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Stitches in time

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Martha Ginn, quilt artist. [Photo/China Daily]

"We have some good Chinese friends at home," she says, "and so I included the double-happiness symbol to commemorate that special friendship. And since I was working on this in 1992, the 500th anniversary of the landing of Christopher Columbus in America. I wanted to include a block for that, too. So I drew my own ship," she says with a chuckle. "And then I drew my church, to make a block commemorating my faith, and wrote a bit of scripture I like to sew into the design."

Then came family. Her dad was a Texas highway patrol officer, so she created a block that incorporated the button design from his uniform.

"Making a Baltimore Album quilt is a sort of paying-your-dues step," she says. "Once I'd mustered the skills to create a Baltimore Album, I knew I could do anything else." She started that quilt in 1990 and finished it five years later; it has hung at major quilt shows around the US.

"I use cotton, organza, silk, anything I can find!" she says, holding up a pillow-sized quilt block for demonstration. "See here I've added this flossy fiber we call 'angel hair', and here some painted cellophane to represent water, which I've heated to make crinkly."

Designs come to her quickly, she says, but with the cutting and sewing involved, many of her quilts take more than a year to complete. "That's partly because like most quilters, I'm working on three or four at once. My Japanese Lanterns quilt, for example, was made entirely of 1-1/2 inch strips, in a complicated arrangement of colors. I'd work on that for several days, but then need a break and I'd go do something less intense."

For Ginn, a big part of her hobby's charm is the social circle it provides.

"The quilt guild in our town is a big and active one," she says of Hattiesburg, a community of 46,000 people. "We do a lot of quilts for children, and give them away for charity sales. They are simpler and fun, a nice diversion."

There are also big shows - in Paducah, Kentucky, home of the National Quilt Museum, and in Houston, where quilters take over the entire convention center in that Texas city for a week.

There can be $10,000 for the winning quilts in shows like that, she says. The jury process to get into those shows is very competitive "it's a win just to get in", says Ginn.

"Everyone is an artist to some degree, but they need to discover that in themselves," she says.

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