City dwellers Jane Guillory and Valerie Lopez don’t let a little thing like not owning a car slow them down. The sisters, natives of Louisiana but long-time residents of San Francisco, each have a brood of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and all kinds of extended family members. They spend their days riding the buses to visit their relatives all over the Bay Area, as well as to shop, or to go to Petaluma to have their hand-sewn quilts machine-quilted.
Jane and Valerie both favor Japanese-print fabrics, and both have made multiple quilts with kimono designs and geishas in them. Recently, though, Jane brought me a little boy quilt, the center of which included a panel with pictures of trucks. She surrounded the panel with squares of print fabrics that would delight a little boy. When I asked her who the lucky little man was, she said, “My niece’s foster child.”
He is actually her niece’s foster grandchild. Jane’s niece, Mary, raised a foster child named Ramira, who was a crack baby. Ramira was never placed into an adoptive home, so Mary has been her only mother. Now 22 years old, Ramira has produced two children of her own, a girl and a boy. Unfortunately, Ramira is mentally unstable; she has effectively abandoned the children, although she lives under the same roof with them in Mary’s home. Mary is raising the 3-year-old girl and 1-year-old boy as a foster mother. Jane sewed a quilt for the girl a couple of years ago; now she has made a quilt for the boy.
Last week I listened to a presentation by a quilter who started a program called “Foster a Dream,” which connects quilters with foster children. She emphasized how much it means to a foster child to receive a quilt that someone sewed especially for him or her because often that child has nothing of his own. More about that in a future posting. Meanwhile, it’s reassuring to know that my warm-hearted friends Jane and Valerie are looking out for children who need someone to love them.
