A local family who knew of my work in multimedia journalism heard through the grapevine that I was also a long-time quilter. The introduction led to a commission to conduct a quilt documentation project for an 89-year old Appalachian quilt-maker, Juanita Shockey Harris. Her grandson hoped to give the family a great surprise at Christmas— documentation of her quilts and an oral history exploring what her life-long practice as a quiltmaker brings to her experience.
The project began with an introductory meeting, where I could ascertain the basics. Juanita’s house was chock-full of quilts. Layered on every bed and carefully stashed in closets were quality pieced, appliquéd, and cross stitched quilts— some Juanita inherited from her mother and many that she had made herself. As if that were not enough, Juanita had a sparkling personality and a sweet voice that was full of wit.
The first day was picture day. Her grandson, Michael Knemeyer, and I spent hours pulling quilts out of storage and getting some amazing photographs of her works. Many of the quilts were so large that I had to stand on a ladder with a 10-22mm wide angle lens to get the whole quilt in the image. (The images in the video are taken with a Canon 7d using three lenses: a 100mm macro for close-up work, a 50mm 1.4 portrait lens for the basics, and a 10-22mm wide angle. If I must say so myself, the imagery is striking!)
As we pulled out each quilt Juanita would tell its story, so I had the audio recorder (a Sony PCM-D50) running in the background the entire time. Juanita’s pride in her family heirlooms and her own creations was evident, and this show-and-tell process really gave her an opportunity to shine. I will always remember seeing her face as she looked at her handwork through the lens of a photographer, and Michael had the foresight to bring his own camera to document the entire experience.
It was an incredible gift to sit with Juanita and learn of her life story as she pointed to the dresses her mother used to wear that were now in the quilts, walking me through a chronological recap of her life as represented in the quilts she has made.
I came back a second day for the oral history (we were exhausted from moving all the quilts!). We moved the tick-tocking clocks out the room and settled in for a long talk, starting from the very beginning of her upbringing in Ravenswood, West Virginia. We talked about her upbringing in Appalachia, her first quilt (a Dresden plate made as a summer project for school, including two pillows she plucked geese feathers for herself), and how she really became serious about making quilts once her children had grown and she could reclaim her time. She spoke beautifully of her late husband, who would often clean up the kitchen so she could “go work on her quilts,” and how the practice of quilting helps pass the time and stave off the loneliness that can come from living alone for many years. When a furnace serviceman drops in and compliments her quilts, asking how much something that beautiful might be, she exclaims, “I wouldn’t sell!”
The process resulted in 576 images documenting her quilts (both the family heirlooms she inherited, and all those she had made and not given away), an audio oral history (about 2 hours of conversation, covering her early years with her family, to a description of the various quilts in her collection, to why she quilts and the meaning behind her use of family fabric). I produced the video above as a short piece to be played at a family Christmas gathering as a surprise, where each member of the family received a custom thumbdrive with the video, the images, the full-length oral history, and a document overviewing the process and encouraging everyone to listen to the full oral history.