Tag: 2010

100 Quilts · Journal Entry · Quilt Finish

Visitors. . . and a Story

Elizabeth E.

We had some visitors from out of town last week. It was my daughter Barbara and her three kids: Cute, Cute and Cute. And Cute. Did I mention that they were cute? All my grandchildren are cute. I’m so very lucky.

And now, a story.
Some time ago, I’d made a quilt with pinks and blues and cherries and flowers and was so frugal with my fabric I had enough for another quilt leftover. I starting piecing the pinwheels and put them up on the pin wall, and then was stuck. I tried this combo and that combo and nothing would come together.

Then one horrid horrid day, our friend Heather wrote to say that she had Stage IV metastatic breast cancer, and it had spread to her liver, and maybe her brain but they were doing CT scans checking, checking. We waited. Good news! No brain mets, as she said.

I began to work again on the stuck quilt. Only I knew now it was for Heather so it flew together in a glorious explosion of work and love and tears and care for our friend. I thought long and hard about what to name it.

I arranged a visit to see her shortly before she would begin her first of six rounds of chemotherapy, a grueling process. I wanted her to have the quilt. I had in my mind what I wanted to call it, carrying along my pen to sign and write the name on the back, just in case I was right.

We had one of those happy-sad-teary-laughing conversations about what lay before her. I knew then what I planned to call it was correct, Earth’s Crammed with Heaven, from E. B. Browning’s verse:

 

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

And only he who sees takes off his shoes;

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

 

I told her that it meant to me that because of her suffering she would see and understand so much more about heaven and earth than she ever would before. She would see that indeed, earth is crammed with heaven.

I tracked her chemo treatments on my calendar, trying to visit when possible, emailing whenever as I waited for her to come up out of the vortex of chemo and bendy bones and pain.

Last week she had another CT scan, and because of her treatments, and her faith, and the doctors and good karma and prayers and heaven and hugs and everything-we-could-throw-at-it on earth, her tumors have been eradicated. As she put it: “lots of high fives and tears in the doctor’s office.”

Oh, yeah. You go, Heather! Happy Valentine’s Day. Happy Chinese New Year.

Happy Life.

Quilt Shows

Road to California 2010

Elizabeth E.

This was my tenth appearance at the Road to California Quilt Show, held in Ontario California. I have entered in the past, but haven’t since grad school, lacking either the time or the interest.

But there’s also this nagging suspicion that my quilts may not measure up, given the direction that quilting seems to be going. So when I come to the show, I come with a critical eye, trying to identify trends. Or fads (such as crystals). One trend is in the quilting. Not just the single line of thread tracing around a patch or creating a feather, but Quilting As The Star.

Fire and Ice, by Claudia Pfeil of Krefeld, Germany.

This quilt typifies that, with its narrowly spaced lines of thread (don’t even get me started on why we quilters need to use certain types of thread), decorative jewels, sequins, crystals adding to the main pieced design. There are quilted flames shooting off the appliqued fabric flames, and tightly scrolled quilting suppressing certain areas of the quilt in order to create a sort of trapunto effect. The whole quilt is layer upon layer on texture, color, design.

While I think the above quilt is beautiful, I think this trend has gotten out of hand. In the early 1990s I entered a large bed-sized quilt (quilts are not identified anymore as “bed quilts,” that idea having faded as it seems the main thrust of quilting now is about art, design and its decorative function); this quilt was evaluated by a team of three judges as it was a juried show. No noticeable faults with my piecing or design, but one judge scrawled, “Not enough quilting.”

I think that was the year that two quilts were exhibited at the back of the hall, covered in heavily quilted design and crystals for accent. Multi-colored threads outlined feathers, swirls, circles, and a dragon (if I remember correctly). We were in awe. We all had a crush on this new boy in town. Now the heavily quilted are at the front of the hall, strutting their stuff and this influence has had some unfortunate effects, I think. Case in point is the quilt below.

In this first picture, the appliquéd vases and flowers of baskets have the full stage, but upon closer (blurry, my apologies) inspection–

Hawaiian Green Sea Turtle, by Cheryl Spalding of Portland, Oregon; Quilted by Karen Saltzberg

The quilting really works in this quilt, and it is used to bring out the texture of the turtle and the motion of the water. The quilting complements what is going on in the design, instead of competing or obscuring it.

Here are some that caught my (untrained) eye.

Pup Art, by Nancy S. Brown of Oakland, California

Christmas Chickadee, by David M. Taylor of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The inclusion of the Christmas tree light elevates it from a simple nature scene into a conversation.

A Summer Parade, by Joanell Connolly of Huntington Beach, California

The Moment of Inspiration, by Sandy Curran of Newport News, Virginia. Hitchcock keeping an eye on these birds was what pulled me in, but I also liked the reference to the film by the inclusion of “sprocket holes” on the side of the quilt.

Memories of Monet, by Joen Wolfrom
Joen Wolfrom’s quilt works well on so many levels. It’s the first I’ve seen of hers in many years. She’d stopped quilting for a while when her hand was injured in a dog attack.

Colors Unfurled, aka, If Betsy Ross Had My Stash, by Maria C. Shell of Anchorage, Alaska
Great use of quilting blocks and traditional motifs to create a flag. Depictions of the flag in red, white and blue are found a lot at quilt shows (we’re a patriotic bunch, I guess) but this one, with its brights and bolds was a real stunner. It’s huge, probably 9 feet long by 5 feet tall.

Love the paper doll blocks, swimming fish, flags–this quilt has everything!

Betsy Ross Never Imagined This, by Nancy McLerran of Santa Rosa, California. A crazy-quilt version of the flag. This is a new idea as well, as most depictions are traditionally pieced.

Play Dead (Guns Kill Children), by Janice Pennington of San Diego, California; Quilted by Laurie Daniells.
Nostalgic fabrics, reproductions of designs from earlier days, are used in a quilt that makes a statement against handgun violence.

Enjoy these for now. I’ll try to get a few more posted later.

Sewing

Pillowcases

Elizabeth E.

I’ve been busy today. I made little treats for little people in my life for Valentine’s Day. If the rain lets up (yes, we’re still here and not washed away) I’ll trot over to the Post Office and mail them off. I had already made two little treats for two little boys who lived nearby, and felt like I should finish some for the rest.
The babies, who don’t have pillows yet, will have to wait until the next round.

100 Quilts

Christmas Star Quilt

Elizabeth E.

I was ready for a new Christmas Quilt. So one day in October, when I had twenty minutes free of grading, I thought about what I wanted, and really really thought I could get it done by December 1st. So I cut out a bunch of patches, and sewed up this square.

Ick.
Then the grading kicked in, Christmas fol-de-rol arrived and the patches still sat on the cutting mat.
This whole time I’ve had this patch up on the pin wall, and have thought, well. No.

Here I spent all this money on this fabric and I hate the quilt. I remember evaluating dresses I was making in high school, hating them all, thinking why did I waste my time on this? And then I remember my mother saying to me that you can’t judge the success or failure of a sewn outfit until you get the hem in. Of course, she’s right. She’s my mother. So obviously I can’t judge a quilt by one block.

Another factor in the design was my push-back against one-patch quilts–simple designs I see all over the web on my blogs. Quilts used to be about the grid and the geometric-ness of it, if I can make up that word. Then the art quilt hit, and people left the grid behind and certainly the quilt world is better for it. I love many of them.

And the current craze of one-patch or simple designs I think is a result of the large-scale design on a piece of fabric–a design that would just not look good cut up into teensy squares/triangles/rectangles and then sewn back together.

But when I glance at a bed, while I like the large-scale prints and the simple designs, I still long to see something more traditional and perhaps more elaborate, a secondary design that might percolate up from the first blocks placed together. So I got out my trusty-dusty quilt block book, which is simply pages of flannel interspersed with paper. It allows me to plan out a block in a portable form.

Four blocks done. I like how it’s coming along. I no longer believe it will be done quickly–it takes some planning and sewing time–but I think I’ll have it done by this Christmas. Maybe.