By Karen LeBlanc, host of LA64, a Louisiana Travel Show on PBS
I have met a lot of organized people in my travels across Louisiana, but I am fairly certain I have never met anyone who vacuums up stray sewing thread out of pure devotion. Anne Hitt does. She told me she keeps a little handheld vacuum at her sewing table because, as it turns out, thread is a sneaky houseguest. It hitches a ride on her socks, slips down the hallway, and turns up in rooms where no sewing has happened in weeks.
Image caption: Anne Hitt at her sewing table in Lafourche Parish, surrounded by meticulously organized bins of fabric, yarn, and felt hearts.
That is the first thing you learn about Anne, a culture keeper from Lafourche Parish: nothing in her world is accidental. The fabric closets are folded by color, texture, and weight. The doll bodies, the braids, the tiny socks and boots all live in their own labeled bins, waiting to be matched up like a very tidy speed-dating event for toys. And one of her favorite ways to spend a rainy afternoon is to pull every bolt of fabric off the shelves just so she can fold it all again.
“One of my happiest pleasures is to sit in there on a rainy day, pull everything off the shelves, refold it, and reorganize it according to colors, textures, and so forth.” — Anne Hitt
I have met people who clean when they are stressed. Anne organizes for joy. And out of all that order comes some of the most generous, openhearted handwork I have come across in Louisiana.
A Bedroom Full of Dolls and Not a Duplicate in Sight
When Anne walked me into the bedroom where she keeps her finished dolls, I felt like I had stumbled into a tiny, very polite crowd. Dolls everywhere. Long-legged, bright-eyed, pigtailed dolls, each one different from the next.
Image caption: A bedroom filled with Anne’s handmade dolls, each one custom-designed with signature long legs and ponytails.
She started this particular batch at the end of October and simply has not stopped. By the time I visited, she was somewhere north of 220 dolls of her own design, on top of the 100-plus she had already made before that. When I joked that she must have run out of names somewhere around doll number 200, she laughed. Naming them is not really the point.
“They’re all custom dolls. I don’t see a duplicate anywhere.” — Anne Hitt
Each doll carries Anne’s signature touches: those long legs she decided were simply cuter, the braids and pigtails she ties off by hand, and eyes she draws on herself. Anne thought the machine-stitched eyes looked a little too grown-up. So she picked up a pen and drew them. It is a small thing, drawing the eyes by hand. But it is exactly the kind of small thing that turns a craft into a calling.
The Heartfelt Dolls of Lafourche Parish
Look closely at any one of Anne’s dolls and you will find a little felt heart stitched somewhere on its body. She calls them her “heartfelt dolls,” a pun she earned because the hearts are literally made of felt.
Anne cannot help herself when it comes to embellishment. A plain blue doll is, in her words, simply not an option. There has to be a braid, a bow, a heart, a little something extra. The solid fabrics get the most attention, because to Anne, a blank canvas is practically a dare.
Image caption: Anne’s “heartfelt” dolls, complete with hand-drawn eyes, yarn braids, and a signature felt heart.
She is the first to admit the work is fiddly. Closing up a finished doll, she told me, is the tricky part. And here is a detail I adore: in more than 50 years of sewing, Anne never learned to use a thimble. She needs to feel the fabric. So instead of a thimble, she works in a little armor of Band-Aids wrapped around the finger that takes the most abuse.
How One Little Girl Started It All
The hearts were not part of the original plan. They began with one child.
Anne told me that the friend who first invited her into the doll-making club had a young neighbor who used to help walk her dog in the afternoons. That little girl was going through chemotherapy for a brain tumor, and she asked Anne to make her a doll to bring along to her treatments.
So Anne made one. And, being Anne, she added a felt heart. The little girl looked at it and said it was perfect.
“And ever since then, I just started adding the hearts on all of them just to make them more unique to me.” — Anne Hitt
That is the moment the heartfelt dolls were born. One child, one treatment, one small heart sewn on for comfort. Now every doll Anne makes carries a piece of that story stitched right into it, whether the next child who holds it ever knows it or not.
Sewing for Relay For Life and the American Cancer Society
Anne is not making hundreds of dolls to fill a shelf. She is making them to give away. She donates her dolls to Relay For Life, the grassroots fundraising movement that supports the American Cancer Society. When she struck out on her own as a maker, she knew exactly where the dolls needed to go.
Her dolls are also headed for hospital gift shops, where they will be sold with all proceeds going to the Cancer Society, and into the hands of children in hospital wards who could use a long-legged friend with a heart on its chest.
When I asked Anne how many dolls she can finish in a day, she answered like the project manager. From scratch, cutting and stuffing and all, about ten. But she does not work that way. She spends one day cutting out bodies, heads, and arms. Another day she does nothing but make braids. Then she lines up her bins and assembles everything like a little factory of one. Once the pieces are matched and ready, she can sit down and sew about 20 dolls in a single day.
A Quilter Who Refuses to Let a Machine Do It
Before there were dolls, there were quilts. Anne’s home is full of them, and her heirloom quilts have hung in museum exhibits.
She will happily tell you that plenty of people use quilting machines these days, and that those machines turn out beautiful work. But for Anne, a machine-quilted quilt is missing something essential.
“To me, it’s not a true quilt unless it’s hand-stitched. And as long as these fingers work, I’m going to hand quilt all of my quilts.” — Anne Hitt
People ask her constantly how she can sit and stitch for that long without losing her mind. She does not understand the question. To Anne, the in-and-out rhythm of hand quilting is not boring. It is therapy.
Her design process is its own kind of wonderful. Anne does not buy fabric so much as she rescues scraps, boxes and boxes of leftovers from decades of sewing for her family. She sits on the floor surrounded by bins of cut squares and lays them out like a puzzle until a pattern pleases her. Then she photographs the layout, numbers each row, and tucks the whole thing into labeled shoeboxes, photo taped to the outside, because it might be six months before she gets back to it and she will need the reminder.
Image caption: One of Anne’s heirloom quilts, hand-stitched square by square, on display in her home.
The very first quilt she ever made, back after her senior year of high school, has more than 1,000 squares, every one sewn together and quilted by hand. Some of it is gently dry-rotting now, because her mother handed down inexpensive fabric originally bought to make the family’s Mardi Gras costumes. Anne treasures it anyway. A disintegrating quilt made of old Carnival costumes might be the most Louisiana heirloom I can imagine.
Learning to Sew in a House of Nine
Anne grew up one of nine children, and her mother sewed all of their clothes. All four sisters learned to sew. Three of them never warmed to it. Anne fell in love.
She wanted to help her mother keep the younger kids in clothes, and she stuck with it so faithfully that the family pooled their money to buy her a sewing machine of her own. Her first apartment machine was a used Singer, already 15 or 20 years old when she got it, and she ran it hard for another two decades before she finally treated herself to something newer.
She went on to sew for every niece and nephew that came along, then graduated to quilts and button-front dresses, always hunting for the next project. That hunt has never really ended.
Image caption: Anne’s heirloom quilts, the ones that have traveled to museum exhibits, carry generations of family fabric and memory.
In her family, a quilt is not a decoration. It is a rite of passage. Every niece and nephew gets one when they marry, and another when they have a baby.
“So everybody in my family has at least one quilt that, hopefully, they’ll keep to pass on to their children.” — Anne Hitt
That is the quiet engine behind everything Anne makes: the belief that something made by hand should outlive the maker.
The PE Teacher Who Got Football Players to Quilt
Here is the detail that made me grin the widest. Anne spent 33 years as a physical education teacher, and she became an accidental quilting evangelist.
It started with two fifth graders who kept wandering into her room at recess. One day they caught her flipping through a photo album of her quilts as she prepared for an exhibit, and they were hooked. They talked her into starting a quilting club at school.
After a holiday break, those same two kids walked in carrying a box tied with a ribbon. Inside was a quilt they had made themselves: squares cut out at random, stitches on the top instead of hidden away, gloriously imperfect.
“To me, this is beautiful. This is art.” — Anne Hitt
For the last decade of her teaching career, the quilting club kept going. At the end of each year the students’ names went into a drawing and someone won the quilt. Anne even arranged field trips so the kids could see their own work displayed at the library in Houma. And yes, she had football players coming in at recess to quilt.
What Anne Hitt Really Leaves Behind
Quilting dates back hundreds of years, and here is Anne Hitt, practicing it by hand in Lafourche Parish, refusing the shortcut, wrapping her fingers in Band-Aids rather than lose the feel of the cloth.
But spend an afternoon with her and you realize the craft was never really the point. The point is the niece who unwraps a wedding quilt. The football player who learns that art can come from his own hands. The child in a hospital ward who gets a long-legged doll with a little felt heart, made by a stranger who decided that child deserved something custom, something heartfelt.
Every stitch is going somewhere. Every doll is desinted for someone and every quilt is a letter to a generation she may never meet.
That is what a culture keeper does. She keeps the thread going, in and out, in and out, for as long as the fingers work.
If you know a Louisiana maker, tradition bearer, or culture keeper who deserves the spotlight, I would love to hear about them. Your story just might become my next stop.
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