Quilt Finish #284 from a kit, which means it sewed up lickety-split.
And my quilter…
…let me pick it up in Utah when I was there last month. Jen did a very cool pattern for me which I wrote about here. It’s a great little throw quilt, all ready for Christmas!
And oh, yes: “The Wexford Carol” from YoYo Ma and Alison Krauss on YouTube is a must. I love that first verse:
Good people all, this Christmas time, Consider well and bear in mind What our good God for us has done In sending His beloved Son With Mary holy we should pray, To God with love this Christmas Day In Bethlehem upon that morn, There was a blessed Messiah born.
I wish you a Merry Christmas, a holiday filled with wonder– and quilting!
Last night we had smoke from fires somewhere, but I never could figure out where. And so I gave up, because that’s what you do at the end of summer: you play it easy, play it nice. You take a breath. You don’t work too hard to find out things that don’t really matter. For nearly a week the temperatures here have felt like end-of-summer, with highs in the 70s and at night, lows that allow the window open.
This quilt is Time Let Me Play, the line taken from “Fern Hill,” a poem by the esteemed Dylan Thomas, where he describes his childhood from the vantage point of a grown man. He looks back, riffing, remembering and describing how he was king of the hill, lost in the verdant landscapes of his childhood Wales. I especially liked the repeating of the center lines of several stanzas:
Time let me hail and climb / Golden in the heydays of his eyes, / And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
Time let me play and be / Golden in the mercy of his means, / And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman
And playing, lovely and watery / And fire green as grass. / And nightly under the simple stars / As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away
Who is this personage that he refers to? It is Time, which gives him a chance to be “green” and “golden” — a reference perhaps to being young like a growing sprout, but also as a golden, or fair-haired and favorite child. The child is the “prince of the apple towns” and lord of the trees and leaves. He repeats “Time let me play” only once, but does refer to that necessary activity of youth, over and over.
Only at the end does Thomas allude to the ephemerality of what he has just described, when he says that Time held him both “green” and “dying,” giving hint to the arc of a day, of a season, the arc of a life.
And while I could go on forever, pulling out the ideas from this rich poem, I want to say tonight that I slipped out the door just at sunset, the sun climbing down from its throne in the sky, soon to slip down over the horizon. I had the quilt in my hands, and quickly clamped it up to the sprawling woody vines of our wisteria. I stepped back and took pictures as the golden light lit up the quilt.
The shadow of the leaves were soft smudgey shapes, a contrast to the crisp angles and simple lines of the quilt. The sun moved quickly and so did I, turning the quilt over to snap an image of the label, sewn on this afternoon.
I felt caught on the edge between day and night. And I am also caught on the edge of another shift of time: I am no longer that young child, climbing trees, playing as if it were the only thing to do in summer, drinking in the richness of clouds and dew and green and gold. But with cloth in my hands, I can still play once in a while, as that pure essence of a quilt — of color and line and shape and imagination — will still let me wander.
Time, let me play. Again and again and again.
Quilt Details
Quilt #279 in my Quilt Index • 53″ square Painters Palette Solids are from Paintbrush Studios Magnifico thread is what I used for quilting, and that is made by Superior Threads Designed, pieced and quilted by Elizabeth Eastmond (me!) Pattern can be purchased in my Pattern Shop
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green, The night above the dingle starry, Time let me hail and climb Golden in the heydays of his eyes, And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves Trail with daisies and barley Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home, In the sun that is young once only, Time let me play and be Golden in the mercy of his means, And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold, And the sabbath rang slowly In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air And playing, lovely and watery And fire green as grass. And nightly under the simple stars As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away, All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars Flying with the ricks, and the horses Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all Shining, it was Adam and maiden, The sky gathered again And the sun grew round that very day. So it must have been after the birth of the simple light In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm Out of the whinnying green stable On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long, In the sun born over and over, I ran my heedless ways, My wishes raced through the house high hay And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs Before the children green and golden Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand, In the moon that is always rising, Nor that riding to sleep I should hear him fly with the high fields And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land. Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Last words about the poem: I searched to understand what a nightjar was (found it), but that flying rick? Well, a rick was a name for a tall haystack, and I suppose the child falling asleep at Fern Hill might dream of flying nightjars and haystacks, just as the “owls” might “bear the farm away.”
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
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.
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 