I’ve Seen The Mermaids Singing

“I like color: white and pink and blue and yellow. Something loud. So I thought, an island. I’ll put them on an island.”

Barbara Coleman is explaining how a quilt is made. Not only made, but conceived, constructed, corrected, and finished.  Barbara is a member of the Madonna Quilters, and their work was on display at the San Francisco Quilters Guild 2009 quilt show at the Concourse Exhibition Center last weekend. The group includes residents, house social workers, and program volunteers.

All of the Madonna quilts in the Guild show are mermaid quilts. The group decided to do mermaid quilts from Laurel Burch’s mermaid fabric after quilt artist Jeanne Jacobson shared her mermaid quilt from Laurel Burch’s fabric design.

After Laurel Burch, the resemblance ends. Each quilt is a picture of mermaids and the sea, made from innumerable different fabric sources: an aqua water pattern, several fish patterns, and a fabric with palm trees.  Some of the women have stitched on embroidery thread for hair, sequins for eyes or scales, fuzzy yarn for sand, shells as abstract borders or as inhabitants of the underwater kingdom.

Gretchen Nelson included humans swimming around her mermaid. Molly Wu’s quilt is threaded with fabric showing notes on music staves because mermaids sing.

Barbara’s mermaids have yarn hair. One of her fish has sequin eyes; another has a tiny toy eye that showed up in the donated materials. Barbara is from New Orleans. Crystals dot the water in a very Louisiana take on mermaids: “I thought of the fireflies on the water,” she says.