Quilting: another way of communicating and teaching girls symbols

My grandma lived in Los Angeles and had a 'quilting room.' Yes, it seems like a bit of an oxymoron, as it never gets THAT cold that you'd need heaps and heaps of quilts lying around. However, she started two quilting groups in the LA area (that had over 30 members each) and would meet twice a month with them.
When I would come visit her, she immediately started to get me to learn how to sew. I was able to stitch by the age of 7, and played with her sewing machine, making little quilts for my dolls.
Quilting for her wasn't about being domestic, it was about teaching stories, patterns, and even archetypes and connotations. She'd ask which colors seemed to go together, and why, and would make quilts based on her 'moods' and moods of people, but never really had a story to go along with it. It was just something that was therapeutic, kept her busy, and was a way to bond with her grandchildren and impart lessons to them that no other family member would be able to teach them.

One quote that struck me in our readings for today, was from the "I Remember Mamma" reading. "These mnemoic devise foreground memory-making as a complex multimodal endeavor...as understanding of rhetoricians like Jannette Miller as 'craftsmen' not only draws attention to memory-making as a mulitmodal endavor but, like the argument for rhetoric as design, potentially challenges  an understanding ofrhetoricla activity as a linear process," (371).

Of the two personally made quilts from my Grandma I received growing up, one quilt was patterned with a bunch of hearts, the other quilt was of 'girlhood' images (I'll post pictures of these under this blog once I figure out how to upload these pictures). The only inscriptions given were really straight and to the point, "to Christine, made by her grandma, year such and such." When she presented me with the quilts, (one in '94, and one in '97) she merely said it was something she wanted to make, so we could "treasure it" for years to come.

The quilt to me, is a symbol of rhetoric that my grandma was imparting that she loved us, wanted to nuture us and was a token of providing comfort to us. When she died, I spent a few days just wrapped up in my quilt able to find relief that this rhetoric we had was not of imparting any stories, but imparting symbols that we both cared for eachother.