Quilts

Change, a Four-in-Art Quilt

May 1, 2014May 3, 2014 Elizabeth E.17 Comments

Change
#3 in the Urban Series, Landmark Quarterly Challenge
Quilt #131

(Y Mountain. Photo courtesy of Judy Cannon)

This is the landmark I grew up with, a letter on a mountain in Provo, Utah. Known as the “Y,” there are annual hikes, and a lighting of the letter on Homecoming. I thought everyone had a mountain with a letter on it, but as I grew up and moved around, I found out that most of the world, and certainly the East Coast of the US, doesn’t. Since I chose this idea for my landmark, I found there’s a whole Wikipedia page about these hillside letters. Also known as “mountain monograms,” as one professor wrote in an article about the origins and the spread of these letters, I discovered that University of California-Berkeley was the first. And here’s a map of these letter landmarks, mostly in the mountain west. (Maybe because we have mountains?)

The movie Cars even used hillside letters on the mountain above Radiator Springs, the fictional small town in the movie. The RS is just to the right of the stoplight. (Sorry for the weird image, but I had to take a photo of my computer to get this shot.) The mountain from another view:

Columbia University in New York does have a “C” painted just above their boathouse on the Hudson River:

Yet most people think of this when I say hillside letters. . .

. . . but to me, neither of those counts. A letter needs to be embedded on a hillside or a mountain to count as a landmark. So that was the genesis of the quilt.

Our landmark hillside letter is a C, an imitation of that first University of California-Berkeley letter, which was set onto a hillside about 1905, the granddaddy of all the other mountain monograms. This is a blurry image from Wikipedia of our local mountain (our letter isn’t really yellow). I tried to photograph it, but couldn’t get a good vantage point, so this will have to do.

Here’s my little art quilt with its C on its mountain. (Note: although I like to photograph outside, today we are having raging Santa Ana winds, so inside it is.)

What is the significance of these other letters, spelling out the word C-H-A-N-G-E?

As Longfellow observed, “all things must change.” And I keep my mother’s advice that “A change is as good as a rest” close to my heart, for that’s a truth as well. But the C-for-Change linkage came to me one weary night, when I had to go and do one more pick-up and one more errand when teenaged children were still at home. It must have been during our University’s Homecoming Week, for when I rounded the street corner at the base of the Box Springs mountain, I could see the “C” all lit up. I pulled over and gazed at the glowing letter with that tired-behind-the-back-of-the-eyes fatigue, wishing that that I could go home and be home, like I could when the children were little and weren’t off at some activity that required me to be out and about picking them up. I thought back to the “easy days” of tucking them in after a story and prayers and a drink, and about how wonderful those times were. Why did things always have to change?

But I realized that change is the law of the universe, and instead of being at war with that constant mutability towards “something new, something strange” I should just accept it. Change and I are now uneasy companions. I know it won’t always be like that, for experience has taught me that change can come in steep cliffside drop-offs and hair-raising turns on a winding road. But for now, I’ll be content gazing at my quilt where it hangs in the corner of my kitchen.

4-in-art_3button Please visit the rest of our Four-in-Art group, and see how they’ve interpreted the Landmark Challenge:

Amanda at whatthebobbin.com

Anne at springleafstudios.com

Betty at a Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/toot2

Carla at lollyquiltz.blogspot.com

Elizabeth at opquilt.com (you are here)

Leanne at shecanquilt.ca

Nancy at patchworkbreeze.blogspot.com

Rachel at rachel-thelifeofriley.blogspot.com

And come back for the next post, with instructions on how you can make your own little art quilt.

Quilts

Shadow Owes Its Life To Light

April 27, 2014 Elizabeth E.17 Comments

What do you do when the quilt you just finished is too big for your improvised outdoor home photo studio? You try to photograph it anyway.

Shadow Owes Its Life to Light
Began July 2013 • Finished April 2014

I pieced it, but Cathy Kreter of CJ Designs quilted it.

I’d first seen this in the City Quilter Quilt Shop in New York City, and immediately signed up for the block of the month. It was great fun to have those packages arrive every month for six months. I kept up pretty well. Nancy Rink called it Amish With a Twist–II, as it followed her first quilt design in the Amish style. I blogged sporadically about its progress on this site (and *here* too), as often the work progressed sporadically.

My design wall wasn’t big enough to hold this massive quilt (106″ square) so I pieced it together in sections.

I wrote about the quilting *here* as I really stressed out about which thread to use.

And to make this record complete, here is the back. I used some Jane Sassaman fabric.

I thought about many names. I halfway thought I’d just keep Nancy Rink’s name for the quilt, but wanted something different. Certainly, since it has furrows of light and dark, calling it the oft-used “Sunshine and Shadow” would be a possibility. But I didn’t just want to say it THAT way. So I found this old proverb: Shadow Owes Its Life to Light, indicating the interdependence between light and shadow. Not only did I like it because its allusion to the old cliche, but it also had a nicely poetic rhythm to it.

I vowed after making my son’s king-sized quilt that I’d never make another quilt that large. Well, I did. But next time, please come running over to my house and talk some sense into me if I ever even think about making another big quilt.

This is Quilt #130 of my lifetime quilts.

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Quilts

A Record of Quilts–Making A Quilt List

January 14, 2014January 11, 2014 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

I have two links up above, one titled “100 Quilts List” and the other “200 Quilts List.” It’s been interesting to be able to say with some accuracy how many quilts I’ve made over my lifetime, but I didn’t start those lists when I first started quilting.

Those lists began because of my father’s journal of his paintings (this is one volume of five), which are a record of how he created them, colors he chose, inspiration, sketches. My friend Lisa also had a quilt journal and when she showed it to me, some time ago, I was in an insanely busy time of life and thought I could never do such a thing. But life changes, from busy to not-so-busy, and as an experienced quilter, I began to want a record of my work in this life that didn’t vanish under dust or dirt, or disappear into a student’s backpack, never to be looked at again. I began quilting in my twenties, some four decades ago, so that was a lot of quilts to account for.

And once I started my journal, I wanted it to be accurate, a habit that has come about because I am married to a scientist, and we are all about accuracy in this house. I started making a list, pulling photos from albums, and bugging my children to let me come and photograph their quilts. That’s my oldest son, Chad, above. We met one day at his work and we laid out the quilts he had in the conference room, so we could photograph them.

At that time, we had wooden lift-up garage doors, and I stapled a white sheet to the front, set up a table and gathered every quilt from what I had in our house to photograph. I pinned the quilts as straight as I could to the sheet and waited until the sun had moved off the door, so I could get an even tone (adjusting for the shadow). It took me about three days, and the neighbors were quite entertained by all my going up and down the stepladder, photographing the front, turning the quilt over (you see a back up there), and then a few close-ups here and there.

Another time, I drove to Arizona, where two of my children lived, set up a borrowed frame and pinned and photographed, over and over, with grandchildren watching, finally being allowed to wrap up in their baby quilts.

I started going through all my digital photographs, looking for quilts. Above are Peter and Megan the night before their marriage, holding a quilt I gave them. And from all these sources, I started compiling my list in a simple spreadsheet. Where I had dimensions, I put them in. Dates were critical, but I decided to keep it just to the year. Was the quilt labeled? Photographed? I noted that too. A couple of quilts are gone forever, but I remembered them, and tried to put them in where I could, numbering and re-numbering.

I decided to only include finished & quilted tops, but I know Thelma, of Cupcakes and Daisies counts hers by pieced tops. However you decide to count yours, I would encourage you to start writing down what you have accomplished. I guess the biggest pay-off came from me when I came home from Arizona with those frames and was able to photograph some of the larger bed-sized quilts that I couldn’t accommodate on the garage door.

This is Clay’s Choice. The first big quilt I’ve ever made.

My husband helped me put it up on the frames and I stepped back a bit to photograph it, then looked up from the camera to really see it. This was the first time I had seen my quilt off of a bed, all arrayed in its beginner-quilter glory. I paused and studied it–the white floral sheets, the solid greens, the Clay’s Choice triangles in a dainty blue print spinning around, each in their own block. I remember tracing around cardboard to get those shapes, stitching the blocks, and hand-quilting it over several years on a small portable frame. I looked at it, all the memories of the making, here, visible in this fabric concoction, never needing to be dusted, or re-done, or rewritten. This quilt, nearly 35-years old, captured all of that in its pieces, waving back and forth in the late afternoon breeze.

“Everything okay?” my husband asked.

Oh, yes. Everything is just fine.

200 Quilts · Quilts

Silver and Gold Friendship Quilt

January 1, 2014 Elizabeth E.21 Comments

Silver and Gold
The Toni Jones Quilt
finished December 2013

Toni Jones moved into the house up the cul-de-sac from mine, a welcome addition to our neighborhood. With her six children to my four, our houses were jumping when we got together, and we did that a lot. Her mother lived with them, and the three of us women got along famously. One late summer day, Toni gave me a jar of her homemade pickles, made from her mother’s recipe and which used grape leaves as the secret ingredient. As a pickle lover, I thought I was in heaven and still have her recipe in my file, although I have never made them (grape leaves are not easy to come by).

We because close friends very quickly, as we tried to sort out the three main things that concern young mothers: will our children grow up to be good citizens? how do we manage our marriages? and how can I lose this weight? The first is a universal, the second was harder for me, and the third was harder for her. Too soon, my husband took another job and moved us to California, where the marriage finally cracked apart, and we divorced. Toni moved to a town further south of our Texas meeting place, got a job driving a bus to help out with finances and our letters and phone calls still resonated with the three questions, occasionally adding in a few more thorny conundrums, such as: will I ever marry again (mine), will we ever feel happy inside (both of ours), and can I clone myself to get everything done?

Then I fell in love, married and moved to Southern California. She and her husband, mother and family moved back to the Midwest from where they’d first moved. That fall I received a lovely letter from Toni. She was noticeably slimmer, posed in a family portrait with her husband and children surrounding her like bright satellites. She was all heart, that girl. Her letter glowed with satisfaction: she loved the Midwest, happy to be “home” again, and everyone was doing well. And yes, she’d canned some pickles and wished she could share.

I sent off my Christmas card in 2004, adding a scrawled a note and busied myself with preparations. Shortly after the holiday, instead of her usual Christmas card, I received a letter from her husband. He wrote that just before Christmas, Toni and her mother had been killed in a head-on collision on an icy road. By the time the accident was discovered, they were both gone. The news was stark, severe, sucking the breath right out of me.

Toni was the first woman close to me that had left too soon, and I resolved to capture all my friends, those who were close relatives, women who had mentored me. I decided to make a quilt with everyone’s signature, my own memorial to Toni and to my friendships.

So many lived far away, so I ironed fabric to freezer paper, enclosed a letter giving instructions to sign the square in pencil, and included a self-addressed stamped envelope so I’d get them back. Most did. Other times, I carted my squares with me to family reunions, to church, to a therapist’s office, to quilt group, as I had made a list of women I needed and began checking off the names as the squares grew. Not all of my close friends are included, as I decided to limit it to a time frame, otherwise I’d never be done.

I gathered up all my granddaughters’ names this fall, and made them squares.

My mother, Barbara, and my daughter, named for my mother, are kitty-corner from each other.

I took the quilt to my quilter a week before Christmas and she turned it around quickly, so I could show my granddaughters when they came to visit. Emilee, the oldest daughter of my son, beamed brightly when I showed her the square with her name on it. Brooke, the four-year-old, wanted to sign another one, but I’ve left two blank in case my last son has daughters.

I had purchased the backing when I bought all the fabrics for the quilt, so it came together quickly. I felt some urgency to finish it off, as this Christmas we celebrated my 60th birthday (it’s really not until January, but all the children were in town, so we did it early). I hesitate to say the number, because I remember being thirty and thinking that sixty was the kind of number where people were shipped off to Old Folks’ Homes, fitted with canes, walkers and rocking chairs and consigned to a life of reminiscence. But I am young in my mind (although sometimes the body doesn’t get the memo) and want to celebrate what I’ve learned and the people who have touched my life, providing instruction, guidance and a listening ear at critical junctures in my life.

So, with this quilt, I remember Toni.

With this quilt, I celebrate a lifetime of women.

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This is Quilt #126 on my 200 Quilts List.