Behind The Seams...
It all starts in a beautiful island in the Caribbean called Puerto Rico. A little girl was born in 1978 with no idea the turns her life would take. She lived there for 18 wonderful years between sandy beaches, rice and beans and a bright sun that shined all year round.
Old San Juan street, Puerto Rico
In high school she learned to sew clothes. She was not very good at it but she enjoyed it. When she turned 18 years old, she decided to move to the land of cold snowy winters, Massachusetts, looking for better opportunities.
The road, her spine, the crash...
Massachusetts
On one of those snowy winter nights, she had a serious car accident. The diagnosis wasn't good. She suffered a spinal cord injury. She worked hard and recovered from her injuries as best as she could.
Sewing always kept her spirits up. She was using her mom's old 70's JC Penney sewing machine and one day it got tired and stopped working. She went to a sewing machine store and the owner asked her
Do you quilt?
Amazing how three little words can change your life.
The little girl bought a new sewing machine and a book called Quilting for Dummies and got to work. She discovered that what made sewing clothes hard, fitting the clothes to an actual human body, wasn't an issue in quilt making.
The recovery from her injuries wasn't easy. Many times she got depressed thinking of all the things she was able to do before that she couldn't do anymore. But little by little, sewing scraps of fabric together she realized that even though there were things she would never be able to do again, there were a lot of other wonderful, useful and beautiful things she could do.
“When life gives you scraps, make a quilt. So she did.”
Paducah
Aynex's house in Paducah
Then one day in 2004 she discovered a magical place where art and quilts came together like the Ohio and Tennessee rivers. A place called Paducah, KY.
Here she brought art to her quilts and between dogwoods and barbecue and encouraging artist friends, she became a full-time quilt artist.
Market House
Texaco Station
Chromosome - Aynex is a web designer in biotech
Maryland
Four years later, because of health reasons, she had to move closer to family in Maryland. Life happened. Quilting took a back seat. The little girl (she will always be little) got a real job, bought a real house with two real cats and lived the life a real person is supposed to live.
commute > make money > pay bills > repeat
Even though she liked her job as a web designer, something was missing.
Then a pandemic happened.
Suddenly we were all in our houses looking for things to fill the time in our calendars that a virus had cleared.
Self portrait
Little bits of fabric started to jump out of the closet were they had been hiding for years. The little girl stitched them together and started to remember how wonderful life is when you are creating something out of scraps.