Stitching Memory
The quilts of Wende Stitt stitch together personal connections, the living and the dead, the earthly and the ethereal. They also demonstrate this Bay Area artist’s talent and deep pride in her craftsmanship.
Stitt made the quilt pictured above for a friend, Tony Herrera, a 30-year-old tattoo artist dying of cancer. Finishing the quilt was a race against the disease; she beat it by a week, incorporating images from Herrera’s best friends and tattoos he had inked. A strawberry border signifies his home in Watsonville, Calif., and memories of his mother’s agua de fresa.
“After working on it for about two weeks I became ill and did not work on it for about six weeks,” she recalls. “One day a sense of urgency came over me. I then worked on it 12 hours a day for one week, and gave it to Tony on a Friday. He loved it. He passed the following Friday.”
This cosmic synergy happens often when Stitt, 53, is quilting. “My favorite way to work — what I call ‘relaxing quilts’ (family quilts) — is to simply start with a center medallion and work out to the edges,” she explains. “I’ll have no plan and just take it one move at a time. I like to ‘listen’ to what the quilt tells me to do.”
Stitt, a quilter for 30 years, began her “relaxing” quilting in 2004, when her daughter was ill with a serious infection. “I made her a small wall quilt in honor of her bravery,” she explains. “She recovered beautifully.”
Stitt’s imagery reflects significant events and interests in the recipient’s life, but with a twist. Last year she created a 17-foot-long, three-quilt masterpiece for the Oakland Museum. The Día de los Muertos scene represents loved ones who have died in her lifetime. “It is a reflection of the sweetness I remember most about them, and the twist is that they in turn are voicing what they remember about me … in essence they are eulogizing me.”
Stitt blends the traditions of Amish quilting with her own spin. She uses contemporary fabric, but also vintage feed sacks and flea market finds. “I resist the temptation to purchase new fabrics, instead opting for the effort and creativity to make what I already have work,” she says. “I can find inspiration in a single piece of cloth and build an entire quilt around it.”
— Shawn Connally
