The prompt was media. This one was difficult for me.  Too few ideas, too many ideas, in a creative funk? I’m not sure the reason. Did I get the idea of creating a local newspaper while visiting my parents and reading their weekly, ultra-local newspaper The Grapevine? Or is it watching my own local paper, the Mountain Democrat, all but evaporate that gave me the concept?

Local newspapers used to be THE source of community news.  It wouldn’t just be the important, earth-changing news or the crime logs; it was the small things that happened in the community that made the local paper important. There were descriptions of weddings, little league baseball team scores, and lists of students who made the honor roll at the junior high school.  It’s the kind of diverse information you would really have to search for in these days where everyone and every organization has its own website.

I have a certain fondness for The Grapevine. One of my first jobs was delivering the paper around our neighborhood. The Grapevine was free, but a 50-cent-per-month delivery payment was suggested.  50 cents.  I’m trying to remember if most people paid or not. My memory suggests it was a character-building job, not a profitable one.

I enjoyed perusing the online copies of The Grapevine, remembering businesses that had long since shuttered their doors; the opening of Highway 50 through our town, with freezing teenage girls in shorts holding the banner through which the first car drove; an announcement of a trip to Los Angeles given by our local fabric store to a couple of worthy clothing (sewing) students, and even my best friend’s wedding announcement from 40 years earlier. I wonder what people will find interesting 40 years from now, and what shape their media will take.

Once I had the idea for creating a quilt in the proportions of a newspaper, the Mountain Democrat, I had to decide what to include.  It was serendipity that I found a headline mentioning community identity that fit perfectly with Cloth in Common’s over-arching theme of community for this round.  I wanted the quilt to be black and white with a touch of red, reminiscent of the joke “What’s black and white and red/read all over?”  I also added a snippet from the website https://www.50states.com/news/ speaking to the relevance of newspapers.

For the quilting, I stitched my own masthead, divided the page into columns and created a pseudo type face by alternating a straight stitch with a modified zig-zag.

Local Newspaper
Deb Cashatt
Dimensions 18″ x 39.5″
Material: Cotton fabric, cotton batting, polyester thread.
Technique: Digitally created image printed on cotton. Machine quilted.