How did you get connected with the Belle Grove Memorial Quilt Project?
[Belle Grove] had the names of 270 people [who were enslaved at the plantation]. They wanted someone to take these names and put them into a quilt.
First, they had a local embroidery guild [with the help of community members during workshops] embroider each person’s name and, if they had it, birthdate. They hand-embroidered each and every name on blocks.
Then [Belle Grove Executive Director] Kristen [Laise] reached out to Dr. Mazloomi for some help with locating a quilter, and then Dr. Mazloomi contacted me. Ultimately, I got selected to do it [in] 2023.
What was your artistic process for this project?
The first thing I did was think, how are we going to do this in a way that honors the families? I decided early on that I was going to do something different to each block, to make the family stand out and be recognized.
I had a size constraint. [Belle Grove has] a wall that is 97 inches by 84 wide [where the quilt will be displayed]. That’s when it got really hard, because 270 is a lot of names to get within those measurements. I spent months trying to figure out what size to cut these names down to.
I asked a quilt friend to come over and look at my dilemma. Like an architect when they do a small model, we shrunk it down, like a scaled model.