By Dawn Crafts | Published Thursday, July 22, 2004
In some ways Margaret Bucklew is a stereotypical grandmother, quilting the summer hours away in her attic sewing room in Boonsville. But, across the stairwell from her sewing machines and stacks of fat quarters, amidst piles of books, paper and memorabilia, sits Margaret's husband, Phillip Bucklew at his computer.
In some ways Margaret Bucklew is a stereotypical grandmother, quilting the summer hours away in her attic sewing room in Boonsville. But, across the stairwell from her sewing machines and stacks of fat quarters, amidst piles of books, paper and memorabilia, sits Margaret's husband, Phillip Bucklew at his computer.
His hobby of surfing the Internet, along with her career as a computer graphics teacher and coordinator of the graphic communication program at Tarrant County College, have taken Margaret Bucklew's quilting into movies on the world wide Web.
After about 20 years of quilting everything from traditional queen-sized bedcovers to clothing and wall art, Margaret Bucklew's sewing has come to focus on portrait quilts (usually 16 inches by 20 inches) and webcast movies created to help to tell the stories behind them.
"I try to quilt every day, especially in the summer when I am not working," said the grandmother of six. "But the designs and movies take quite a while to put together. Sometimes we have 60 or 70 different songs or pictures to whittle down."
Phillip Bucklew usually finds the portraits on copyright free Web sites, knowing his wife's favorites are military and Native American. Once the image is scanned into Photoshop in grayscale, Margaret is ready to sew and Phillip continues with all of the research ó finding music, photographs and other images to include in the movies which Margaret said she believes help viewers to understand and relate to all of the emotion she puts into her quilting.
"Some of the quilts have special meaning for me, like the Air Force and Navy ones, because the military played a big part in my life," she said.
A portrait quilt called "the Final Salute," which features an Air Force officer in full dress uniform with a white gloved hand raised to the brim of his hat, was the inspiration for the Bucklew's first Web movie that was posted in February.
"That portrait really brought up feeling about my dad who was in the Air Force and isn't with us any more," Margaret Bucklew said. "When we posted the picture to the Web site, I told Phillip, 'If I could, I would put Taps to this.' So, he convinced me I could."
"If you just look at a quilt, it might not say as much to you as if you look at the movie and hear the story behind it," she said. "It is amazing how it all works together."
Sometimes.
"I would like to do a story for every one of my quilts, but some don't lend themselves well to it. And there are others that I just haven't gotten around to," Margaret Bucklew said.
Meanwhile, Phillip Bucklew grinned like a child playing with a favorite toy when he talked with enthusiasm about a portrait quilt of a third-generation police officer. He is looking forward to setting it to the tune of "Bad Boys."
He was more somber about researching another project. One of the military portrait quilts led to research about his own family member who served and died.
"I was in Oklahoma looking for a photograph when I called a friend who lives next to my grandmother. She told me to talk to some cousins that I had forgotten all about," he said. "When I first got the photograph of Ernest Dean, I cried."
The quilts and movies have stirred others' emotions, too.
"We got a letter from a lady that we never met. She was moved by our movies and remembering those she loved and lost at Pearl Harbor," Phillip Bucklew said.
Although Margaret loves the military-related projects and Native American portraits, she said she feels a bit guilty about not yet using her talents to capture the images of her grandchildren.
"I have to get busy doing my grandchildren," she said. "My children have been kind not asking, but I suppose I need to start. But since they are always changing, I don't know when or where to start."
