Latifah Saafir has been sewing since she was a little girl. Her passion and enthusiasm for making quilts shines through each of her pieces. Her quilting style is bold, modern and timeless. And, she helped establish the Modern Quilt Guild!
1. Tell us about how you started quilting and how you found modern quilting.
I’ve been sewing since I was a little girl – garment sewing mostly. My mom who hated to sew had the foresight to teach me how to sew when I was 6 or 7 years old. I’ve always loved quilts but was always intimidated by them. I was the weird 15 year old that checked out quilt books from the library to just look at them. I’m not quite sure why I was intimidated because I was fearless with garment sewing making everything from my suit that I interviewed in when I graduated college to my Mom’s wedding dress for my folk’s 30th anniversary. It wasn’t until I saw a friends quilt in 2009 though that I realized that I NEEDED to start quilting. Seeing her quilt made quilting accessible to me for the first time in my life. It was made from re-purposed clothing and whatever fabric she had, the batting was a old blanket. And, for the first time, I saw quilting as something that I could actually do!
After being inspired to quilt, of course I started to explore the very active online modern quilt community . At that time everyone had a blog and the Flickr community was active. Can you say the Fresh Modern Quilts group on Flickr? The online community was also where I met Alissa through her blog and came up with the idea to form the Modern Quilt Guild.
2. What does it mean to you to be a modern quilter and a modern woman?
Sewing has always been an important part of my life and my creative outlet. It has always been a part of me. So, quilting is just a very natural extension of who I am.
The title modern quilter sits comfortably with me. Modern quilting is defined by both an aesthetic as well as an attitude and I think I embody both of those in my work. But, ultimately I just consider myself a quilter. I love, love, love what we have been able to do in the modern quilt community. I love the new energy, the vibrancy of the quilts and the fact that we are bringing quilting to future generations. But, I do hate that a lot of the quilt community still looks at it as a divisive term. I see it as an expanding and dynamic term that hopefully will evolve as we evolve as quilters and as a quilt community.
3. Which quilt that you have made represents you and why?
That’s a difficult question. After my first two quilts, every quilt that I have made has been a quilt that I designed. It would be difficult to pick one quilt that I have made that represents me. The quilts that most closely represent me are quilts that were designed from an idea or a concept that I had to explore to see if it were a viable quilt idea. An example of that would be my quilt Convergence where I had to idea to top stitch bias tape and use it as the primary element in a modern quilt design. Or, my Glam Clam quilt pattern where I started off with a concept of blowing up a traditional quilt design to 8″, adding tabs, and machine piecing it instead of the traditional hand piecing. Then, it morphed into a method for being able to piece it without pins. Then it grew bigger into a 12″ version. Now, I’m working on the next iteration of Glam Clam quilts.
I’m rarely surprised by my quilts. My designs are almost always fully fleshed out in my head before I start piecing them and they almost always look like what I envisioned. I now include a step in between my head and the quilt and sketch out what I see in my head on my computer. I guess I’m sometimes surprised how much they look exactly like the sketches!
I must add here I don’t enjoy the actual process of sewing. In many ways it is a means to an end. It is my means of expressing myself artistically and a necessary evil which I know is very unlike many in our community. I WISH sewing soothed and comforted me. But, the satisfaction that I get from seeing my ideas come to life is worth the process.
4. How do you connect with other modern quilters? What does it mean to you to have this sisterhood of modern women?
I co-founded the Modern Quilt Guild and was president of the Los Angeles Modern Quilt Guild for the first 3 plus years of it’s existence. The LAMQG is my quilt home. Some of my closest friends are from this organization. Unfortunately work and life have taken me away from being in attendance regularly. But, I do make time outside of events to see my quilt family. I still rely heavily on the online community though. I’m most active on Instagram and use it daily for inspiration and to stay connected.
I am the only person that I know of out of living relatives that quilt but, I understand my paternal great-grandmothers both quilted. My 93 year old grandfather tells stories about how his mom would get together with her friends and they would work on one person’s quilt at a time. They would sit around this quilt frame that somehow hung from the ceiling and chew tobacco and gossip and hand quilt. The “batting” was just cotton that was beat into flat sheets. And how the “modern” quilt design that was all the rage at the time was what he calls the Dutch Girl, which I know of as the Sunbonnet Sue pattern. It all makes me feel connected and realize that nothing is really new.