again, and this time I wanted to throw in some orange, which is the complement of blue, and a third time I did it with orange, blue, and white and loved it and it was a great quilt. It was a lot of fun and it was a matter of having orange and white, and blue and white, and blue and orange all work together with this one shape throughout the quilt. Of course it wasn't until I was done making the squares and started assembling it that I realized that I needed some squares that were actually blue, orange, and white to maintain the pattern. I hadn't expected that, but I made some extra squares to fill in, but by this time I was so tired of making these damn squares! And so there are two places toward the bottom of the quilt where the squares are almost, but not quite right, and it was simply because they were good enough at the time and I decided I'm going to use them and be done with it. That is how the quilt came to be. Now much later, this quilt was shown in an exhibit at a grade school where I was working with students and talking about my quilts and the way I design quilts, which is mainly taking a single square, and arranging and rearranging and rearranging, to come up with a lot of different designs, a lot of different patterns. One of the classes that I was talking to was first graders. So here is this quilt on the wall and here are these students sitting in front of it on the floor, and they are eye level with the bottom of the quilt, which is where these two errant squares were, and lo and behold if one of the children didn't point and ask, "What happened there?" [KM laughs.] I could have just slapped the child. I say, 'It's artistic license.' I wasn't about to tell them that I was too lazy to make a square that would actually fit there and not be so obvious. Of course, [I never expected] to have a seven year old kid sitting on the floor at eye level with the mistake. I don't even want to call it an error. I'm going to call it a design flaw if anything, but it was fine. I still enjoy the quilt; I still like it quite a bit.

KM: What did you do with the quilt?

RH: I still have it. I take it with me when I do tours and lectures, and I have cats, so the quilt is not on my bed. I have cats, and my cats have claws, and they are my two worst critics. So any quilt I happen to have hanging on the walls, at some point I will come home from work and find a quilt on the floor in a little ball, and a cat maybe lying in the middle like, [yawns.] 'So comfy.' But neither of them will own up to who tore it down off the wall. With that, I decided no quilts on the wall, no quilts on the bed. Oh well.

KM: Now it is ninety by seventy-five, so it is not small.

RH: No it is not small, but it is not big enough for a bed. I happen to have a king size bed, so I guess for a small bed.

KM: Is that typical of the size for you?

RH: Pardon.

KM: Is that typical of the size for you? Do you work large?

RH: I like to work large because I like to play with the color and play with the pattern. Some pieces approach ten feet square and I'll keep the pattern throughout, but play with gradations of color so it will shade from light to dark say, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner, and with the larger piece I'll use more fabrics that will allow me to play with the color values [more.].

KM: Tell me about your interest in quiltmaking.

RH: I started quilting summer of 1976, which was the Bicentennial. I did not make a quilt because it was patriotic; I made a quilt because it was Americana. I had been sewing for a number of years leading up to that, and thought, 'Oh, yeah a quilt. Yeah, that would be kind of fun.' I read all the books I could on the subject at the time and found a pattern that I liked, and bought fabric, and cut the pieces, and machine-pieced them all, and actually had a quilting frame at the time. I said, 'Oh yes, I'll quilt this by hand, because that's the way it's done.' This was the summer of 1976 and I said. 'Yeah, I'll have this done in time for Christmas. I'll give it to my parents.' Well, Christmas of 1976 the quilt was still in the frame and I told my parents, 'I have a Christmas gift. It's not quite done, but I could show it to you.' And I showed them the quilt and they said, 'Oh that's lovely. That's beautiful.' Well okay, Christmas of 1977 it's still in the frame because I'm still hand-quilting it. 1978, well my parents were like, 'Well is it done?' 'Well the quilt is under the tree.' Of course, the quilt was still in its frame, but I bought a small plastic Christmas tree, three or four inches tall, and plopped it down on the quilt in the frame so literally the quilt was 'under the tree.' It took four years to hand-quilt it. I swore I would never hand-quilt another quilt as long as I live and I haven't. These days I machine-piece and machine-quilt. It's more durable, and holds up better. In fact, if my quilt gets dirty, you can take it to the nearest Laundromat, throw it in a tumbler-type washer and tumbler-type dryer, and you're good to go. I kind of got away from the traditional view that a quilt had to be hand-pieced and hand-quilted, because I don't have the time, which is good, because once I discovered this method of designing new quilts I realized that I had a lot more quilts than I could ever make in a given lifetime, so I had to make them as quickly as possible and [the sewing] machine does that just fine.

KM: When did you come up with this idea?

RH: Well, my first couple of quilts actually were copied from quilting magazines and books that I read at the time. We're talking 1976, so there wasn't a lot back then, but I realized at some point, well you're reading this book or magazine and [wondering] how many other thousands of people are reading this book or magazine and copying this quilt just like you. Do you really need--does the world really need another Log Cabin quilt? I wanted to design my own quilts and I had no idea what that entailed, so I was looking up books in the library on how to design a quilt and I found two types of books. One [type of book] would give a handful of motifs, like half-square triangles or quarter-square triangles or bars or 9-patch or 4-patch, and then say, 'arrange them in a pleasing manner.' I didn't know, what is pleasing to me may not be pleasing to the next person, so that wasn't a lot of help. The other type of book would have these same motifs arranged in a pleasing manner although they didn't say how they managed to do this. So, in the end, it was still a matter of copying something that someone else was presenting. At some point I read a book on symmetry. It was actually a textbook on two-dimensional patterns, and I'm reading this book and I thinking to myself that this would be a great way to design quilts; this would be a wonderful way to design an unlimited number of quilts. Maybe a week or so after reading this book I'm thinking to myself, 'You know what? I'm going to write a book. I'm going to write a book on how to use symmetry to design quilts.' Then, I saw a book that had come out called "Symmetry" [Ruth McDowell.], and just by reading the description of the book I knew exactly what it was about and I was thinking to myself, 'Oh, that, that bitch stole my book!' I was upset. I decided to boycott. [KM laughs.] I decided I'm not buying that book. When I did put it down, I said, 'Yes, yes.' I bought the book and yes, it was pretty much what I imagined. And after that there was another book on designing tessellations [Jinny Beyer.] that I read, and both of them were pretty good. Both of them dealt with the subject in a manner that they were dealing with it, but I was still stuck on this whole idea of using symmetry to design quilts. I went back and looked at the first book I had read that talked about using a handful of motifs, [and arranging] them in a pleasing manner. They [the motifs.] were all square and they all had three or more lines drawn through them. I got [to.] wondering about squares with just one line drawn through them? Then, after you get a set of those, how about combining two or more of them to get a square with multiple lines, and not necessarily half-square triangles or quarter-square triangles and the like. That is kind of where I started with the whole thing of squares and symmetry and it was really great. I was making all of these quilts and having a blast. I had not been commissioned, but I volunteered to make a quilt for a couple at church who were retiring, and it was interesting because up until then no one knew that I quilted. No one had even seen the quilts I made, and I said, 'I will make a quilt for their retirement,' and people would go, 'Oh, that's nice.' I drew it out and colored it in and showed them the drawing and they said, 'Oh, that's nice.' I made the quilt and brought it [to be signed], because it was a signature quilt. It was a friendship quilt for people to sign well wishes for this couple. So, of course, when I brought the actual quilt for them to sign, their jaws dropped and they were like 'Oh, that's nice!' in a completely different tone of voice. I could just hear the smirk being wiped off their faces. After that, I had a person ask how much would I charge to make a quilt and I was like 'Oh I can get money making a quilt?' I hadn't thought of that. I made that quilt, but before I delivered it I realized that once I delivered it, I would probably never see this quilt again. So, I hired a photographer to photograph the quilt and he says, 'It's going to be a little expensive for just one quilt. Do you have others?' so I collected all of the quilts I had made up to that point and had them all photographed and put them in a photo album. I carried it around like a little bible. I would be in a bar and people would ask, 'What do you do?'I said, 'Oh, I'm a paralegal.' and I could mentally hear them yawning. But if I said, 'Oh, I'm a quilter,' they'd say, 'Oh really? Well, my grandma quilts,' and I'd say, 'I don't think so; not like these.' So, I would fetch my photo album and start showing them the quilts and watch as their jaw dropped and they'd go, 'Oh, my Lord! I've never seen quilts like this before!' I did that for a number of years. Well, I won't say years, but I did it long enough until I realized it's nice showing people quilts one-at-a-time, but [wondered] how do you reach more than that, and that is where the Internet came in. I researched designing and building a website. At the time, I didn't even own a computer, and when I finally did buy a computer, I was ready and designed and built and launched my own website, www.NachoGrandmasQuilts.com. Now people look at [the name] and ask, 'You're not Mexican, are you?' It's more of an audible pun than anything else: 'nacho' like 'not your' grandma's quilts. It's not until someone says it out loud that they get the joke. I launched the website and showed it to, or invited a number of quilters to look at it and they freaked out and they were like, 'Oh, my Lord! I have never seen anything like this. Where did you come up with these ideas?' From [the launching of] that website, two things happened. One, I was invited to join the faculty at Quilt University, where I hold the double distinction of being the first male instructor and the first African-American instructor at Quilt University. The second thing that happened was I was invited to appear on HGTV's "Simply Quilts." Of course this was back when HGTV's "Simply Quilts" was on the air. It was pretty cool. I entered the lecture circuit, and gave lectures to local quilt guilds and across the country; I teach online at Quilt University; I also teach workshops to quilt guilds in person and that's been a lot of fun, I love it. Recently, I revised and revamped my design system, which pretty much revolved around a system of notation used by crystallographers to denote different two-dimensional patterns. I realized that they were on their way, but they didn't quite make the mark and there were a lot of patterns that didn't fit in with their idea of two-dimensional patterns, but were still patterns. I have recently taken that in a new direction and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. I'm looking to expand my--or actually change the class that I have been teaching at Quilt University into something different that is a little more inclusive. I've been using a prototype of that in workshops at quilting guilds. My most recent idea or thought is to expand that a little bit more, and now I'm working on a book proposal, so we will see how that goes.

KM: Tell me a little bit more about teaching at Quilt University.

RH: Teaching?

KM: Teaching at Quilt University, because that is an online.

RH: Quilt University is a rather interesting place. The classes are broken up into lessons. The one that I currently teach is three lessons. The students decide which class, or choose which class they want to take; they pay their tuition (which I get a percentage of), and every Saturday morning, for say three weeks running, a new lesson is presented online. The students are given a password for that class. They enter the password for their class, then they can print out that week's lesson and have an entire week to work on it at their leisure. There is also a student forum, where we encourage students to gather and talk, like a little chat room I guess. If they have questions, they can post them and me, as instructor, will answer them. I checking in daily or actually several times a day to answer any questions they may have and to pose a few myself. There is also a student gallery, where students can post pictures of the designs they have come up with and I look them over and critique them and make suggestions. The class runs three weeks; the lessons showing up on each Saturday morning; and then the entire class is still available, say two or three weeks after the close of class, for students who may be a little slower or who may still have something they want to post a picture of. It is a very good way of learning at your own pace. It is a very good way of teaching because I can based on the type of questions students are asking, I can tell 'Oh, that must not make sense.' For me, I've been having all of these ideas running through my head for years and years and years and it is pretty much second nature to me, so I'm not thinking about it in terms of someone who has never seen it before. So, I have to keep my eyes open to what questions people are asking and how they are asking them to get a better idea of what I need to do to make it a little clearer or a little bit more understandable.

KM: Probably helps with your book.

RH: That too, that too. [laughs.]

KM: What aspects of quiltmaking do you not enjoy?

RH: That is a good question. That is a very good question. I enjoy the making, I enjoy the sewing. I don't necessarily enjoy the prep work. I do a lot of foundation piecing. Most people would say 'paper piecing,' but I'm not using paper. I'm using muslin cut into squares and starched and ironed and stenciled as opposed to paper. With paper piecing you sew all the pieces of fabric to the paper, and then you sew the blocks together. When the entire top is done, then you have the project of tearing out all the paper. I thought's silly, so I got the idea to use starch-stiffened muslin to sew the fabric to, so when I sew the blocks together, the muslin stays in, it becomes part of the quilt. As for the starch, once the entire quilt is finished, I'll wash it, which removes the starch and returns the original hand of the fabric. Currently, I have about 400 eight-inch muslin squares that I am starching. I have an aluminum baking pan with a solution of starch and water and I'm dropping the squares in there and working with latex gloves to swish it around and then pick out each square and squeeze it nearly dry. My work table is covered with a plastic tablecloth and I'm laying them all out, one by one by one, with a little bit of overlap. I check them to see how well they are drying, and as they dry, I pull them up and iron them flat, which is very good because the muslin feels not quite as stiff as paper, but it makes a good sewing surface and I don't have to deal with bias and stretching or anything else. That is a part of the prep work that I don't like. The other part is a matter of washing [the fabric I'm using in the quilt] and then cutting it into strips wide enough to accommodate the templates that I'm using. I cut the strips into pieces using a system of notching the pieces so I can easily match them up while I'm sewing. I'll end up with piles and piles of these cut pieces and that part I don't like. It's slow; it's tedious; and, kind of boring. Once the starched squares are ironed and stenciled and once all the fabric pieces are cut and piled up, then I can start sewing and then it becomes enjoyable because I can turn on some music. I'll have some classical or soft jazz or new age playing in the background and I just sew my butt off and relax. It is very soothing and relaxing and takes no time at all.

KM: How many hours a week do you work on quilts?

RH: Depends on what it is I'm working on. Currently, I'm working on prepping these muslin squares and I'll do this two or three hours an evening, when I come home from work. I have a forty hour a week day job as a paralegal, so any and all quilting I do is done evenings and weekends. I pray for the day when it becomes what I do full-time, but I worry that it will become a job and not a fun thing to do. I'd say maybe, if I have a project really going I could easily spend thirty hours a week, evenings and weekends, on top of my day job.

KM: Do you think of yourself as an artist or a quiltmaker or do you even make the distinction?

RH: That is a good question. I feel I'm a quilter because I'm taking fabric and cutting it into little pieces and sewing them back together again. What I do is based on very fundamental quilting sort of basics of patchwork and all. I feel I'm an artist in that my sense of color may be a little bolder than most "traditional" quilters who are looking at pastels and calicos. Me, I'm looking at bolder colors and more mottled solids and no cutesy prints, so in a way I kind of straddle the fence. Traditionalists will look at my quilts and say, 'Oh, that is more Art,' and the textile artists will look at my quilts and say, 'Well, that is kind of traditional.' It is kind of a little bit of both worlds. Does that make sense?

KM: It does make sense. Whose works are you drawn to and why?

RH: Quilt wise?

KM: It could be art wise too.

RH: Art wise, MC Escher is first on my list, just because I love his tessellated designs, shapes that fit with themselves. Quilt wise, I know of some quilters but don't follow them. Michael James comes to mind, but I'm thinking early Michael James when he was doing a lot of strip piecing. For a while I emulated him, doing a lot of strip piecing and then I thought, 'You can't do that. You're copying what he's doing.' This was before I started working with symmetry myself. Once I started working with symmetry, I essentially quit buying quilting magazines and quilting books and followed my own path. In essence, I was more or less quilting in a vacuum, even though I knew there were other quilters out there. I just wasn't looking at them for fear that they would, not tarnish, but some how . . .

KM: Influence?

RH: Influence, yes, yes, influence what I was doing. Now it has been so long ago, I'm surprised. I'm surprised when I do pick up a quilting book or magazine and think, 'Oh, look what they're doing now. Isn't that nice?' It's not necessarily what I'm doing and that's fine. I'm not saying they have to, but I guess in a way I don't follow what other quilters are doing because they're doing their thing and I'm doing my thing and I'm letting it go at that. Ricky Tims is another name [that comes to mind]. Well, he is a quilt artist. But generally, I don't really follow quilt artists. As I said as far as art goes, I'm very much into MC Escher. Oh, what comes to mind? Three o'clock in the morning I will wake up and say, 'Oh yeah! That is who I should have said!'

KM: You can always add it. [RH laughs.] That would be quite okay.

RH: Sorry?

KM: You could add it.

RH: Okay.

KM: If you remember, you can write it down and we can add it. How do you want to be remembered?

RH: How do I want to be remembered? [pause.] I think that a lot of what is called traditional quilts and traditional quilting stems from a small library (although they think it is large) of patterns that have been used and reused and used again for a long, long time and I think that with what I'm doing now I can take a single square with some lines drawn through it and match everything else that has been done. In fact, the series that I'm working on now I'm calling "The World's Largest Quilt Series" and there are millions of possible patterns that I can make from this one single unit and since I realize I'm not going to live long enough to make all of those quilts, I thought it would be neat to teach others how to make these quilts and use this unit. In a way I'm working on the world's largest series of quilts, but not just all made by me. They're made by thousands of other people, and so if anything, I would like to be remembered as the guy that made the ultimate quilt pattern possible and wants to spread it around.

KM: Very cool.

RH: Is that a bad thing?

KM: No, I don't think it's a bad thing at all. [RH laughs.] I think it's very cool. Quiltmaking is basically a women's world.

RH: Well, yes.

KM: How is it being an African American male in a woman's world?

RH: [laughs.] That is an interesting question. "Sewing" is a woman's world, and when I first taught myself to sew I was a sophomore in high school. I'm the oldest of seven children: five boys, and two girls. It got to a point where come September they [my siblings.] would go window shopping to see what the latest styles were and we would go shopping. They would pick fabric, I would pick patterns and I would make their school clothes. Now, my father's watching all of this and wondering what the hell does this mean, and yes it meant exactly what he thought it meant, but that's a different story for a different time. I taught my father to sew. By the time I graduated high school he took over sewing for the family. My two sisters and my mother don't sew a lick. My father does. I started quilting. It wasn't that much different from sewing. It was something I felt I could do. I wasn't looking at it in terms of being gender specific, as a gender specific activity. Once I started designing new quilts and coming up with new patterns, I definitely left gender behind and just became an artist; creative and the way I was expressing myself. I haven't paid much attention to it, but I know they are out there, other male quilters. I know quilting is a woman's world, and it's often interesting to lecture at quilting guilds that have male members. They are so glad to see me. There are more of us out there than one realizes. They are not all members of guilds and they don't do a lot of quilting but they are out there. I guess in a way why shouldn't there be.

KM: I feel 'the more the merrier.'

RH: Yeah, why not?

KM: Do you feel pretty welcomed within the quilt community?

RH: Yes I have been. I won't even say it is a novelty thing like, 'Oh look, a man, a quilter.' I think it's just as a rule, quilters have a more openness about them and are a little more welcoming and if someone comes along who's doing some quilting who has something different to show them, they will say, 'Hey look at that! Let's go along with that.' I don't think people are looking at me as 'Oh, my Lord, he's a man and he quilts.' Or, 'Oh, my Lord, he's black and he quilts.' It's simply 'Oh, he quilts.'

KM: That's probably what I suspected. [RH laughs.] I really do think that we all want to be 'the more the merrier.'

RH: Of course I'm not a typical quilter for the obvious reasons, male and black, but there's another aspect of me that when I tell quilters there is an audible gasp. I admit that I do not have a stash of fabric. I will buy fabric and/or dye fabric for a specific project and do my best to use it up. Whatever I don't use up, I'll give it to my dad. I talked about teaching him to sew. I also taught him to quilt, so I give him a lot of the scraps and stuff, so I don't keep fabric on hand and whatever I'm using, I'm using and once I've used it to the point where I think, 'Alright, I'm tired of this. It needs to go out. I'll go buy something different for the next project, and never have a room full of fabric. There is the saying that 'The one with the most fabric wins,' well I'm assuming that is after you die and I'm thinking, 'Well you know the one who dies with the most fabric is still dead, so what good did the fabric do?' I don't have a stash, I don't haunt quilt shops too much, and I don't buy the latest book and magazine and tool. I quilt because I enjoy quilting. I quilt because it is as I said before: it is relaxing. It is very peaceful and my quilts suit me. I entered only one contest and this was many years ago. It was a Snail's Trail quilt and it wasn't a very big piece, but it was the best work I'd done to that day. (Of course, every quilt I make, I think, 'this is the best one I've made.') Well, I entered that quilt in a contest and it didn't win and I was called and told, 'Mr. Houston, you need to come and pick up your quilt on such and such a day.' Okay, I went to pick up my quilt and the place was full of other people whose quilts also did not win and I realized we all had the same expression on our faces. We all expected our quilt to win and at that point I said, 'You know what? I will not enter another contest, because what's the point of being able to say my quilt is better than your quilt? Each and every quilt that gets made is a winning quilt.' I don't worry about the quilts being perfect. I'll sew because I'm happily sewing and if I make a mistake, the mistake stays. I'm not going to rip out stitches [because I feel] they have to be perfect. I run into people who are very much into perfection, and I say, 'Well, only God is perfect, and no, I don't think you fit the bill.' I try to encourage people to let loose, cut loose, have fun, make your quilt and the only people that will know it's not perfect is you. Back when I was showing my early quilts to someone, they'd say, 'Oh, this is wonderful,' and I'd say, 'Well, yeah, but if you look in this little corner here you'll see that is not quite right, and if you look over there . . .' Most people didn't even notice what I noticed as being imperfections in the quilt. That is when I realized if they don't care, then neither do I. I would just quilt away and have fun, enjoy it. Does that answer your question? I'm sorry.

KM: Yes it did, you're doing wonderfully. [RH laughs.] Is there anything you would like to add that I haven't asked you? Anything you want to share?

RH: Hum, that's another good question, I think.

KM: You have done exceptionally well.

RH: Well, I have gabbed consistently and constantly for quite a bit here. No, I don't think there is much I could add.

KM: I want to thank you for taking time out of your evening and away from your starching.

RH: [laughs.] Believe me I'm happy to do it. Actually, I'm on a cordless phone, so I've been laying out squares that I have piled up here, and when I hang up the phone, I can plug in the iron and start ironing.

KM: Thank you so much and we're going to conclude our interview at 9:15.