Dr. Alessondra Springmann on quilting

Nic
Hi, I'm Nic Steenhout, and this is The Work Between. This podcast is recorded on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Stó:lō Coast Salish people, the people of the river, whose presence in the Fraser Valley stretches back of years I named this territory because it belongs with what this show is about the ways we decide whose lives are valued whose work is taken seriously and whose experiences are treated as problems to be managed those decisions shape everything this show sits inside that this is was and always will be First Nations land that's not a formality It's consistent with everything I and this show stand for. My guest today is Dr. Alessandra Springman. I know her as Sondi. Sondi is a planetary scientist with a PhD from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. She spent years studying asteroids and comets, and her work has included the NASA OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample, returning mission, and two years of planetary radar observation at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. She quilts. Her quilting practice lives on Instagram at at intergalactic cactus. So today we're talking about quilts, what draws her to the work, and what making things by hand means when your professional life is built around looking towards outer space. Sondy, welcome to The Work Between.

Sondy
Thank you,

Nic
Now, for my listeners, I have to be open. Sondy and I go way back and we've been talking about quilting a lot but let's let's try and formalize things a little bit tell me a little bit about your creative practice what is it that you do obviously quilting but tell me more about that

Sondy
For the most part when I make quilts I am turning secondhand fabric into something more interesting than stuff that doesn't get sold at the thrift store that may wind up in a landfill. The project that I'm working on now is a lot of work shirts and work pants from an uncle figure of mine who's a contractor who builds boats, repairs boats. He met his wife while they were working at a boat yard. She was the manager and he rose up in the ranks because he could weld and he was smart um he's a he's a real uh he's so we were going through his clothes a couple years ago when I was staying um in a little cottage on their property and he was saying that he would love a quilt made from secondhand shirts because it was it would be soft I said okay richard um so here we are almost two years later and it's been a really fun way to figure out how do you take something you know how do you take a set of half a dozen work shirts and carhartt pants all made of canvas and denim and other tough materials and make them make them something soft and how do you arrange them in an pleasing way and how do you do it in a way that doesn't make you want to lose your mind, or if you are going to lose your mind, providing for losing your mind in the process. So I'm doing something called quilt as you go, which involves cutting out the batting for each little part of the quilt before hand, rather than sewing the top of the quilt, sewing the back of the quilt, and then sewing the top of the quilt, the batting and the back of the quilt together in uh one big sandwich and so for this I'm making tiny little hexagon sandwiches and rather than lose my mind cutting out each hexagon of batting and fabric uh by myself by hand I went to the library makerspace and used the laser cutter to laser cut the batting into hexagons and to laser cut his uh denim work pants and work shirts into in canvas work pants and work shirts into hexagons so I didn't ruin all my uh cutting tools at home so it's been a fun way to you know take something as mundane as you know the clothes off his back but you know clothes that have been well loved and some of them have fun paint stains and some of them you know there's the fading that's really interesting under the seams uh men's work shirts often have like a little I think it's a pleat at the back of the neck and so the that area under that doesn't fade as much as the rest of the shirt. So I've managed to capture that in a few places. So I think it's a really fun way to take something, you know, like his, you know, these clothes that are such a fundamental part of us, you know, they're close to our heart, we wear them out, and they sort of fade into the woodwork, and to turn them into something soft, something comforting, and something that will, you know, keep him warm.

Nic
How do you take something that's not inherently soft like denim or or work canvas and make it into something soft and cozy

Sondy
First of all you give those garments to someone who will wear them until they are worn out and they have been washed so many times that they are incredibly soft on their own and then one of the things I have figured out in quilting is if your fabric is ugly or if your fabric is otherwise too much if you cut it small enough it suddenly is less ugly or less firm so having these um pieces of you know canvas carhartt work pants cut to hexagons that are about six inches tall makes it much easier to have them be soft and the whole quilt isn't denim or canvas there's a lot of um there's thrift store shirts there's shirts from friends there's some corduroy pants in here there's quilting cotton all the backs the hexagons are quilting cottons so there's a huge variety so if you don't have the hard things dominating your quilt you can get away with a lot

Nic
How did you learn quilting

Sondy
Well in 2020 uh in march 2020 when my roommate at the time and I were like well we're at home what do we do with ourselves she had gone to fashion design school. And so she had been an accomplished sewist. She had done costume design in New York, including Broadway musicals. And so she was, she was very competent. And so we said, let's sew some masks. And I thought I knew how to sew. I'd, you know, done some basic garment sewing. I'd sewed my prom dress in high school. And, you know, after I borrowed a sewing machine from a friend and Carrie looks at my sewing and she, you know, you can tell the thoughts are going through her head. Like, wow, Sondy, you think you could sew? That's a really nice idea you have there. But she taught me kind of how to sew as an adult rather than seat of the pants sewing that my mother had taught me. And once you do something hundreds of times, and we sewed 500 masks. I had a spreadsheet tracking all this. Once you do something hundreds of times, you get decent at it. So I sort of got more consistent with my pinning, got more consistent with stitching, learned some binding, learned all sorts of things, learned some very silly couture techniques, which I've never really used since, but it's good to know that they exist. And, you know, after it became clear that supply chains had resolved themselves and we could get good N95 masks. Again, I had all the scrap fabric left. And one of my friends in town was an astronomer who was moving to a job at an observatory in Hawaii, and she was downsizing. And she gave me a bunch of fabric that I didn't realize was like fancy designer quilting fabric until I had all these scraps sitting around and said, what should I do with them? Uh, and I'm, I'm Jewish, but you know, most of my friends are celebrate Christmas. And I decided to make a Christmas stocking for a friend out of these scraps and didn't quite realize that what I was doing was quilting until I had done it and realized, Oh, this is, this is quilting. I should, I should learn more about this. So I went to the library and I went to the shelf of the library that had quilting books. And I this was you know a neighborhood branch it wasn't the main branch and I grabbed the five most interesting books out of six that they had on the shelf and I took them home and I found one by Blair Stocker called Wisecraft Quilts and she turns fabrics into meaningful patchwork and I read this book you know I opened this book I read her philosophy and I turned a few pages in and I saw this quilt where she was using the value or the brightness of fabrics rather than the color or the pattern to dictate the pattern dictate the layout of the quilt and I was completely sold and probably within within three weeks of making that Christmas stocking I had put an alert on Craigslist for sewing machines at estate sales and yard sales I had driven 45 minutes down to a suburb of Tucson. I threw elbows. I got a gigantic Janome sewing machine that Ginger Downing had spent like $2,600 on new that I got for $600. And it came with all the accessories. And I have sewn so much on that machine since. And I've made some pretty cool quilts, if I don't say so myself. It's been really fun to finally feel like I have a creative practice. Both of my parents are artists my mom has done oil painting and acrylic uh big big canvases she's done some mixed media but she really sticks to like big abstract acrylic canvas works my dad was a portrait photographer for most of his career he photographed Georgia O'Keeffe in 1974 at Ghost Ranch so he's you know so my mother's father was an animator her mother was an illustrator my dad's mother sewed and she crocheted and she knitted so you know I come from this family of creatives and I'd never really done anything regularly and I think everyone was sort of like sitting around waiting for me to do something consistently so when I finally started quilting I think everyone I think my mom in particular breathed a sigh of relief and four months after I started quilting she came to visit me in Tucson and I was picking up my sewing machine from being serviced at the, um, the sewing machine store and she paid for it. And she's like, no, I want to encourage this. So it's been, it's been cool to get into quilting. It's been cool to find out how many people around me quilt or know someone who quilts, uh, you know, someone's mom tried quilting and she gave me the, what they call a pig, a project in a grocery bag of her first attempt at quilting and she decided she didn't like quilting after she'd started that. And I looked at what she'd done and I said, yeah, of course you didn't like quilting, Pat. You were not, no one taught you how to do this properly. No one taught you how to cut your fabric properly. Of course you hated this. So, you know, it's fun. And then I've moved up to Boulder a few years ago and through a desperate post on the Young and Millennial Quilters Facebook group, found a wonderful long arm quilter up here and joined the Boulder Modern Quilt Guild. And it's been great to meet other people who are really interested in secondhand materials quilting. There's one guy in the Quilt Guild, Elu Hernandez, who's a bit of a big deal making quilt set of reclaimed jeans. And so he's been really encouraging about this project. And there was a Quilt Guild open sew and he said, give me seven of those hexagons. I want to take them home to sew them together for you. So he took seven of the 188 hexagon pieces and sewed them together. So now I get to add his name to this quilt. So it's been really fun to learn this, to find the community, community. I try to read a lot, you know, random quilt books, blogs. The Facebook group has been fabulous and educational. There's a lot of Facebook groups that are badly moderated or that tolerate very bad politics and behavior from their members. And this Facebook group is, I would say, it's one of the things that keeps me vaguely active on Facebook. And by vaguely active, I mean logging in twice a month to ask a question or see posts there. So I've enjoyed the community. I've enjoyed being able to make things.

Nic
I want to come back to community in a little bit, But before we explore that, I want to talk influences. Obviously, your family background is very much into creativity, but it sounds like nobody really quilts. Have they?

Sondy
My dad has started quilting in the last few years.

Nic
As a follow up on what you're doing, right? So the influence into quilting from their creative and artistic endeavors, has that tickled through or is just, tell me about that relationship.

Sondy
I think it's interesting because my mother loves color. She loves reds and oranges and yellows and she loves her blues and her greens and things of that nature. But my mother doesn't really think about value in her her paintings she doesn't think about the contrast between colors she just says you know she's a very intuitive painter and you know she went to she I think she went to art school for a little bit she had some um post-college art education so I know you know I know she's familiar with color theory I know she's familiar with value and contrast and tints and tones and shades and all that um but she you know I she knows all that but it's all you know in her heart at this point we've talked about sort of like patterns and scale but you know she she creates with paint she creates very fundamental she creates in a very fundamental way with paint whereas you know I'm using things that already exist and I'll look around you know at the fabric and say hmm this would be good for this I think it's a very different creative process than than what my mom does and I have some of the fabrics that her mother designed as an illustrator for the launch of salzburg in los angeles and I'm like a lot of this stuff is just like not it's just not interesting to me like I can't figure out what to do with it but I hold on to it because

Nic
Because it's fabric right how how can you not hang on to fabric and stuff

Sondy
It's the great thing about having a quilt guild and a center for creative reuse in boulder is that I can just bring fabric to quilt guild and say hey who wants this or bring fabric to the center for creative reuse

Nic
That quilt guild uh you're part of that as a community what does that connection do for you

Sondy
For one thing uh this hexagon quilt that I'm working on that I started just under two years ago. I started working on it at an open sew and L.U. Was enchanted by the process. I don't think he was really familiar with doing hexagons for quilt as you go. And then I let it sit for a while because it was parts of it that were frustrating and I hadn't quite figured out how to mitigate the frustrating. And at some point in the last year, LU asked hey how's that hexagon quilt going and I kind of grumbled at him and so I started working on the hexagons again so it's been really nice to have encouragement uh it's been really nice to have feedback when I need feedback it's been nice to have a smaller place to ask for smaller scale advice there's now a couple of us who have been inducted into the singer featherweight cult though uh I think all of us have one featherweight so we're not really cultists

Nic
You ever have enough featherweights

Sondy
I don't know I take issue with like I've got 10 featherweights and I sew on none of them like get them out in the ecosystem folks say they uh they need to they need to be used so for folks who are not familiar with singer featherweights Singer made these lovely little sewing machines between the 1930s and the 1960s. And they are mechanical. They draw 0.7 amps, less if you put an LED bulb in them. I mean, they draw less current than your phone does when it charges. And they are, some of them have been running for 90 years. If you keep servicing them and keep putting oil and grease on them, they will run for another 90 years. I mean, they are the most robust little machines. And I like to say that they are the most heterosexual sewing machines of all time, because you will not find a straighter stitch on any other sewing machine. So it's been fun to learn the basics of featherweight maintenance and where to grease and where to oil and how to clean things with kerosene and how to adjust the timing and what has changed in the intervening uh 81 years since my sewing machine has been made and what has not in you know what remains the same between this machine and modern machines like the needle that this machine uses it's the same needle that modern machines do

Nic
Yeah

Sondy
The bobbin case okay yeah bobbin cases are very particular on the featherweights but modern machines are very similar into how that all works. So it's just a really cool way to sort of fundamentally understand how sewing machines have evolved and haven't evolved and how to use them. And I feel like it informs better how I use my machine that was made 15 years ago. And yeah, it's nice to have more technical understanding of how a sewing machine works and how to adjust it and how to tune

Nic
It well we're talking about equipment but one thing I'm curious about is um what does your workspace tells you about yourself that you didn't really decide it kind of involved or arrived at

Sondy
So I I've got some lower back stuff from uh being rear-ended twice while driving my car So I have figured out that standing for machine sewing is best for my ergonomics. I have also discovered that since getting a heart rate tracker about nine months ago, that standing to sew also does really goofy things to my heart rate. I don't know if it's a POTS thing because I can walk like three or four miles a day, no problem. But it's the standing that seems to just not agree with heart rate stuff, which is fascinating or that like stand sewing is just like a stressful thing is, you know, it's, it's creative, but it's like, am I just sort of like going into like, you know, high stress focus mode to do this? So that requires more, experimentation and investigation, but I've now gotten to the point where all these hexagons have been, I've done everything I need to do for the hexagons themselves to machine sew them. Now I'm joining them by hand, all seams of them and that can be done on the couch it can be done at my partner's wood shop it can be done uh at parties it you know it's a very portable task in that regard so that's been cool and it's also like okay I will not be worsening my heart rate while I do this part of this project I will have to stand to sew to do the machine binding but it's also just a nice way to slow down a bit and kind of figure out how do I do hand sewing because I've never been interested in doing hand sewing I've always found it annoying but when you do something uh you know 127 times you you get a little better at

Nic
It you could always hand stitch the binding

Sondy
I don't I'm really bad at sewing straight like sewing like long straight lines whip stitching to join hexagons is is fine uh because you've already got the straight line there but I don't know I guess I could try it but I feel like that would just be when it comes to putting binding on a quilt I'm just like get me through this let's just go like

Nic
Final mile final get it out

Sondy
And uh I know richard probably will not listen to this but I know that richard will never um he will never wash this quilt and a lot of the fabrics you know there's some like a thrift store skirt that had boats on it and a few other ones that I'm like yeah this would be fun to include but it's way too light and I got some indigo dye and did indigo dyeing last year to darken some of these fabrics and so the fabric I have I'd gotten in Ghana for uh and had originally given to his wife Millie but you know they were never going to use it and so I'm like oh I have an idea of what to do with it but it's kind of a like a medium light sky blue with like a darker vine print on it and so I've been darkening that with indigo with the idea of using it for the binding because the binding of the quilt is part of the quilt that is used the most and gets like all of your oils from your fingers on it from like pulling it and touching it and I don't like fighting reality right like I accept that gravity is is a thing I don't like to fight gravity unless well there are circumstances in which I have successfully fought gravity and won we can we can get back to that one um so I like making sure that the bindings of my quilts are dark so that they don't show as much finger oil don't need to be washed as often

Nic
If it comes down to a choice between working alone on a quilting project and working in a group what what's your preference why

Sondy
So another march 2020 thing that I started was a zoom crafting group uh so rather than it being stitch and bitch I named it loom and zoom and here we are six years and uh a month and seven days later and we are still going twice a week on zoom where we work on crafting projects together we have a group chat where we talk about ideas so for me really up until I moved to boulder and joined this quilt guild quilting sewing whatever was not really a in-person social event um but you know I still I still like hanging out on zoom to do things with folks and now I can have a project that is portable I can take it places there is a hand sewing group that the quilt guild has I think they meet in coffee shops and so now I'm kind of like huh I should make sure I have a hand hand sewing project at all times and the quilt guild open sews those are fun I've really enjoyed those I'm the only person masked them but that's fine and now that I have a it's much easier to bring a sewing machine to them than to haul like all 26 pounds of my main sewing machine downstairs in the car take it over to the community center

Nic
I'm gonna ask you about your relationship with disability you you mentioned a few things you mentioned pots you mentioned um chronic back issues so what's your disability what's your relationship to that

Sondy
For I have had ibd for over 20 years I have got you know another fun constellation of other other things you know laryngopharyngeal reflux and interstitial cystitis and some lower back stuff from, uh, drivers in Tucson. Um, I deal with headaches. I deal with some joint stuff and RSI stuff. Um, so for like half, half of my life, I've been dealing with, living with chronic illness and some form of disability. And I have found that most of my friends are disabled, have some sort of disability of one type or another. A lot of my friends have a chronic illness or deal with chronic illness. There's someone at Quilt Guild who, you know, I've interacted with her very briefly twice and she says she doesn't drive. And I'm like, huh, that's interesting. You know, there's so many reasons that a person may want to drive, whether it's from disability or from a moral perspective. And I'm like, I kind of want to get to know you better because you've thought about this. You've made a decision that runs contrary to what the rest of the world expects or experiences. That, you know, huh, interesting. And so that's one of the things that I really appreciate about disability communities is that disabled people have thought about how they move through the world, how they interact with the world and whether it's their choice or otherwise they they have had to think deeply about sort of the fundamental tenants that society uh expects and that's something I really appreciate about disability community

Nic
Yeah that's funny you say that I was I was gonna ask you um I was gonna to say some people argue that navigating a world not built for you produces a kind of creative thinking and do you think that connects to your practice or is that just too neat a framing but you mentioning getting to meet and talk to people that have been doing that kind of thinking before Or leads me to think that, yeah, maybe it works for you?

Sondy
I think I've, at least for quilting, I'm someone who likes, I like solving problems in interesting ways. Or I've done sort of enough thinking from reading, you know, reading about color theory or value quilting. Or like looking at a stack of fabric and being like, what can I do with this? This is the project in the grocery bag. This is the pig fabric that was given to me by the friend's mom who decided she didn't like quilting and for some people they see what I wind up doing and they're like wow that's wild like how can you look how can you look at these strips of these fabrics and turn them into you know this thing I'm like well I've been thinking about value and contrast for a while and like what what combinations of fabrics you would need to have you know to make something effective out of to make this particular thing and have it be effective and so people don't necessarily see all of that like thinking and experimenting and work that goes into producing something that looks really cool but also you know folks in the quilt field being like I don't understand how your brain works that you can have these, you know, go from this step to that step. And I'm like, oh, there were a lot of steps in between and a lot of frustration. There was a lot of experimenting. There was a lot of banging my head against the wall and being frustrated that I put all this effort into this thing and then abandoned it. But, you know, two years later, coming back to it in a completely different way no one sees all those experimental steps that led up

Nic
To

Sondy
It and you know for this hexagon quilt you know figuring out oh yeah I've used the laser cutter a couple of times at the library makerspace including for a really cool quilt that I made for a mutual friend of nick's and mine so you know had some precedent you know there'd been some in my life for doing laser cutting for quilting so you know there's there's a lot of work that people haven't necessarily seen that leads up to my current creative way of moving through the world you know it comes from like going to the there's a the colorado quilting council puts on a quilt affair once a year and someone was doing a demo of her reverse applique system and you know sitting there watching her do this and I was like I don't I need to make a quilt that has Chinese characters in it but I don't want to do any of this by hand and I'm watching her do this reverse applique and I you know figured out from what I knew about laser cutting and her reverse applique method that I could do this could have a laser cutter do a couple of steps for me and not have to worry about figuring out a bunch of stuff by hand and having it look not the way I wanted it to look so it's um yeah it's been fun in that regard to figure out how to put a bunch of disparate things together and also kind of fun to see people just blown away by the end result

Nic
I like this contrast between Sondy is using a nearly 100 year old featherweight singer's sewing machine and is using the latest laser cutting technology I think that's that's just awesome Sondy are you a disabled quilter or are you a quilter who happens to be disabled

Sondy
I think I'm a disabled quilter uh I'm always trying to find more ergonomic ways to do things I'm very aware of how the ergonomics of pretty much any fiber art are awful doesn't matter what you're doing you know is it knitting is it crocheting is it uh needle you know needlepoint needlework is it cross stitch is sewing on a machine all of this is bad it you know you're hunched over on your machine some people put wedges under their machine to tilt it up a bit but I like having the big extension table off the side of my machine so like having the machine tilted up doesn't like creates this other problem so I feel like you can't really fundamentally separate how I quilt from my being disabled and yeah this heart rate stuff this is interesting um I don't really have a provider I can talk about this with but I don't know I guess I I guess I need to ask around and see what what other people experience

Nic
What are you trying to get better at right now

Sondy
I'm trying to get better at being consistent and doing things at a sustainable pace um for me it's sort of this like this boom bust cycles of doing things now that I feel like I've gotten to the point where, you know, 24, 23% of the way through sewing these hexagons together, I'm just like, I just want to crank them out. I just want to get them done. I want to get them out the door. Like, let's go. And that's, you know, after like months of not doing anything, you know, then I'm like staying up past midnight hand sewing and I'm like it's not not great yeah I've got this other quilt that I've like should be working on I'm like trying to get back to but like you know it's like okay well I need to deal with this well that means dealing with that and then you're like five steps away from the original issue and it's like that's so be nice to consistently show up and do work without it sort of being too much or not at all. Yesterday I was up at my partner's woodshop hand sewing, and he always likes having a body double there to kind of keep him on task. And I was saying, hey, is it helpful having me here? He says, well, you know, I'm pretty locked in on this task I'm doing. You know, I think I would have been doing it and stayed focused on it even if you weren't here. You know, but it's nice it's nice to have company uh and he asked you know is this helpful for you and I'm like well I'm not trying to make a living off of my quilts necessarily

Nic
Yeah

Sondy
But you know it's like I really should be cleaning the house I should be doing physical therapy I should be doing should be like cooking more meals I should you know I should be tidying the sewing room which is just devolved into chaos uh yeah there's a whole bunch of things I should be doing and well okay we're gonna we're in a boom we're in the boom part of the cycle uh that's just how it's going there will be times when I'm in the bust

Nic
It seems like you're you're working in cycles Do those cycles relate to either feeling stuck and then kind of not abandoning but slowing down or, you know, hey, it's going well, let's get things accomplished while it's going well? Or is it something unrelated to that that dictates the boom-bust, quick, slow approach?

Sondy
Sometimes it's related to disability in october we doing botox injections for this headache and I got the fun reaction of uh my so when you do botox sometimes your neck muscles are like whoa whoa whoa what my head is so heavy and your head is the same weight your neck muscles are just responding completely differently. So I got all of this like neck perceived neck muscle weakness that caused tremendous pain if I bent my head forward for more than like a little bit at a time. And that was really terrible. And I couldn't machine sew. And I'd been kind of like okay yeah let's get back to machine sewing um but fortunately fortunately uh the guy who had serviced my sewing machine had screwed something up so I couldn't sew until that got fixed

Nic
Right

Sondy
And I couldn't sew because of my neck um and so like yeah that really sucked but there was like that in combination with something else was not not the worst

Nic
Has making the work the quilting has it made it harder rather than easier so you know you're you're making these quilts you've you've had uh the the botox and and you've had barriers but you're also keeping at it so I'm I'm assuming doing the work the quilting is is actually somehow making your life easier in some ways but has it also made it harder

Sondy
Yeah I think you know there's definitely the times where it's like oh look I'm staying up too late hand sewing or I'm getting distracted by this to the uh I'm getting distracted by this and it's you know negatively affecting other things in my life um I mostly buy secondhand fabric or I inherit fabric or I you know given fabric so spending money on this hobby isn't necessarily a problem especially since I make t-shirt quilts for friends occasionally and you know that helps subsidize things so yeah like the ergonomics of hand sewing right now you know like having like poked myself in the finger so many times or like how it's worsening this really thick callus on my thumb which means that like the sense you know the nerves are now like having a hard time it's like okay yeah the sensitivity of like the left side of my or the outside edge of my dominant hands thumb is like having an issue um or like oh I should really be doing pt but look at me I'm sewing instead I'd had ankle surgery last year and was like finally out of the boot and probably should have had the boot on but like my sewing machine had been on the floor and I'm like okay I'm gonna lift it up and put on the table and I'm like should I have been lifting 26 pounds at that point

Nic
Yeah

Sondy
Probably not it could have been much worse I guess but it's um I guess for the most part sewing has generally been a positive thing because it really felt like before the pandemic started in 2020 that I didn't I was never getting enough done as a grad student that I was always uh not productive enough to have hobbies and that was really a time where it's like yeah no one's getting anything done like having a hobby having a hobby that involves like sewing masks socially great keep up the good work you know it was like oh I'm not gonna get anything done I'm gonna go for a hike and I'm not gonna feel guilty about it so I think for the most part sewing has been generally a positive thing in my life and has not been too detrimental damaging or distracting from other things.

Nic
Have you ever made something you regret making?

Sondy
I've certainly started projects where I'm like, I don't... Do I really want to finish this? Do I really want to get back to this? Okay, if I was starting this now, I would make all these different choices. So that's definitely been, been the case for some, some things.

Nic
You could always just shove it all in a bag and give it to somebody else.

Sondy
Yeah. Okay. I do, I do regret one thing. I had a friend in town who moved nine months ago, coincidentally when this headache started. And anyway, the move, the move was a shipwreck of epic proportions. And before she was moving, I'm like, Hey, I'll, I'll make a t-shirt quilt for you and so I've like stabilized all these shirts of hers I've cut some of them out she even like came to the library makerspace and helped me with some of the stabilizing and cutting and now I'm just like ah darn it what do I do with these they're like all in a bin plastic storage bin like shoved under you know like on the bottom of a shelf in a cabinet where like I can't see it but you know she hasn't thanked anyone for helping with the move she hasn't apologized to anyone. This is not the first move that I've bailed her out of. So kind of like regretting that. And I'm like, she did give me her FedEx number. I'm like, I could just FedEx all this to her. And I know a lot of t-shirt quilters like hate, hate, hate taking on t-shirt quilt projects that other quilters have started. But like, I'm no amateur. I've made, I've made three t-shirt quilts one that a friend has paid me for I'm precise I'm accurate I am not sloppy a lot of people who start t-shirt quilt projects don't they haven't done a lot of reading they don't know what the common pitfalls are and I think anyone who got this uh pib project in a bin would not be unhappy yeah uh like given that I've done most of the most annoying parts of the work and given that it's been like nine months and she hasn't apologized to anyone

Nic
Yeah

Sondy
I don't think it's worth having this taking up space in the house

Nic
That seems making sense to me

Sondy
Yeah

Nic
That's

Sondy
But hey she didn't move nick I'm not joking t-shirts

Nic
That's a massive quilt

Sondy
And uh no it's not and but like in another dozen garments if each t-shirt is 12 by 12 inches that's a foot a queen size quilt is eight by eight feet that's 64 shirts

Nic
Yeah all right that works

Sondy
So it probably won't be king size but

Nic
Yeah when you make a quilt what are you hoping it does how are you hoping it's received and and does it land that way usually

Sondy
Two years ago two years ago a friend graduated from library school and she didn't know I was making her quilt but I'd actually been working on it while she was showing up at crafting group on zoom like right under her nose and she would she would practice the cello while I worked on this quilt on zoom like right under her nose and so the quilt was supposed to show up the day before graduation and it didn't but it showed up the day of graduation and her parents got these photos of her wearing her cap and gown opening this box not knowing what's in the box and just like the look on her face and you know just how excited she was and she she's just looking more and more excited and like the final photo is her like with it around her shoulders like a cloak and she's like spinning her you know head with the cap and the tassel and she looks ecstatic uh and I posted this on young and millennial quilters and they're you know every so often there's a post there with someone being like I made this quilt for you know my mother-in-law or my and you know she was so ungrateful and she sent it to the thrift store and like or this person was you know I'm like hey don't make quilts for people who are going to be ungracious right like don't do that but a lot of people were like right this is this is why we do what we do and this is the correct response to receiving a handmade quilt so people have been people have been pretty happy and you know I think I put some fun surprises in I made a t-shirt quilt for someone that like some of the t-shirts have like interesting tags one of them was uh the brand was junk food with like a heart-shaped american flag so you know I put labels on my quilts and I included that as one of the labels I'm like sure this is fun and weird

Nic
Is there a quilt someone else made that you wish you'd made

Sondy
There's a bunch of these like judy niemeyer quilt works quilts and I'm like man I really want to do that but I also don't want to spend 400 on fabric some of the some of the color schemes for some of the judy niemeyer quilts that people come up with I'm like I see why you're into that that is not to my liking but I would like to do I would like to do more of those but you really you have to put a lot of and time and effort into the planning because you can't just be like I'm gonna buy these fabrics when there's like fabric options they have a quilt planning tool where you can try out different fabric combinations color combinations the the fabric picker is a huge pain in the butt it's not just like let me filter by red like just let me put red here let me put blue here you know just just give me like a you know a hex code color picker right come on those exist there's apis for them

Nic
What do you know now about your quilting practice that you couldn't have articulated when you started five six years ago

Sondy
I think it's really important for me not to cut all the fabric for a project before I start. I think it's really important for me to cut sections because if I get bored with a project or decide I want to do something a different way and I've got the fabric all cut, then that's a problem that, you know, it's hard to reuse it if it's been cut a certain way. For me, it's really important to put a lot of time and effort into precision and accuracy uh people like that's just you being a raging perfectionist I'm like well no there's a purpose to it and that is if you do things in these certain if I do things in these certain ways it's easier to get a it's easier to put things together it just makes subsequent steps easier so if you invest the time into getting things a certain way here it's those problems are not going to propagate out the way they would if I was just being like it'll be fine and I don't know like I look at I've got one quilt I've got a quilt pattern for something that I want to try and I'm like this is one of it's not like the most popular quilt pattern of like the last 10 or 15 years that's like the exploding hearts one that's all half squares triangles which like forget about it miss me on that one but it's the ranges quilt by modern handcraft and that one I'm like people have been putting this together and it's looked fine and people have like not been accurate with it they've not put in the effort to have it you know and it's turned out fine so like let's put it together and see what happens

Nic
You talk about perfectionism and that always makes me think a long long time ago I was a chef and people say chefs are artists and I kept saying I'm not an artist I'm an artisan an artist has the luxury of failure the artisan doesn't and I'm curious in view of your raging perfectionism are you an artist or are you an artisan

Sondy
Yes um I think there's there's time you know that the first project I started that's still you know sitting in a bin upstairs that I don't know if it's a failure it'd be really great to finish it I don't know what finishing it is going to look like I think it's going to be a lot of time it's like oh I really want to take all these apart and sew them back together knowing what I know now because it would make it much easier blah blah blah um and you know is that a failure I don't know it's part of the learning process that's you know like you had to go to cooking school right you had to learn you had to fail a lot before you were a professional so there's a thousand hours yeah exactly um so there's that expectation that you have to learn somehow and you know there's you have to invest that I think, you know, it's just really important to understand that, you know, I'm not, I'm not punching out t-shirt quilts for a living. There are people who do that. And, you know, I could, I could, I guess, if I really wanted to, but I can't stand the smell of people's fabric softeners. You know, they can, they can make my headaches worse. So no thank you on that regard. And yeah so I think you know there's an this is a craft at some level uh I do it mostly for fun if it wasn't fun I would probably not do it I'll probably make a t-shirt quilt or two more for friends over over the years um I got I got one quilt finished last year part of what I mean I did have foot surgery at the end of February, but it was just, just didn't, just didn't sew a lot last year. There was, you know, the issues with machine, there was the issues with like my head and my neck. And that's, that's fine. It's a, my partner is a woodworker. He he wants to be a commercially successful woodworker. He has an artist background. He's, you know, painting oil painting. Uh you know he's got a lot of experience with color and creativity and he doesn't feel like he's got the space to fail right now yeah really that he's got the space to experiment because he wants to be able to make a living uh making art and you know so it's like well yeah I mean you've and you know an artist is worried about marketing and so I think you know at some point this is kind of is still sort of a hobby but I think it's it's both art and craft for me it's art and artisan and you know it's just fabric nick no one's gonna get food poisoning right like no one's gonna leave me a bad review on yelp or whatever right like it's I'm not gonna give anyone an upset stomach or send them to the emergency room it's just fabric

Nic
Yeah well have you tried eating fabric it'll give you an upset stomach

Sondy
Yeah but if anyone's eating my quilts we have other problems nick right like I so I don't use scented scented um spray starch I don't use scented laundry detergent yeah I tell people not to wash things in scented detergent because those you know all that buildup can reduce the lifespan of the fibers in the quilt um I try to avoid using polyester thread when you know or polyester anything if I can avoid it my quilter prefers using polyester thread because it's stronger when it's wet and I'm using polyester thread to join these hexagons by hand because I know there's gonna be a lot of stress on these seams but you know I try to use cotton for everything and try to think about try to think about how things are going to be used the person using it um try to use good quilt batting yeah so hopefully yeah hopefully I don't give anyone an upset stomach or you know a migraine

Nic
Yeah what do you wish people asked you about your work that they don't

Sondy
That's a good question uh I think you know the point of like yeah like what is the toll on you like what is you know clearly this is something that compels you to to make and create but like what are what are the downsides like what is this doing to your body I think a lot of people don't kind of realize the brutalness of all of these quote unquote traditional women's crafts you know the things the the fiber arts that they're just really hard on a body and I don't think people realize that I don't think that people respect that and a lot of people see quilting as sort of like oh yeah this is this is what grandma does and you know but the average quilter is like a 60 something year old wasp um that that this is yeah like you know if you look at the quilt guild it's a whole bunch of you know gen x white femme presenting women in the quilt guild plus lu hernandez right like it's uh yeah like okay we have a couple people over 60 the demographics are not you know we're not like treated you know average demographic but it's still like what what makes this interesting and different and um and also like what are what are the hard aspects of this

Nic
Yeah

Sondy
You know you hear about port like all the accommodations for knitting like how do you make knitting hurt less you know there's the portuguese knitting there's people who take uh tennis balls or makeup brushes and stick their crochet hooks in them

Nic
Yeah

Sondy
So they can get a more ergonomic grip uh I want to look into getting a needle puller or um some more like finger protectors because like this is this is a lot of grip strength pulling this needle through and I think I can do better

Nic
You know what I've noticed makes a big difference do hide homemade thimbles one on the thumb one on the index and suddenly I don't need to grip the needle as strongly and there's more friction so I can pull the needle easier

Sondy
Yeah I've got this uh I think it might be doe hide it's a very soft

Nic
Yeah um yeah that looks a little bit like what I do

Sondy
So it's nice but then like if I'm tying knots I have to take the thimble off and yeah I might want to learn how to tie knots better I don't know I check out books from the library on quilting I'm like certainly one of these quilt as you go books won't suck so many of these quilts okay I checked out a bunch of books on garment sewing from the library and all of the examples are stitched with like contrast thread on fabric but the quilt as you go community is like oh no

Nic
No

Sondy
Any example quilt that we use in our books has to be a final quilt that we're gonna like want to give away to someone yes no contrasting thread the fabric is a solid so it's the same on the front as the back so you can't see like what's the front of the fabric and what's the back of the fabric oh well if you want to do it by machine just do it by machine it's like no this is a hand stitching example you got to give us the mystique I don't know I kind of like want to write a quilt as you go book of like you know quilt as you go that doesn't suck like

Nic
There's your next project in your downtime

Sondy
I I read through uh I don't know I was reading through the alumni magazine of where I went to undergrad and I was like damn I need to write a book I don't know what this book's gonna be but like salty quilting

Nic
Now you do hey Sondy I really have enjoyed this conversation um I want to ask you one last thing um is there something that you would like to say that I haven't covered that ties your quilting with your disability

Sondy
I think those of us who've been forced to look at the world differently, I think we get to make more interesting choices about what we make. Those of us who can't sort of take everything for granted, whether it's our bodies or how society lets us move through the world. I think there's a lot of disability inherent in quilting. I think there are a lot more disabled quilters out there than folks may admit to themselves that, you know, especially for hand stitching, right? Like if you can't sit, you know, there's hand stitching available. Or if you can't, you know, sit up at a machine, you know, if you, you know, there's so interesting like you know posts on these facebook groups of like hey I can't do this or I need I need a thing that does that and you know all the people who are happy to hop in and be like yeah here's an accommodation for that here's an accommodation to that or like I've got the same thing and it sucks like it's uh I appreciate and I know that's not like terribly really personal. But I think there's just so much of, you know, a lot of us who are disabled can't take, we can't take things for granted. We have to think, we have to question, we have to create new ways of moving through the world and interacting with things. And, you know, as you create something that no one else has before, I think that's a lot of fun. You know, there can be a playful aspect there's a lot of joy there and that's something that I've really appreciated about disability communities is seeing you know thriving disabled joy in a way that society society doesn't want you to society you know and you know quilt quilting wants you you know buying other people's patterns and using other people's ideas and not like and you know there's a lot of folks who are like yeah there's space in the quilt industry for people to come up with their own patterns and to come up with their own things. That, you know, not everyone, that it's, you know, it's hard for me, especially to keep like a whole bunch of thoughts in my head at once. And so to have time and to be able to read and to think and to put different things together is really validating. That's something that's been really hard for me as a scientist to come up with my own research ideas to do to you know read through the literature I really have never enjoyed that aspect or I've never like kind of figured out the right accommodations to be able to do that or to ask interesting questions and so to have a thing in my life where I feel like I can do that is uh it's really it's really great you know someday there'll be a you know science support and facilitation position where my weird weird experiences will be rewarded um but we haven't gotten there yet

Nic
Yeah hey I just thought of something we you mentioned microgravity earlier and we didn't come back to that now I know from past conversations that you've actually been on microgravity flights doing experiments which sounds like a lot of fun what would quilting look like in microgravity or no

Sondy
Funny you should ask that astronaut karen nyberg has quilted in space

Nic
How awesome is that

Sondy
Yeah yeah it's pretty cool um she even has two lines of quilting fabric uh called earth views one is prints that are really cool I actually have the whole set I'm gonna do a bigger hex bigger hexagons that have been like traditionally machine pieced for a friend out of those she does um like mars mission work where she you know her she works on one of these cameras that points down at mars and gets really cool landscape aerial landscape photos of mars and then karen's next fabric line is going to be batiks if it's I think it's already come out

Nic
Cool

Sondy
So yeah someone someone someone's done that there's been there's been quilts in space if I ever uh get an llc for my t-shirt quilts it'll be quilts in space awesome like muppets pigs in space

Nic
Sondy thank you so much for talking to me about quilting about disability about the work between um where can people find you or more about your quilting

Sondy
I have not really been active on social media in a while so uh if you happen to be in a you know the same discord or slack that I'm in um look for me there some maybe someday I'll post things on intergalactic cactus I think I have a blue sky for quilting but yeah you're just gonna have to social media has just not been fun for me so

Nic
Yeah I can relate to that Yeah, so I've just

Sondy
Enjoying putting my time and effort into smaller communities and doing the thing.

Nic
Awesome. Dr. Alessandra Springman, quilter, scientist, and a good friend. Thank you.

Sondy
Thank you, Nick. You're the best.

Nic
That's it. I'm Nic Steenhout. This is The Work Between. If this sounds like your kind of conversation, subscribe, and I'll see you in the next episode.