Looking Up to Emma Bell Miles

I've been working on my Take It Further Challenge this cold snowy morning. January's theme, "Who do you look up to?" made me think about making a memory quilt, with each block devoted to a different person. Aside from a family memory quilt, (which is what people usually make, and for which I've been saving fabric mementos for many years), I think a quilt devoted to my favorite naturalists would be fun.

I picked Emma Bell Miles for my first sampler block. She haunts me for several reasons. She had a short life of trouble. Only surviving child of Yankee missionaries in the South after the Civil War, she never fit in with her parents' set, the poor mountaineers they evangelized, or the more prosperous "artistes" who may have stolen some of her work. She seems to me a sad shadow of her contemporary, Pearl Buck, who prospered in spite of her missionary parents and the difficult road they set her on.

I have copies of Miles' books, Spirit of the Mountains and Our Southern Birds, as well as Kay Baker Gaston's biography, Emma Bell Miles. I want to use images from these books in my sampler block.

These are "Web-ified" versions of the images I selected and scanned for my project. The first is a photo of Mrs. Miles, in her early thirties, taken in 1912. The picture is printed on the back cover of Ms. Gaston's biography. The second is the cover of Spirit of the Mountains, and the last two are from Our Southern Birds. The frontispiece is the painting of the Fox Sparrow, and the "Bird Map" is meant to teach descriptive terms to the young birders for whom the book was intended.