I am GenQ: Life in the City for Cherri House

Cover from the 2010 City Quilts by Cherri House

What started out as a conversation about the path from traditional to contemporary quilt designs ended up as something so much more when Cherri House, author of the award-winning City Quilts by Stash Books, spoke openly about her challenges with chronic pain and depression and how quilting helps heal.

Last February, Cherri awoke to a blaze of pain in her head and it hasn’t gone away since. She was diagnosed with occipital neuralgia, a condition where a nerve that runs along Cherri’s skull is inflamed for some unknown reason and causes severe headaches. Treatments involving injections to numb the nerve haven’t helped.

“It’s so discouraging. It drains me of all of my energy. It’s horrible to be in pain all of the time,” she says.

All this comes at a time when she’s pulling together quilts for a new book. Cherri says she can see changes in her work, reflective of the challenges she’s faced lately.

“My work has changed,” Cherri says. “I don’t know if I’m in a different place mentally. They are not the same quilts that are in the first book. I had been going through all of these really really hard things before I finally broke and I think it’s reflective in my work.”

The break Cherri talks about is when, on her doctors’ recommendation, she admitted herself into a mental health hospital. There she was diagnosed with a major depressive disorder. Cherri speaks openly about her struggles with depression, saying it’s been a lifelong issue she’s managed to control through a trying childhood, abusive marriage and life as a divorced mom with four children. But the chronic pain of the last months has left her unable to manage her depression. Medication has been the answer and while the pain is still present, she’s now better able to navigate her daily life. Quilting, always a solace for Cherri, is back in her life.

“Quilting saved me. After I got a divorce, I couldn’t touch fabric for a year. I was in such a funk. I was shell-shocked from everything that happened and I couldn’t do this thing that I loved the most. I worked my way back to being alive again from quilting and from my religious beliefs. That’s how I became grounded.”

Cherri’s known for her graphic quilts, made mostly from solids or fabrics that “read” as solids, such as blenders, tone-on-tones, hand-dyes and batiks. Inspiration for her first book came from her hometown of Houston and it’s downtown city vistas complete with skyscrapers. In fact, it was a visit to the International Quilt Festival several years ago that permanently changed Cherri and her quilts.

City News on display at International Quilt Market, May 2008 in Portland, Oregon.

“There was just this incredible moment at the Houston quilt show with an Amish on display from the 1800s. It had these purples, blues and greens and looking at it was truly a life-changing moment. I’d never seen anything that glowed so much, that had so much life to it. And I said, ‘I’m going to do this,’” she says.

But working with solids after a lifetime of prints was no easy switch for Cherri. It took her a couple of years and several ugly quilts before she finally hit her solid stride.

“I tried to make a quilt like I would make it in prints and then I would make it in solids and it was this hideously ugly stark thing,” she says. “I studied a lot of photos from Amish books and it finally started coming together. For me when I finally knew that I had it right was when I made City News. I knew that I had reached a new place in my work.”

That was around 2008 and she hasn’t stopped yet.

Cherri founded the Houston chapter of the Modern Quilt Guild, but considers herself a contemporary quilter. She works traditional quilt patterns and blocks into more modern looks with the use of solids, clever arrangements and bold colors.

“You can look at old Amish quilts and you wouldn’t know that they weren’t contemporary works of art. I always define myself as doing traditional quilts in a contemporary style. I’m just doing my own thing now. I don’t look at a lot of other people’s work. I don’t want to be accused of taking other people’s ideas or copying.”

City Aviation works with traditional Flying Geese and Pinwheel blocks but in a contemporary manner.

Doing her own thing has always been a part of Cherri’s design process. Cherri is dyslexic and reading patterns to recreate quilts brought its own set of challenges. It was much easier to design her own quilts. She’s sewn all of her life, calling herself one in a long line of pioneer Mormon women for whom quilting runs through the blood. But it was when she faced life single and wanted to help her oldest daughter, Lizzie House, in her business that she turned her stitching into a career.

It’s that do-it-your-way attitude that Cherri hopes she passes onto those who buy her patterns and books. She also hopes that today’s newer quilters look more closely at the traditional quilts and learn from them.

“Stop blocking yourself from seeing beyond this ugly thing your grandmother might have had on the bed. Look and then go beyond it,” she advises.

As to her health, Cherri says that while her struggles with pain continue, that she’s also found blessings these last few months she wouldn’t have otherwise found. She’s starting to look into Eastern medicine to seek some relief and she’ll continue to design and quilt. She hopes that others with similar issues will draw some inspiration to be open about their own pain and depression and find help.

“I’m not a quitter and I’ve persevered. And I will make incredible work. I’m not ashamed,” she says.