Valerie Miller Villafane & Mary Anne Ciccotelli

Valerie Miller Villafane and Mary Anne Ciccotelli discuss the power of fabric and quilts as they are passed from one generation to the next. The interview with Valerie Miller Villafane was recorded on January 12, 2020 at the ArtsWestchester building in White Plains, NY. The interview with Mary Anne Ciccotelli was recorded on February 29th at the Pelham Arts Center in Pelham, NY.
Podcast audio with images at: https://youtu.be/ihp-yoEE6uA

Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

Sewing Community is part of ArtsWestchester's Folk Arts Program, made possible in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.   

Transcript

1:28
I’m Valerie Miller Villafane. I was born in Minnesota, grew up in South Dakota, came out here almost 30 years ago. In both my family and my husband’s family, I become the keeper of fabrics. As the older women are getting close to end-of-life and know that they want to pass on their prized fabric to someone that actually cares…I get both the fabric and the china. It’s a real treasure to have that. I have my husband’s grandmother’s little singer sewing machine, which she used to sew matching dresses for her and her sister. I have some of the fabric scraps of that. To me, its relaxing, it’s comforting. You can actually do something that stays done as opposed to the day jobs that all of us have. We can work on something, you wind up having to address it again…do it over. But with fabric, once you finish a valance, a quilt, a bed covering, a skirt, it stays done and it is a very gratifying feeling. 

One of the pieces that is out here, part of it was made into a tea cozy for a friend of mine that is British and was despairing of American’s not having tea cozies. So I had made a big round tea cozy with ribbon to tie around so she could keep her teapot hot. And other pieces have little memories. There are scraps leftover from when I made little pinafores for my nieces. They loved pink and purple. Now they hate it as teenagers. They think it is despicable that anyone would have loved those colors. I’ve got planet fabric that my mom had gotten for my son to make a quilt that he still uses in the summertime. The matching green fabric that was pillowcases and the underside of the quilt. There is not enough to do anything like a full quilt but there is enough for this project. There is also burgundy red with gold stars that I had used to make a teepee for my nieces. There was too little left to make anything else. That’s inone of the panels. It is amazingly gratifying to walk in here and see fabric and go “Oh! That was in Heather’s pinafore. Oh! That’s in so and so’s!”  And now it’s going to go on the building and have a new life. It’s just a fabulous project, because not only are we using fabric that has sat on people’s shelves for years, but we are also getting people in the community talking. I’ve exchanged phone numbers with at least five people here today, which I think is a fabulous way of building connections. 

Going back in time, my great grandmother was in the mid-West at the point in time of the depth of the depression. Everything was used. Her name was written on railcars in the mid-west…at this mile marker in North Dakota get off, walk X miles North and Mary would feed you. And not only would she feed you, she made everything—shirts for her husband, quilts…we have quilts from her era. Over time, her daughter, my grandmother, went to classes to learn how to make tailoring. So she would buy good wool, tailor a winter coat. In the mid-West, it had to be heavy. So you would have lamb’s wool inside as a lining, plus the liner. As a small child, she would teach us how to do the hand stitching to get the collar to roll, how to do the cuffs on it. And then over time, growing up we were very very poor. So a wonderful event in the summer was called crazy days, where everyone would sell things at a very low price and my mother would buy fabric for a penny an inch. So it would be 36 cents for a yard of fabric. That would be our stock up and we would be making our clothes off of that fabric. My mom sewed, whether it was skirts, dresses, shirts…I made shirts for my younger brothers. That was a tradition carried on in the family. I remember the first time I had something store bought that no one had ever worn before. It was usually made by my mom. As small children we were given fabric scraps, a long string of thread tied onto a needle, and we would “sew” clothes for our dolls, but it would be permanently sewn onto the doll. If we wanted to change the clothes we would use scissors and cut it off. Then as you get older, you learn how to set in the sleeves, do all of those things. And my mother who did not want us to look like we were poor and wearing homemade stuff, was meticulous on details. The hem needed to be straight. After supper in the night, she would have us put on a skirt or dress and we would stand up on the table and she would use the yard stick and then move our leg to turn to make sure the skirt hem, or whatever it was we were wearing, was straight.  So by the time we actually learned to sew, formally in school in home economics, we had learned far more from mom and grandma. 

6:16 
Mary Anne Ciccotelli. I grew up in Rexburg, Idaho and currently I live in Pelham, New York. I’ve been here in New York for 20+ years. I grew up…my mother was really into sewing. Probably some of the youngest memories I have of quilting is she would put up a quilt on the quilting frames and invite women over to quilt. I remember going underneath and playing under the quilting frame. And we would hit the quilt and they would be quilting by hand and they wouldn’t like it because then they’d prick their fingers with the needles. I have six generations of quilts in my home. I have my great grandmother’s quilt, the quilts my grandmother made for me, quilts that my mother made, quilts that I’ve made, a couple of quilts that my daughters have made, and a quilt that my granddaughter made when she was 5 years old. So six generations.  I started sewing when I was in third grade. Once thing I remember is my mother would always unpick my mistakes. She would send me outside to play, take my mistakes out…so I had a real positive experience. As time went along, I thought that I needed something unpicked but my mother didn’t so then I had to start unpicking for myself. 

teach children’s sewing classes after school during the school year. So kids from seven years on up though high school come and can attend sewing classes. They come for an hour at a time. In my basement there’s six sewing machines set up so there can be six kids in the class. It’s a self-paced program so I can have beginner students with advanced students. And it really is fun as the older students, the ones who have been there little bit longer, can then turn around when I am helping someone else, and if somebody needs help they start helping the younger students. That’s when you are like “they really get this.” It is a real creative process. Sometimes it is a creative process and sometimes it is very therapeutic to sit at the sewing machine and put it through. Three months ago I had a total knee replacement and a couple of weeks after that I was sewing and I was trying to do something…I was trying to work on these pajama quilt blocks and it was just too creative.  I wasn’t physically ready to do that. So I pulled out another project that was just putting squares together and it was just therapeutic to sit there and hear the hum of the machine and see the colors come together. I did that and I called that quilt “color therapy” because it has all these bright colors.