Aerial Beacon – OccasionalPiece

I was in a quandary about what to name this quilt, having tried out multiple phrases. It was a quilt made up of blocks from my friends in The Gridster Bee, the penultimate year I ran the group.

Susan, one of my friends in the group, wrote to suggest I consider “Ladies of the canon? As in music – composition in which each successively entering voice presents the initial theme usually transformed in a strictly consistent way. (And there’s also that cool reference to Ladies of the Canyon by Joni Mitchell.).”

I’d played many a canon in my teenager years as I studied music (piano) and who of us can forget the Pachelbel Canon in D? As to the quilt, I’d asked each of the bee members to make a lady, and some made “representative” women, and some made self-portraits. I didn’t really specify which they were to do; it was fun to see what arrived in the mail. I dithered for a long time about whether or not I should create a pieced back (I didn’t), and whether or not I should quilt it myself (I didn’t). If I had waited for myself to do those last two things, the quilt would still be in pieces in my sewing room. I did have a few extra blocks, and I have plans for them, never fear. I so appreciate the women I sewed with over several years time. The Bee was fairly stable for a while, but always a few leaving and a few coming in.

When I finally did leave The Gridsters, Patti took it over and it is still going strong, with a new group of women. It’s fun to see their blocks in my IG feed, and I’m happy for the time when I gathered my own Ladies of the Canon. Good memories, represented in this fun quilt.

I made my sample lady in February of 2021, using blue scraps from my first pieced quilt for her hat.

We photographed the quilt at a local elementary school. My husband catalogues all the murals and art in our town on his blog, Murals and Art, so I have an easy supply of cool backdrops.

Thanks, Dave, for always being willing to hold up a quilt. (BTW, those palm trees are not curved; it’s a function of the camera lenses.) This is quilt #280, in my Quilt Index.

Now, a piece of good news. My quilt, Aerial Beacon, was accepted into Road to California’s quilt exhibit in 2024. I didn’t think any of my quilts would be accepted, so yes, I’m pretty happy.

For a long time now, my husband and I knew of an actual aerial beacon in Southern Utah, but just could never find the time/energy to go there. This week, we did. I wrote about this, and the quilt, in an earlier post:

An arrow, about 50 feet long was poured from cement, and a tower and a small hut were erected on that slab. And we hiked up this hill to go and find one, in St. George, Utah:

You can still see the metal bars poking out of the center section, where the tower would go. This arrow is 56 feet in length.

Found out this is the remnant of Transcontinental Air Mail Route Beacon 37A (from here. More info is found here.)

We’re happy we found it! (I love I could connect with something created in 1925.)

The two white water tanks are to the left of this.

And that’s a good note on which to close this post. Happy November, everyone!

Other posts about this quilt:

This and That, February 2021
Book Reviews & Giveaway, March 2021
Pieced Quilter Ladies: Twelve Ladies Dancing, December 2021
The Ladies Are Back: This & That February 2023
Bright Ladies (Well Read) • Quilt Top Finish, April 2023
And then, a tab (above) with links to the free patterns, and a closer look at the handiwork of The Gridsters: Pieced Quilter & Notions

More about the Mitchell song, which I’d never heard before Susan sent me down the rabbit hole:

The Music Aficionado writes that the song was about “Mitchell’s Laurel Canyon’s circle of friends….Trina Robbins moved to LA from NYC in the winter of 1967. She was girlfriend of Paul Williams, publisher of the Crawdaddy rock magazine. She always wore those popular Love Beads, otherwise known as wampum beads. She also loved to doodle in a sketchbook that was always on hand. Annie Burden, wife of photographer Gary Burden, was keeping house and family in Laurel Canyon. She was host to many artist gatherings in her house and described her life there as: “I simply made babies and brownies, encouraged by the fact that Joni Mitchell saw me as a sort of Martha Stewart of the ’60s.” Husband Gary Burden later designed the album cover for Blue. Estrella Berosini was raised in a circus to a Czech highwire performer. Joni Mitchell bought her a gypsy-like shawl that she wore a lot.”

Now you know.

To get across great distances, way back in the day, early airplane pilots would focus on visual landmarks, or sometimes lit bonfires if they needed to find their way in the dark: “In February 1921, an airmail pilot named Jack Knight put this to the test with his all-night flight to Chicago from North Platte, Nebraska. Knight found his way across the black prairie with the help of bonfires lit by Post Office staff, farmers, and the public” (from here). When I found this Aerial Beacon block, it sent me gathering information about this idea: that there were physical beacons to guide those airmail pilots before we had modern navigation. Really? I’d never even thought about this.

An early map showing one of the routes across the United States.

Many aerial beacons were atop tall city buildings. This is from a vintage postcard of Chicago.

Some aerial beacon were little huts with a number painted on the roof. They were next to the tall beacon, with a concrete arrow pointing on to the next one. These are still found in the United States on hilltops, beside cities, although there are very few extant arrows.

This quilt began with these French Bee fabrics by Renee Nanneman. I kept trying to think of names for the bees, and thought up “sky pilots.” Nope. That’s an established term for clergymen/women, which I also didn’t know. So I kept looking, and then found this:

A traditional block, which would let the bees show off nicely, as well as the coordinating fabrics. I loved those four big triangles; sort of like propeller blades (another reference to flight). So I made my first block, wondering if could I even do this? I chose to make this a foundation paper-pieced block, so as to get those snappy points and to keep everything in place (pattern coming next year some time).

*ultra-high radio frequency waves (RFID, or radio frequency identification)*

Then, thinking about the idea of RFID waves, and the communications that replaced the aerial beacon huts, I referenced them with a waved border made with bias binding. It was a good exercise to figure it out, and I love how it looks.

Jen of Sew-Mazing Quilting went the extra mile in the quilting. I had many strong colors in the blocks and a very light border and backgrounds and I asked her to use Superior’s MicroQuilter thread in silver (7007). Bob Purcell (who founded Superior) told me it was their best blender, and he was right.

I did begin making the blocks way back in October, first thinking about a design with nine blocks. But there was so much fabric left from each French bee color, that I made more. And took trips to Utah. And tried to sew. And took trips to Utah. And I kept trying to write the pattern, because it was such a fun block. And took a final trip to Utah. Then unlike those early pilots ferrying mail, in the next few weeks I felt more than once like I had lost my way. This quilt spent a lot of time wadded up in the corner, as I just didn’t have the moxie to work on it.

I even had the backing ready to go as I dithered and dithered about whether I should quilt it myself or not. I finally realized that given my current state, you-know-what would freeze over before I got around it it. When Jen returned the quilt, it sat some more time. Finally this past week, I found my way to binding it. (Binding is a lot less stressful since learning this trick.) And then I indexed it: Quilt #273.

*the back of the quilt, held by the best Quilt-Holding Husband, at a local park*

Since I often write about my own life on this blog, I will share that I have often wondered how I would react when my mother died. I thought about it off and on in my life, sometimes thinking I’d be perfectly fine and then other times thinking I’d be a total wreck. My mother lived to be 94, so she had been with me my entire life and really, truly, I liked her a lot. Yes, we had our differences, and no, she was not perfect, but in her later years (before it got really hard for her), we had an easy camaraderie. The truth is many days I am perfectly fine, and at other moments, in other days, I’m quite tender around the edges, breaking into tears. You probably know how it goes. When I was a teenager, Dad got all the credit, but I came to realize — and even more now that she is gone — that she did all the heavy lifting of relationships, of sending me little gifts, of checking in with me. I always knew she was my best cheerleader.

I had a chance a couple of years ago, after a presentation with the Utah Valley Quilt Guild, to go up to her condo and give her and Dad and one of her friends a mini Guild Presentation. Her eyesight was failing then, but we passed around the quilts so she could look at them up close and feel them; she enjoyed it all. She apologized that she didn’t have more of her friends there, but that wasn’t who the show was for.

It was for her, my mother, now my very own aerial beacon.