ARLEE — You can always see the stars in Arlee. The stellar bodies fall from the scissors of Jan Charlo on a regular basis, landing as multicolored patterns on satin and cotton quilts created by hand by the talented craftswoman.
Charlo began quilting over thirty years ago, when her first babies were born. Through the years her hobby evolved into a business, and expanded to include creation of fancy dance shawls and grass dance outfits for powwow participants.
Her niece gets the credit for the star shawls that are her specialty.
“One of my nieces designed a shawl with stars on it and asked me to make it. People saw it and wanted more,” Charlo said.
The outfits then become family heirlooms. “My outfits get passed down for years,” she said. “They’re made to last.”
Charlo estimates she’s made over 200 outfits for local and national dancers. Most all the work is bought by Native Americans.
“Very rarely do I sell to non-members,” Charlo said.
Still, the distribution goes beyond the confines of the Salish and Kootenai reservation.
“I make a lot of stuff that’s sent all over the country,” she said.
That has been changing, though, as the advertising rates in a national Native arts magazine Charlo used to run ads in have skyrocketed.
“It used to be affordable but now it’s gone up too high,” she said.
It’s a loss for her business. “I used to get thirty calls a month.” Though not all the calls turned into orders, the work was steady.
But when her mom got ill, then suffered injuries in a car accident, Charlo’s life focus necessarily changed. “I had the responsibility of caring for her as she got more and more helpless.”
After her mom entered a nursing home, Charlo moved to South Dakota for four years.
“That’s a sad place,” she said.
“It’s a hard place to be a kid. It’s a hard place to be a teacher,” said Charlo, who taught in the Pine Ridge reservation schools.
She might still be there, as she loved working with the children, but she said, “My grandkids were getting old enough to use the telephone, and they’d call and ask me to come over and have a tea party. They didn’t understand I was so far away.”
“It became more and more apparent I needed to come home. I didn’t want my grandkids to grow up without their grandma.”
Charlo decided, “It’s time to turn efforts to home.” She now has four grandchildren, whom she adores.
It was the right move for her.
“I belong here,” she said.
Charlo works out of the small cabin where she raised her four children those many years ago. Her grandkids’ toys are scattered throughout the house and through the yard, attesting to their grandmother’s devotion. And everywhere, there are the bright hues of summer flowers represented in fabric being worked.
Quilt backs drape chairs, the antique sewing machine in the living room has pieces to be sewn and the quilting machine, where Charlo creates her characteristic puffy cloud design on the tops, is covered over by a huge picture quilt in progress.
The quilting, stitching that binds the layers of fabric and batting together, used to be done by hand. But years ago, thanks to a small business loan that targeted entrepreneurial businesswomen, Charlo was able to purchase a machine quilter. It allows her to make thicker, comforter-style quilts.
“That’s one of my trademarks, thicker, puffier quilts,” Charlo said.
People are pleased by the thickness, she said, and Charlo’s work is often given as a wedding or graduation gift to young people starting their own households.
Most of Charlo’s quilts carry her trademark star. The image is a common icon in Native American culture.
“Just as Native American men took to the horse, Native Plains women took the star quilt pattern and made it their own,” Charlo’s business brochure explains.
Star quilts, Charlo said, have “become very significant to Native Americans, replacing the buffalo robe” in ceremonial giveaways.
“In Plains tribes it is a necessary thing for births and deaths,” she added.
For Charlo, though, it was a family occurrence that brought her the star.
“When Vic’s mom died, I was given this star, and eventually I found someone to show me how to make a top.
It took many, many years to hand quilt it.”
That could have been the end of her experience with the star, but in 1993, Charlo needed a number of quilts for a giveaway, so she made star quilts. And she used one as a backdrop for some photos of children she took while teaching.
That quilt caught the eye of a parent who offered to buy it, and Charlo, by now a single mom, realized her talent could be used as a source of income for her family.
Charlo uses the strip quilting method to make her stars, where strips of different colored fabrics are sewn together to make a square. Those squares are then cut along the diagonal to make a series of diamonds, which in turn are pieced together to make the large eight-pointed stars that top the quilts.
She uses the same method to create the less common picture quilts.
The picture quilts, Charlo said, take much more time and concentration.
Because the pattern does not repeat in a picture quilt, but needs to vary strip by strip, each strip needs to be sewn individually, planned in advance. Those strips are also made of half-diamonds, to try to smooth the points that occur when designing with only straight lines.
As a result, Charlo only makes the picture quilts to order.
Her favorite design she calls “Gold Buckle.” The image was designed for a woman bronc rider in the 1940’s, and was given to her by an elderly South Dakota woman about 15 years ago. She now makes the bronc-riding “Gold Buckle” on request, usually for a rodeo rider.
Currently, Charlo is busy making baby quilts. One, a springtime satin of greens and pinks speaks of the softness of a new baby girl.
And then there’s all that Thomas the Tank Engine material on the table.
“That’s for my grandson,” Charlo said. “He’s just obsessed.”
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