Quilt festival pays tribute to astronauts
‘Fly Me to the Moon’ exhibition captures global obsession with outer space
A “Fly Me to the Moon” exhibition at the International Quilt Festival captures a global obsession with outer space.
Susanne Miller Jones and millions of other baby boomers have the shared experience of watching what most thought couldn’t be done: Apollo 11’s moon landing and Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind.”
It was July 20, 1969, and Americans young and old sat in front of grainy blackand-white TVs to watch the Eagle lunar module land on the moon. Some six hours later, Armstrong set foot on the moon, joined a bit later by Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Jr.
So when Jones heard news stories about its 45th anniversary a couple of years ago, she wondered out loud: “Wouldn’t it be neat to make a quilt collection to celebrate that?”
Wheels started turning, and in 30 minutes or so, she’d already thought out the categories and themes a collection should include to be considered for the 2016 International Quilt Festival, which runs Thursday-Sunday. The event includes 1,700 quilts from all over the world and draws more than 55,000 people to Houston and the George R. Brown Convention Center.
The collection has something to represent every Apollo mission, every astronaut, the cool tools of NASA and the Parkes radio telescope that enabled us to see it all for ourselves. There are other moon things, too: songs, idioms and more.
Jones, who lives in Potomac Falls, Va., considers herself a small fish in a big quilting world, but she had made some friends while working on an earlier quilt festival project marking the centennial of the National Park Service.
Interest poured in from eight countries for her “Fly Me to the Moon” exhibit that includes 179 quilts, 54 of which will be on display this weekend. The remaining quilts will get their
day in the sun at various quilt shows and events around the world for the next couple of years.
Quilters have long had a love affair with space. In 2013, astronaut Karen Nyberg, an avid quilter, made a quilt block while aboard the International Space Station. Her red, white and blue quilt block became part of a larger quilt at the 2014 Quilt Festival and will be on display again this year.
That was about the same time Jones launched her “Fly Me to the Moon” project, driven by the power of the web, including a private Facebook page for the quilters involved. Very quickly, she had interest from quilters in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Spain.
“It’s the magic of the internet,” said Jones, whose “Connected by the Moon” quilt will be on display. “The world we live in has become so much smaller. … I had no clue that it would go global.”
But it did, and the variety of quilts in the collection is wide ranging.
“The styles of the art are so varied,” said Jones, who didn’t take up quilting until 2010, just before she retired from her teaching job. “I have abstract quilts, people who did portraits, people who did piecework or applique, whole cloth painted and then quilted. It’s amazing. I am overwhelmed by the beauty of this collection.”
Quilter Ricki Selva, whose “Last Quarter Moon” quilt is part of the collection, said she connected with the group for many reasons.
“I was born a month after Sputnik. My entire childhood was spent in front of that TV watching all the launches, Mercury and Gemini and Saturn rockets and the Apollo program. We watched every one of them,” said Selva, who grew up on a farm outside of St. Louis and now lives in Arlington, Va.
Selva was one of the first women to attend the U.S. Air Force Academy, and while she never realized her dream of becoming an astronaut, one of her roommates — Lt. Gen. Sue Helms — did.
While Selva pursued engineering as a career, she always felt creative, dabbling in art since she was a toddler.
“Quilting is how I merge art and engineering,” Selva said. “I do a lot of handwork, which in the art quilting world isn’t a popular way of doing quilts.” She even dyes her own fabric.
Selva has had her quilts shown four or five times at the International Quilt Festival and this year has quilts both in the “Fly Me to the Moon” exhibit and the “New American Traditions” exhibit.
Bonnie Askowitz of Miami, said her quilt, “Clair de Lune,” was inspired by her mother, who played that song on her violin every night after dinner. The quilt includes an image of her mother playing the violin, hand-painted onto fabric and then quilted onto the larger piece.
While her quilt is more about the moon as it relates to music, Askowitz, too, was mesmerized by the space program when she was a young mother in Florida.
Jones hopes to tap into interest in NASA during the quilt show but also wants to expose people to quilting as being so much more than bedding.
“Unless you can convince someone to come to the Quilt Festival, they think of it as their grandmother’s patchwork quilt,” she said. “Take them by the hand and bring them. It’s like going to an art gallery, not a blanket store.”