Real Women Quilt - Featured Quilter

Meet Karen Griska

Karen Griska is a dear friend of mine. Her life and her quilts are brimming with her enthusiasm and joy for life. When I asked Karen if I could interview her for this column, she got so excited thinking about her "story" and that she ended up writing it herself!! This is a wonderful story about a quilter's journey through life. I hope this article inspires you to take the time to teach the precious little ones in your life how to quilt, crochet, knit, or whatever else their sweet little fingers want to learn. Who knows...You may be teaching the "next" Karen Griska!

Karen's Story by Karen Griska
Photos by Jason Griska

When I was ten years old, I asked my mother to teach me how to sew clothes. I remember her teaching me how to line up the selvages and

straighten the fabric. She showed me how to lay out the pattern pieces, cut them out, and sew the pieces together using the notches for accuracy. I felt very grown up learning these things. I have two sisters and a brother: 3, 5, and 10 years younger than me. I’m wondering now how she found time to teach me how to sew with a new baby in the family.

My Mom had a green Elna sewing machine. It had no foot control, but had an arm that folded down, and you moved your right leg to the right to operate the machine. We sewed at the dining room table, so everything had to be cleaned up before supper. That didn’t slow us down, though. It seems like we were always making things. We all learned to knit, sew, crochet, embroider, needlepoint and do other craft projects. My grandmother (my mother’s mother) always said about me, “her hands are always busy.” I don’t remember that my Mom was ever critical of my work or ever made a fuss over admiring it, either. She just showed me how to do the things that I asked about, and let me go on my own. This is how I remember it, anyway. I’m glad because this gave me “ownership” of my sewing from day one.

I grew up in Connecticut, and I was ten years old in 1963. We had the television on all the time during these years. It was in the dining room, and we watched shows like “The Match Game,” “The Early Show,” “General Hospital,” and “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” (in black and white). “Watched” is an overstatement; actually it was only background sound. There were three girls who lived next door, and we went back and forth between the two houses all the time, so there was plenty of activity. Their mom was the person who taught my mom how to sew. We recently had a reunion weekend at my sister’s summerhouse in New Hampshire (the six girls and the two moms), and we had such a wonderful time together!! We are all very close. Only my sister Eileen and I sew now.

"Eileens' Reunion Quilt" by Karen Griska

Back to sewing. From age ten until I went to college, I made lots of clothes: dresses for school, pajamas, bathing suits, prom dresses, skirts and a nice gray blazer. My Dad used to marvel at how I could bring home a piece of fabric in the afternoon and wear the skirt that evening. (Sometimes it didn’t yet have a waistband, but with a sweater, it didn’t matter.) Skirts were so short in the 60’s that I could make one out of ½ yard of wool fabric. I was sewing a little too fast one time when I sewed a zipper into a dress so that it had to be zipped from the inside!

When I was thirteen years old, I decided to make a quilt from my scraps. I don’t remember where I had ever seen a quilt, but my idea of a quilt was: 5 inch squares sewn together using 5/8 inch seams. I didn’t give any thought to the placement of color in my quilt. I just sewed the squares together. I don’t even think I considered the possibility of using rectangles or triangles. My Mom must have told me about batting. I bought the backing fabric at a discount store in Waterbury, CT called McCrory’s. I used my babysitting money for the backing and some packaged blanket binding. I made two of these quilts, and today, 40 years later, they are very well worn. I think I made these quilts because I loved to make things, and I could make something nice while spending very little money on it.

I’ve always loved color and design. When I was little, I used to lie on the floor and make arrangements using hair curlers that were popular at the time, called “Spoolies.” I loved pegboards, weaving potholders with loops on a little metal frame, and paint-by-number oil paintings. I remember sitting way up in my favorite tree after school with my friend Barbara, and trying to knit with string and pencils to see if it would work. It did, but it got messy because of the pencil points. Recently, I tried crocheting with a long strip of fabric instead of yarn. It works too, but it hurt my hands after a while because the fabric doesn’t slide as well as yarn. That was the problem with knitting with fabric strips also. However, I did finish two “rag rugs” using these techniques.

The summer before I started college, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York had an exhibit called: “Abstract Design in American Quilts.” This was a landmark event in 20th century American quilt history, because it revived interest in quilts, (there were hardly any quilt books or magazines available in 1971). Also, the public began to see quilts as an art form, rather than a craft. The quilts in the exhibit were wonderful! I wish I had seen this exhibit, and I sometimes wonder how my life would have been different had I been there. I have the book by the same name, and I’m inspired every time I look at it.

However, I was unaware of this exhibit, and went to college to study finance. This was also consistent with the way God made me, to some extent, but was not my real passion. I did well in college and went on to become a securities analyst, money market bond trader, and portfolio manager of mutual funds amounting to over $1.2 billion in the early 1980’s. That was intense, but I enjoyed it. Occasionally, I dream that I am still at that job, and I think to myself, “this is fun!”

I am happily married to Jason and have two sons, Brian (20) and David (17). We moved to Tennessee when the boys were little. When they were in middle school and high school, I started to do a lot of quilt making. Now, I am involved with some aspect of quilting every day, and it is my passion. I call the room where I quilt, the “quilt room,” “Brian’s room,” or the “guest bedroom,” depending on the circumstances.

My absolute favorite part of quilt making is watching the design develop. I start with an idea, and begin making blocks or segments of some type. Then I put them on my design wall. I used to have a “design floor,” but it was hard to stand back and view my work from a distance. I had to stand on a chair and squint. Now I can sit down and have some tea, and squint.

I have never made a quilt from a pattern. I am sure that if I planned my quilt before starting to make it, that the result would be bland compared to the quilt that results from designing as I go. I am often surprised to see that something I thought would look good doesn’t work, but that perhaps turning every other block upside-down makes the quilt look great, or produces a secondary pattern that surprises and delights me.

Sometimes I’ll set aside the first pieces I’ve made, and save them for a border, or for another quilt. Sometimes the parts that I thought would be in the border look better combined and used as a center medallion. Recently, while I was sewing the large pieced segments of a quilt top, I haphazardly put the borders on the design wall just to get them out of my way. I discovered that they looked great lined up next to each other, so I made more of these for the main part of my next quilt. Frequently, one quilt leads to the next in this way.

Working in a series is a very freeing. When I’m playing with a design, there are so many options that it would be very hard to make choices if I was only going to make one quilt. But, knowing that there will be more chances to try other options (for example, using solid fabrics, reversing the dark and light areas in a design, using a larger or smaller scale, or adding/deleting/changing sashing or borders) spurs me on to be creative. The biggest series I ever did was a group of 28 quilts inspired by the quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. The book called The Quilts of Gee’s Bend is full of colorful improvisational quilts that are different from the quilts that I was used to making. I sewed quilt tops from morning until night as I happily moved from one idea to the next. There are still some ideas I want to pursue in that series, but not right now.

New ideas come to me often when I’m traveling with my husband and sons. I get inspired when we visit museums, galleries, libraries, stores, anyplace that has interesting architecture, patterns, or color combinations. When I can’t sleep, I’ll start to think about a new way to use the nine-patch block, for example. I also go into this mode when I am hiking a strenuous trail, and I want to distract myself from the aches and pains. My sister Eileen and I have “quilt-talked” all the way up mountains in New Hampshire.

Another wonderful source of inspiration is books about quilts. I prefer the books about antique quilts, or the books that resulted from the state quilt surveys, (such as The Quilts of Tennessee). I don’t try to get inspired; I just enjoy the quilts and the ideas start appearing. The method books are less exciting, unless they have lots of pictures of antique versions. Modern quilts often strike me as too organized; the color combinations are too perfect. I like quilts that you have to study for a while to “take in.” I like some surprises, both in color and design. I prefer to make scrap quilts because it is easy to hide little surprises in them. I’m always on the lookout for interesting fabrics containing things like an ice skate, a crayon or a chicken, for adding a little surprise. The term “scrap quilt” should be updated to “multi-fabric quilt,” because new fabrics purchased for making quilts aren’t really scraps. At least not until a fabric is going into it’s fifth quilt!

Maybe we just like the romantic notion of pioneer women “making- do” with what they had. It connects us with an art form that is sensible and thrifty.

My two favorite “big name” quilters are Gwen Marston of Beaver Island, Michigan, and Anna Williams of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Gwen has written nearly twenty quilting books, gives lectures, and has quilting retreats near her home on Beaver Island. One of her best books is "Liberated Quiltmaking", published by the American Quilter’s Society. It conveys her lighthearted fun approach to quilting in a series, and has lots of inspirational pictures. This book is also humorous, and fun to read. I met her a few years ago at the quilt show in Paducah, and later went to one of her quilt retreats. It was great to talk about quilt ideas with her. She was very knowledgeable and encouraging, also funny and full of energy. She was asked, “You have a life outside of quilting, don’t you, Gwen?” to which she answered, “No, I don’t.” (But she is crazy about her little grandson.)

I have never met Anna Williams. Her quilts are very improvisational, unlike any I have seen anywhere else. When she was a little girl, she sewed the small scraps that fell on the floor when her mother and grandmother made quilts. Anna started quilting in her 60’s, but I don’t think she is quilting now, due to health problems. She made pieced tops with lots of little pieces in them. She sewed in a bedroom in her house in the evenings after work (as a housekeeper). Her colors are bright, and her quilts contain a huge variety of fabrics. Her lines are not straight, and the quilts aren’t rectangular or square. She has other people quilt them for her, which can be pretty tricky, given their shape.

One of her quilts was added to the collection of the Museum of the American Quilter’s Society when it celebrated it’s tenth anniversary. My sister Eileen and I sat in front of that quilt at the museum for half an hour and kept noticing new things! We were surprised at how tiny some of the pieces were, and how awful some of the fabrics looked, if considered apart from the quilt; but we agreed that it made us want to hurry home and quilt. We decided that our annual “sisters quilt challenge” would be to try to make a quilt that would be indistinguishable from the quilts of Anna Williams, just to see if we could do it. We both found it very challenging; we enjoyed the exercise and did a pretty good job. As we usually do, we entered the two quilts in the Sandwich, New Hampshire Fair. As we predicted, we didn’t win any prizes that year. They don’t value improvisation at the fair. Their taste runs in a more traditional direction. Imagining their shock made us smile. We took pictures of ourselves holding our quilts and sent them to Anna Williams. We told her about our challenge. She wrote back to us saying she was glad that we liked her quilts, and that she liked ours. Due to illness, her friend Katherine Watts wrote the letters, one to Eileen and one to me. The American Quilter’s Society published a book in 1995 called, Anna Williams: Her Quilts and Their Influence. This book is out of print now. Anna is usually included in books about African-American quilters. She seems to have a sweet spirit. She has said that if she didn’t have to do anything else, she would just sew. I would, too. We are alike in that way.

I have several dreams as a quilter. First, I would like to have a big quilt exhibit some day. I visualize a big exhibit hall with all my favorite quilts that I’ve made over the years. I would like to sit in the middle of the room and view all the quilts from a distance. There is a cup of tea in my hand. People are enjoying the quilts, especially young girls, who are saying, “Wow! Look at this one. I’m going to make one like this, but all in blue,” or “This one is just squares; I can make one like this for my friend,” or “I’m going to ask my grandmother how to quilt.” It would not be important that anyone know that I made the quilts. I’d rather hear what people say, and it wouldn’t bother me to hear, “This one is weird; I wouldn’t want to have it on my bed.” This would be such fun.

Another dream is to make a book about my quilts. I love to look at quilt books, and to write one would be to participate in history, to inspire and encourage others. I hope I could write things that would answer the questions quilters have when they look at someone else’s quilt. Someday, a quilter might look at the pictures and read the text, and say to herself: “Wow, she is just like me.” I guess this is another way to see all the quilts together. That would reveal something to me; I don’t know what.

My third dream is to show new quilters how to make quilts. I have done this a little, teaching a small group of Girl Scouts, and my niece, Amelia. I love to witness their joy when things start to “click,” and they say, “I think I’ll make mine like this, instead!”

I hope you've enjoyed this story about Karen Griska. These days Karen is her usual proliferative self--churning out endless, incredibly creative quilts. She's also working on her first book and several of her quilts have recently been published into other books. I'll be sure to let you know when Karen gets her first book together...I know we'll be seeing lots more of Karen and her awesome quilts for many years to come.

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