I never hold my own quilts, preferring to be the one behind the camera, taking the shots. But we had a photo shoot for Amarysso, my latest finish, and we traded places. Here’s some more photos, next to two wonderful murals in our mid-town area. Okay, now Dave will hold it:
The back is a random print from the stash, with a rod pocket of Tula.
What does amarysso mean? It means “to sparkle.” It’s one of the root words for Amaryllis, the name of the fabric used for our quilt guild challenge, designed by Philip Jacobs.
Now me:
And we’ll give Dave the last shot:
My husband is a mural-and-art spotter for our town. He has a blog with lots of posts of murals and sculptures and interesting art, and was written up in our city’s newspaper. He started this project after he retired, and it just sort of morphed into his site Murals and Art. The thing that is keen about this is that whenever I need a backdrop for a quilt photo, I just go to his blog, point, and say, “Take me There.”
Thirty-four years ago, I pointed to the future and said “Take me There.” And he did, me and my four children, now *our* four children. This past weekend, we went to the wedding of our granddaughter, child of the little girl you see in the photo. In June, we went to the marriage of our grandson, child of the boy with the black tie on the left. We have a granddaughter on a mission for our church in Argentina, and yesterday, she just turned 20. And I wish I knew where that pink ribbon sash was that’s hooked around my waist (when I had one). I sewed it out of imported French ribbons, to accent my dress, also handmade. And where did the time go?
I’ll celebrate that evening by meeting with the Creatives, my name for our little group that gets together monthly for crafting, sewing, talking, sharing, whatever. It had gone defunct right before covid of its own volition, but we think we want to get together again. It will probably be a different, smaller bunch than who was here last go-round, but under the alchemy of Time, things do change.
We live in the now, framed by the past, and guided by the future. Just like my Dave and I.
The most recent newlyweds at their bridal photo shoot
What is the difference between achievement and accomplishment? asked Adam Gopnick. That question has set me thinking about it ever since. We quilters work hard to get our quilts finished, our patches pieced and all the little scraps of fabric marching in order toward our vision. Are we achieving? Or are we accomplishing?
class taught for South Bay Quilters
“Achievement,” writes Gopnick, “is the completion of a task imposed from outside — the reward often being a path to the next achievement. Accomplishment is the end point of an engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the sudden rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.”
“Our social world often conspires to denigrate accomplishment in favor of the rote work of achievement,” write Gopnik, and many of us are “perpetually being pushed toward the next test or the “best” grammar school, high school or college they can get into.” The result of this is that we drive the young (and maybe ourselves) toward achievement, toward “tasks that lead only to other tasks.”
Guild challenge fabric in front
Our Guild recently handed out their yearly challenge fabric, chosen by someone who loves purple:
While the challenge (due in September) is divided up into four categories (wallhangings/runners, quilts, wearables, bags/totes), for me the real challenge was working with this fabric.
Challenge accepted. When I was in Utah, I stopped by The Quilters Lodge and they helped me pick out some hues not readily observable, as well as a bold and sassy turquoise polkadot. Was this merely another task that led onto a task, “the point of it all never made plain,” as Gopnik asks?
I remember that Bonnie Hunter, master of the scrap quilt, always said that if a fabric is ugly to you, then you haven’t cut it up into small enough pieces. I didn’t find the fabric ugly — no Philip Jacobs fabric ever is, to my way of thinking. But the colors were definitely a challenge. So…I cut it up small. I chose one of my older patterns that I’d had previously published in Simply Moderne to be my guide through this. It has never been published as a stand-alone pattern, and I knew it was really versatile and strong enough to handle any fabric thrown at it. And it was fast and easy…also a requisite for this Guild challenge, to my way of thinking.
This could have been a series of exercises, dictated-from-the-outside, as so many guild challenges are. I’ve seen some so constrained that it really is ridiculous: how many of you have done the “crayon” challenge, or the “scraps in paper bag” challenge, or the “page number in a magazine” challenge? (However constraining, I happen to like that one.)
But on the other hand, says Gopnik, we’ll head towards accomplishment by looking at this big self-assigned task and “breaking it down into small, manageable tasks” that later lead to the final result. This experience of breaking down, then building up can also inform later professional work, even leading to a vocation. And my guess is that Gopnik meant these as self-directed tasks, with enough time and little enough direction, so that we can roam far and wide and back again in order to find that accomplishment.
“Self-directed accomplishment, no matter how absurd it may look to outsiders or how partial it may be, can become a foundation of our sense of self and of our sense of possibility. Losing ourselves in an all-absorbing action, we become ourselves.” (from here)
I spent the better part of a day cutting, arranging, sewing, finishing the top in a short amount of time. I recognize that I now have the opportunity to do that, and the support of my family. It was not always so easy, and when I was in graduate school (can we say “outside task” to “outside task” to “outside task”?) trying to get a degree so I could launch my professional life, I didn’t sew or quilt for two years. But I returned to it, and when I retired from teaching, my days of quilting — coupled with my education — allowed me to move into teaching Guilds, and writing this blog (“inside” tasks).
“Pursuit of a resistant task, if persevered in stubbornly and passionately at any age, even if only for a short time, generates a kind of cognitive opiate that has no equivalent. There are many drugs that we swallow or inject in our veins; this is one drug that we produce in our brains, and to good effect. The hobbyist or retiree taking a course in batik or yoga, who might be easily patronized by achievers, has rocket fuel in her hands. Indeed, the beautiful paradox is that pursuing things we may do poorly can produce the sense of absorption, which is all that happiness is, while persisting in those we already do well does not.”
So what is achievement? What is accomplishment? Maybe the words don’t fully articulate the slender difference, but we know it when we push through something hard, to end with something beautiful. We know it when that pursuit doesn’t end, although we may leave and come back to it after a time. We know it when we finally finish the quilting or the binding or the label, having worked our way through color choices and fabric choices and design and cutting and stitching, and hang up that quilt and stand back to look.
We were about mid-point in our drive from the Salt Lake City area to our home in Southern California, when we turned into the Kolob Canyon parking lot, in the upper section of Zion National Park. Ever since I sewed the binding on my newest quilt, Double Star, on the drive up to see a grandson get married, we’d been trying to find a place for a photograph. Kolob Canyon, with its red rock and green foliage, called to us.
We have a hymn in our church, If You Could Hie To Kolob, which is a fancy way to say “If you could get to Heaven.” The rest of the first verse sort of opens up the possibility of seeing where It All Began, and indeed, as we began the drive up the road to the Taylor’s Creek trailhead it does feel like you are in different space. There weren’t too many people, perhaps because of the threatening storm, or the advent of the Fourth of July weekend. But whatever the reason, it was bliss. We began to sing the hymn, then wondered how many other visitors were singing that same hymn, too, on their way up the canyon? And how many more of them were looking for a quilt photo?
A willing, helping visitor provided answers to both those questions: we were the only ones looking for a quilt photograph, but yes, he (on the right) and his wife did sing the first verse to that hymn as they drove up the canyon. The music is based on an old English tune, Kingfold, which figures because many of the early pioneers in this state hailed from England (including mine and my husband’s ancestors).
We struggled in the canyon’s wind, chatted with them, and wanted to go farther into the canyon, but the upper road had been closed because of winter damage.
The label notes the quilter, Jen Boyer, and that it is from my newest pattern, Double Star. This was a quick one for me, given my languid pace of the last six months, but to be fair, that doesn’t include the two years the bag sat sitting under my ironing board full of black and cream fabrics, collected bit by bit.
I love the curvy quilting pattern, but hate the name of the e2e pattern (Target Practice).
It was quiet up in the canyon with the road closed, with only a handful of visitors to these beautiful finger canyons. I hummed the tune, and was reminded that the last verses talk about how “Improvement and progression / Have one eternal round.” That is a good thing, given that I am always striving to be better, not only in quilting, but also in kindness, grace, and all those other perfectly wonderful attributes that the author Phelps wrote about in the 1850s. Revisiting some of those ideals helps ground me, and encourages me to live well in today’s world, where Phelps might have scratched his head about all the challenges that we face.
Back home, trying to finish up the writing of a pattern, I realized that while we’d had a grand time out in nature, none of those photos would work for the pattern front. So we headed to the California Air Resources Building, which was close by and that we knew had a dramatic entry, shielded from the windy day.
I promise my Quilt-Holding Husband is behind there, but it does look like the quilt is floating.
So now it is finished. You probably recognize that smaller bonus quilt from another post of mine. I included two versions of the smaller quilt in the pattern — one with the border, and one without the black/white triangle border (but it’s not hard to make). The whole pattern is pretty straightforward in the making so it earned at Beginner Plus label.
You can get the pattern in my PayHip shop, and if you act before July 17th, you can get 20% off with the code in the speech bubble, spoken by some rando with a black-and-cream quilt in red rock country. Glorious red rock country.
UPDATE: On JULY 20, 2023, the coupon will expire. I added a couple of extra days.
I guess I was just kind of taken with the place, and always have been since I married my husband when I was 34, bringing four kids to the marriage, and like the saint that he is, he brought us all on a trip when we’d been married about a couple of months, and that’s where I first saw Zion National Park, and Kolob’s finger canyons.
Maybe I was taken with the place because on this beautiful day in windy Kolob canyon, we’d just been to my grandson’s wedding the day before; he holding his bride’s hand, both their faces glowing as they said their vows. These two have an easiness about them, and it was lovely to be the grandmother and not have to worry about the arrangements, or the dress, or the tuxes, or the refreshments, but to just be able to sit and enjoy the radiant happiness of this young couple.
I take much hope in the hymn’s words written well over 150 years ago, their ideals firmly rooted in another time; however, they are still good for us.
This is a quilter’s visual paradise: triangles, circles, squares, bits-and-pieces; it’s the Cosmati pavement in Westminster Cathedral, which got a lot of press recently with the coronation of King Charles.
And this is an entirely different view of pieces and fragments and color. These two images remind me of something I’ve been thinking about for a while: the concept and idea of Community. Obviously these two art pieces present different depictions of together, of belonging, of interacting: ordered or overlaid; yet as a whole, the colors and shapes are part of a whole.
The idea of community has many parts, but “first is the territorial and geographical notion of community—neighborhood, town, city. The second is ‘relational,” concerned with “quality of character of human relationship, without reference to location”….[T]he two usages are not mutually exclusive, although….[and often] modern society develops community around interests and skills more than around locality” (from here).
I always imagined community as being a local sort of thing. Quilt Village de Provence, an original quilt made by Frédérique, is a lovely and perfect depiction of that: a beautiful central sun lighting all the town. Her circular quilting reinforces this idea: we are all together in a great, broad and enveloping circle. (She granted me permission to share this.)
Some of this thinking was triggered by the recent events in my own life: of the passing away of my mother, a breaking of one of my most central relationships. I found myself deep in mourning and all its attendant ills and challenges, yet found a community of women who had gone through something similar, and they buoyed me up. I loved the comment by Tina on the last post, who recommended patience with the process, reminding me that “It takes as long as it takes.” So community, in this sense, was like the second definition, above: “interests and skills more than around locality.”
Recently, I volunteered to serve as a website admin/blog poster for one of our local quilt guilds. In diving in to this, I discovered many tightly bound communities in this larger whole, some accepting of a newbie, yet other groups resistant, with the gates shuttered and the drawbridge up. It was an interesting experience and I was surprised by how fiercely some guarded their particular little fiefdom. Community is not new to me; I’ve been a classroom teacher. I’ve been a Guild teacher. I’ve taught in quilt shops. I’ve been a part of a worldwide church community my whole life, and worked locally within that, coming to love friends and neighbors — thankful for those who accepted me with a large measure of grace and patience — yet I also figured out who was prickly and deserved a wide margin. This guild experience was no exception.
I have also loved having a larger quilting community due to social media, making many friendships even though we lived far away from each other. This is not a new concept to any of you. But the final thoughts about people and connections are because of this quilt. It’s my version of an antique quilt from another community, far far away:
Found on Instagram, I loved the red patches floating on the creamy background of this quilt from the North Country of England, perhaps where my great-grandmother was from? I don’t know, but I like thinking that she may have made something like this, so many many miles and years ago.
In 2019, my young granddaughter Dani played with it in her living room, helping me lay out the center. I have carried this with me on trips, and have taken this quilt to my local quilt guild meetings, ready for it to come to its completion, bridging my connection with this young girl to the older British/American quilter sitting next to me, telling me about her connection to King Charles via her church parish from when she was a girl the same age as my Dani.
At the heart of it is this: I cannot live without my community. It’s been a hard slog to feel easy again in a crowd post-Covid, their faces close to mine as I listen to them, share their joys, carry their sorrows. Loneliness has dogged a lot of us, and we are rebuilding. I am admittedly less patient with those who willfully bar the gates to friendship, but I try to offer them a measure of grace and move on, looking for others who want to form connections.
In a paper by McMillan and Chavis, they define a “Sense of community [as] a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together” (from here). This idea keeps me going, keeps me making friends (and quilts), and helps me find acceptance, no matter whether we are from the North Country or South Country. No matter what slice of life we are from — old or young, happy or cranky, hesitant or willing — I hope we find community.
Yes, it plays nicely in the kitchen. Quilting by Jen of Sew-Mazing Quilting. I love any version of Baptist Fan!
All but the final border was sewn by hand.
The reverse, a combination of two lengths of fabric. The right side is the same that’s on my sister’s quilt, New Journeys, made from French General fabrics, some years ago. Thank you goes to my wonderful quilt-holding husband. This is Quilt #277 on my Quilt Index • 66″ x 86.”
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 