“Living life backwards makes a lot of sense to me.” When the Schmidts moved to Wilmington, Hattie taught school for another 28 years at Trask Middle and Laney High schools. An abstract black, white and gray scale quilt tells the story of her retirement and her expectations of having discretionary income and time to do the things she loves. Instead, paper money flies out of the window. It illustrates a hobby, playing the piano, something she picked up from her father. But the subject is not lost on the medium. “I wanted to learn to bead so I put in a beaded face,” she says. The only blaze of color, stitched into the lower right corner, is a red rectangle with gold lettering. “I’m a Delta Sigma Theta,” she says, interpreting the Greek symbols of the sorority grounded in public service outreach to her African-American community. Hattie is working on another self-portrait quilt. She says it’s a spiritual piece featuring cursive writing. “They stopped teaching cursive writing in the schools,” she says. “I read that in China their writing is very important to their culture.” Framed with cloth that represents cathedral stained-glass win-dowpanes, Plantation fabric and stippled moving water frame this story quilt. The background is a photograph of Greenfield Lake on which Hattie Schmidt painted a tree in which a runaway slave hid. Side panels feature traditional quilt symbols, like flying geese and the North star. The snake is made from Gullah fabric. 28 WBM march 2014 Hattie explains, “My name is Hattie so you see Hattie all in there.” She shares a hand-painted self-portrait panel. Her cursive signature — Hattie Schmidt — is entwined in her hair and appears along the edges of the portrait outlined in bold strokes of yellow. She plans to attach her haloed self-portrait to the stained-glass fabric, along with Biblical proverbs. “I have already chosen some of the proverbs that I’m going to use. I’m going to put the proverbs in script, in cursive,” she says. She pauses, taps the teacher in her. “I’m telling these kids: ‘Living life backwards makes a lot of sense to me. If you had known what you know now, how different you would be in some things.’” Finding the right fabrics to express her design, machine stitching the pieces together, adding her idiomatic decorative stippling, and hand-crocheted stitches, can take more than a year sometimes. Her daughter brings her fiber panels from foreign countries. A rice husking batik from Mali is showcased in a Gullah quilt, one of many in a pile of quilts draped across a table in her living room filled with keepsakes and icons. “My husband says the house is a museum. It becomes part of living and I enjoy everything I have,” Hattie says. One is a gift from Mexico, a Frida Kahlo self-portrait transferred to fabric. It sits at eye level on a living-room chair, where Hattie can study it from her wing back. One day the Kahlo will become the centerpiece in one of Hattie’s story quilts, but Hattie’s not sure if she wants to tell Frida’s story or the story of the artist’s symbolism. “I have to dream it or think it … and then it comes together,” she says. A Hattie Schmidt’s memory quilt depicts Seabreeze, a popular African-American nightclub that was once located north of Carolina Beach.
2014-3
To see the actual publication please follow the link above