I feel our First Amendment freedoms are under attack, and they are slowly fading. I made this quilt to look at the words carefully and to remind me and viewers what the amendment plainly says. It gives rights to the people against government censorship and prohibits the government from preventing us from protesting peaceably.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
My quilt, Shaft Mines, won Talcon Quinn’s Juror Award at Fibers of Appalachia. This exhibition is at Dairy Barn Arts Center in Athens, Ohio through August 30, 2026.
Shaft Mines
This is what Talcon Quinn had to say about the Juror Award:
This was my artist’s statement:
I made this quilt for the Pantone Color of the Year Quilt Challenge. I knew I had a box of scraps in this color and similarly-colored scraps. I wanted it to feel moody like the artwork from Pantone website. Half way through the process it began to look like a geological dig. I started calling it Shaft Mines. I grew up in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. My father and brother are coal miners. They haven’t worked in shaft mines, but drift mines. In a shaft mines, there is a vertical entry from the surface into the coal seam— think elevator. In a drift mines, you enter the mountain at an incline— think tunnel or mouth. This quilt feels like both. Because I was using black, I worried it wasn’t magenta enough. I worried it was too chaotic. I worried my worries would prevent me from finishing it. I tinkered until I gave up. The quilting in straight lines rescued it for me. I love how the dark pink stitches give order to the chaos. I used 8 weight thread in part of it. My machine didn’t like it so I switched to 50 weight in different pinks.
My submission also included information about my connection to Appalachia:
I grew up in the mountains of Southwest Virginia where I was exposed to delicious country cooking and lived in a coal mining community. My father was a coal miner and my mother was a hairdresser. She was also an amazing seamstress. She taught me to sew. MY JOURNEY into quilting began when my mother became disabled with breast cancer and I was home with her. She had just purchased a new sewing machine, a Bernina 1630. She was starting to make more quilts, and while I was struggling with her pending death, I made a traditional quilt: Bow Ties. Years later I donated the quilt to charity. I took a break from quilting for many years (went to law school, started a legal career). In 2014 I discovered modern and liberated quilting and began designing my own quilts. My quilts draw upon my family’s history and my journeys.
My husband and I started an exercise program called Couch Potato to 5K this past summer. It’s a phone app. The app starts with a warm up, followed by one-minute runs and one-and-half minute walks. During our “training” one morning, I commented that “little by little” we would reach our goal– just like quilting. To document our progress, I made a small block representing how far we had gone each day.
But, once football practice started, we stopped running and we didn’t run a 5K. I did, however, make a quilt with the ones I had pieced. Five weeks of running! With such small piecing, resulting in bulk, I struggled with the quilting and used only a few straight lines for each row.
It finished at 26″ by 31″. I entered it into QuiltCon 2019, small quilts category, and it was accepted.
![Couch to 5K detail view[3172]](https://wandadotson.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Couch-to-5K-detail-view3172.jpg)
