Light at the End of the Tunnel - The Book!

 

Quilt No. 136

July 2021

I've finally reached my destination in my Light at the End of the Tunnel journey that I've described previously in the posts, Looking for Light, and Getting Started.

Having made 18 fictional characters into 5x5" quilt blocks it was time to come up with a plan for my Light at the End of the Tunnel challenge quilt.  The blocks would need to be assembled, and arranging them in a box didn’t count, not even if I put them in alphabetical order.  

A wall hanging quilt?  With over a hundred such quilts under my belt, the walls here are getting pretty full, and the padded cell décor is getting just the tiniest bit tiresome. I’m living in a fabric gulag. Also, a picture of each character wasn’t enough to convey why these imaginary people, dogs, angels, ducks, frogs, and gas stoves had not only mattered to me, but had guided me through many a ‘tunnel’ with their own brand of moralist fervor.  

I needed to find a way to help the powerful metaphor of the “tunnel” tell my stories.  Making the character blocks into a book became an obvious choice.  Each character would need an accompanying page of text with either a quote by or about that character, or what the character represented, or perhaps my thoughts on that character.  It was a monumental task - take eighteen things that are not real, and succinctly come up with their impact on my own personal reality. 

What follows are photos of each of the eighteen character blocks, accompanied by their explanatory text pages.  Some of the characters’ stories have been told in previous blog posts (Fever Foster, Nancy Drew, Beaky, Superman).  For the rest, their brief story - as told here - is no less meaningful.  You can click on the photos to enlarge them for easy reading.

Book Cover/Julie

Touslehead

The Galloping Gas Stove

Beaky the Greedy Duck

Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer

Fairy Tales

Santa Claus

Charlie Brown

Snoopy

Fever Foster

Nancy Drew

Superman

Kermit the Frog

The Humanoids

Star Trek

Herbies

The Snowman

The Denton Bear

Frederick Frog

The Door/Quilt Label

The Open Door

How to Make the Tunnel Block Characters

Line drawing printed out

Stitching complete, paper removed, shading added

Briefly, the characters were created using these steps

5x5 inch squares of unbleached cotton, prepared as follows

Spray starch 2 -3 times

Sandwich layers, top to bottom:

• Unbleached cotton

• Fusible web

• Fusible fleece

• Fuse layers with iron

• Backing is not added at this time

Next steps:

·       Choose a simple picture such as a line drawing, or one that can be easily be broken down into a line drawing

·        If you need to make a photo into a line drawing, follow these steps.

Ø  Print out the photo

Ø  Using a fine tipped Sharpie maker, trace it onto clear plastic to make a line drawing

Ø  Scan in the drawing

·       Create a text box in Word with the dimensions you want for your block, for example a 3.5x3.5” text box to place on a 5x5” block

·        Format the text box to use your drawing as the background - this will give you the correct size of the drawing

·        Print it out on regular computer paper

·        Pin the printed paper onto the prepared sandwiched layers

·        Free motion quilt along all lines using regular 40 wt thread, top and bobbin, using a very small stitch, and a fine needle. I used black thread, with a few exceptions.

·        Remove paper, using tweezers where necessary (tedious)

·        Pull all loose threads to the back using a hand sewing needle (even more tedious)

·        Outline stitching is now complete

·        Paint in the colour or shading using Derwent Inktense pencils and Liquitex Gel Medium

 

 

 

 

Fever Foster

 

5x5 inch square; outline free motion quilting 

Colour added with Inktense Pencils

Part of The Tunnel Journey 

For my Light at the End of the Tunnel quilting journey starring fictional characters that I've taken comfort in over the years, I had to choose one representative for all the stuffed animals I have loved (and continue to love) during my lifetime.  There are so many that it’s embarrassing. I was probably more obsessed than the average kid with these so-called toys.  My overactive imagination conferred each one with a personality and a unique life history.  And Fever Foster got the MVP award every year.

He’s one of the few stuffies I’ve owned that has a traceable lineage.  The small dog was given to me by my cousin, a very grown up fifteen years older than me. He was a gift from her boyfriend when she was in the throes of a terrible fever.  Aptly, she named the dog “Fever”.  As time passed, the fever abated…and so did the boyfriend.  As both these influences waned, I was offered the dog.  He was adorable, white and fluffy, with little black circles of felt for his eyes and nose. The combined belovedness of my cousin and Fever made this adopted dog my ultimate favourite. 

However, it was a bit of a problem that he came with a name, since naming a newly acquired stuffed animal was a key feature in claiming it and creating its personality.  My stuffed tiger had been named Bananaface.  It’s likely that my sister thought that one up, since it seems surreptitiously derogatory, something I had not grasped until this very moment.  I had a plastic-faced monkey that was simply named Monkey because I didn’t much like him or the stupid looking banana clutched in his hand.  Another, cuter, plastic-faced monkey was given a pair of my old glasses and named Little Ricky.  He sported olive green pants with buttoned suspenders.  He was large and capable of sitting, so he could occupy major amounts of time on the piano bench, disguising my absence from practice sessions.  Ultimately, his Fur Elise was much better than mine, and won him the new name of Little Rochie, when he began to rival the then-popular Liberace.

So, when Fever moved over to our house, he was an already named entity.  I put my property stamp on him by lengthening his name to “Fever Foster”, since he was an adopted stuffie.  Like Charlie Brown, he was always called by his two name designation. I found him a right-sized cowboy hat (he never knew that it was actually a pencil sharpener) and immediately knit him the requisite scarf. 

Of all the innumerable stuffed animals I have owned, he was the most unusual – and I don’t just mean just his charismatic, mild-tempered personality.  He was made of genuine sheepskin.  He had a comforting wool smell.  In his early years his sheepskin substrate was a great plus.  Later on, as it dried out and cracked and flaked off, not so much.  Bits of Fever Foster left a telling trail, always revealing his whereabouts.  I did my best to intervene.  At first I sewed his various cracks back together, and glued wool bits back onto his muzzle.  He dried out to such a degree that the little black felt circles that were his eyes and nose fell off, got lost, and had to be crafted anew.  Eventually his toughened hide rejected all needle piercings, so I knitted him a sweater (seen in the photo here) to conceal his un-healable wounds. 

The real Fever Foster

He was definitely not a toy intended to have longevity.  Eventually, as I put childish things aside (maybe a decade ago…) Fever Foster was placed in a dark box where, having finally achieved maximal dehydration, he ceased to deteriorate.  And while I still own this fine not-quite-but-almost-real dog, he is a literal husk of his former self, possessing an ever diminishing allure.

In his heyday, when Fever Foster and I were very young,  my imagination sent him on wild exploits, the most notable of which was fighting Germans at the Alamo.  This seems to have been a confusion of historical events gleaned from an evening spent watching a John Wayne movie flanked by  Hogan’s Heroes episodes.  I too probably had a fever. Or maybe that wasn’t it at all.  Maybe it's just that Fever Foster, a veritable king among stuffies, actually had that much pizzazz. 

Light at the End of the Tunnel - Getting Started

 

February 2021

5x5 inch squares; outline free motion quilting; colour added with Inktense Pencils

Part of The Tunnel Journey

Once again, the guild gauntlet has been laid down.  This year’s quilting challenge: The Light at the End of the Tunnel.  I’m hoping that when I read this in a few years’ time I won’t remember why we needed to visit this particular concept.

It’s now been a year since I’ve seen the other guild members in person, except for “lucky” circumstances - like when we’ve crossed paths in the hospital or at the drug store. Such is the wonder of living in a small city.  Like everyone else in my life, they have receded into figures that populate Zoom meetings, FaceTime sessions, or primitive non-video phone calls.  It’s a scary fact that the non-family member I’ve seen the most in the last year is the woman who cuts my hair.  And right now, even she is out of reach, all stores and so-called non-essential services being closed.  Strangely, dog groomers are open.  They refuse to cut my hair.  These are trying times.

Yes, it’s COVID time. We’re one year into a pandemic. Each dwelling is a private fortress. No non-family member can enter your personal Fortress of Solitude.  You can leave, but only at your own peril. Social gatherings, travel, and shopping have fallen into the forbidden zone; fashion has ceased to exist unless you are considering what face mask matches your parka.  We have all become major consumers of alcohol – on our hands.  For the first time in my privileged life, I am witnessing poorly stocked shelves in grocery stores, something I’d previously thought impossible. 

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.  This bit of folk wisdom basically means, meh, wait it out. You’ll adapt.  You won’t necessarily be made stronger by adversity, but as time passes the hideous situation you’re facing will seem less onerous, giving you the illusion that you are stronger.  And really, you don’t need much more than illusion to get through situations you can’t possibly change. 

Different people are coping with the pandemic in different ways.  My sister is accessing every written word and podcast on the subject of coronavirus, knowledge being a cushioning sword.  My husband is tracking vaccine news at a fevered pace that has me running for the thermometer.   He gives hourly reports on the hopeful/shocking/enraging/encouraging statistics as they vacillate like lathered-up horses toiling along in the Kentucky Derby.

So, you can see why Light at the End of the Tunnel became the concept for this year’s quilting challenge.  Now there doesn’t have to be an actual tunnel, the idea is to create something that makes you feel joyful, happy or hopeful. Actually, reading over the minutes of the last meeting, I see it is “joyful, happy and hopeful”, but I’m pretty sure in that tall order, “or” should be substituted for “and”.  Nailing all three seems more like a lifetime pursuit, not a quilting challenge.

Of course, I am inclined to take things in a literal direction, so I immediately started exploring tunnels.  Virtually, of course.  I looked at online photos of tunnels, and investigated arches as well, because when seen in a disappearing cascade, they suggest tunnelishness.  Concentric rings and the like were also potential creative fodder.  All of these photos looked great, but, ugh, what about that ever-present monster,  The Copyright Beast?  Of sure, you can try to contact the photographer to get permission to do a derivative work, but, HA, just try to find that mythical unicorn-of-a-person after their photo has been sent through the mill of Google and Pinterest postings!  Sherlock Holmes would despair of ever pulling the cat of that labyrinthic bag. 

Never mind the photos. I drew a picture of a tunnel (okay, it was just a doodle) but could not make myself scale it up into a quilt. It seemed like something that would reactivate my vertigo if it ballooned into anything big enough to be hung on the wall.  I didn’t want to quilt anything that would require maintaining an ongoing therapeutic level of Gravol in my bloodstream. 

I consulted some photos we had taken of Kettle Valley Steam Railway in British Columbia.   This is a tourist site of walking trails through defunct railway tunnels.  My photos were so-so.  I had been more enamored with the rarity of playing with a flashlight in a tunnel than I was of capturing clever, nested tunnel photos.  Nothing quilt-worthy there.  Maybe I could do a flashlight in a tunnel...oh wait, I forgot to take a picture of that.

I consulted my artist friend.  She’s not a quilter, but when it comes to designing something, your medium of choice doesn’t matter.  Through discussions with her, I was yanked out of my blocked tunnel and into thinking about the actual concepts at stake: joy, happiness, hope.  I started to think that COVID with its seemingly infinite imposed limitations was perhaps not the first “tunnel” I had encountered.

Every life comes with at least a dollop of adversity, and sometimes it comes with gobs, shovelfuls, or even truckloads of the stuff.  It’s part of living, and like the days where you realize you left your wallet at home after pumping the gas, there’s just no getting around it.  But sometimes, you can temporarily escape from hardship.  Like everything else to do with the pandemic, it will have to be a virtual escape.  And while I’ve been known to perform my virtual escape act with tubs of ice cream, I do have to admit that is a fairly risky option if deployed too often.  And I have a drawer full of elastic topped pants to prove it.

But…what about…fiction?  Haven’t I done a disappearing act into fiction since I first encountered Beaky the Greedy Duck (so, so, SO, much more greedy and imperfect than me!) and Nancy Drew?  Didn’t I solve mysteries with Nancy when I lacked a playmate (as close as I got to the “end of the world” in my gloriously simple childhood) or the day I broke the frog flowerpot?  Didn’t I fight jungle ants with Tom Stetson when boredom threatened to chew off the edges of my soul?  Weren’t Charlie Brown and Snoopy my guiding lights who were not only funny but who seemed perhaps a little less lucky than me, making my own particular tunnel a little shinier?  These beacons were the collective fictional souls who had populated my childhood when the real stuff was, well, just too real.

Surely, they were quilt worthy.  I wondered if using images of them would awaken the slumbering Copyright Police. It’s a good thing Charles Schultz wasn’t looking over my shoulder during all those hours when eight-year-old me was trying to perfect my own Snoopy drawings!  I decided I would have to be willing to just take the insane risk of having Charles Shultz’s estate sue me for stitching one image of Charlie Brown.  Surely, they would not do this to me after I’d spent the better part of my allowance on those 40 cent joke books for years on end, and then sheltered those same books for over fifty years.  They would show compassion. It’s pandemic time!  We all have to make sacrifices.  

So, I’ve taken Charlie Brown and Snoopy and characters from Frogmorton, and I’ve outline stitched them onto unbleached cotton, and coloured them with Inktense pencils.  I have no idea if these squares and the others honoring my favorite fictional characters will ever make it into a finished quilt, or if perhaps they will just end up in a really pretty box sharing space with the dust bunnies under the bed. But, while making these squares, I have indeed experienced joy, happiness, and hopefulness.  I’ve also experienced the nostalgia of knowing that every member of my childhood household read these Peanuts joke books.  Numerous times.  And there it is - the light at not only the end of the tunnel, but at the beginning as well.

The Tunnel Journey - Looking for the Light at the End of the Tunnel

 

February 2021 - Books that have inspired the Tunnel Journey

The design of quilts often has curious origins.  My current project has involved a lot of reflection on tunnels.

We routinely drive through tunnels without much of a thought.  But have you ever noticed that a feeling of relief comes over you when the light at the far end is sighted, and you know for certain that you will make it through?  It’s a bit of sparkle that comes unbidden from somewhere deep in our psyche.

We often casually use the expression “the light at the end of the tunnel” without really digging into its meaning.  Tunnels are a deep metaphor for trouble in our lives, and how we must strive/endure/cope until that stressful situation comes to some kind of resolution.  The current pandemic has been a globally shared tunnel for over a year now.  Many exit routes are offered up; at this moment, all are tantalizingly beyond our grasp.  But, slowly, we are making our way toward those exits. 

Mired in various tunnels over the years, I have often turned to the distraction of fiction and stories.  Their characters easily populated my overactive imagination as a child.  These fictional friends often allowed me to find a bit of respite while battling my way out of a tunnel - which in my younger days was usually something monumental - like having my skipping rope stolen right out of my hands.  Stories were a great place to wait it out, and looking back, I can see many covert lessons in those stories.  Morals, values, aspirations, humor – they were all there, carving out new ways of being, tweaking my character as I empathized with the woes of Charlie Brown, shared the lonely triumphs of Superman, saw my own childish anguish diminish as Rudolph’s imperfection was finally recognized as an essential save-the-day asset.

Unknowingly, I have spent a lifetime under the influence of fictional characters who not only held my hand, but handed me the necessary tools I needed to negotiate the unexpected tunnels of life. And as I take a step back to soak in the big picture, I can see what stitches our lives together. It’s the stories.  They become the framework for how our lives unfold as they weave in and out of the stories of those we encounter.  Some stories intersect for a paragraph, some for a chapter, and some are spread across the encyclopedic volumes that stack up behind us over the decades. Each story has a beginning, and an ending, and if we are really lucky, a lesson or two that will propel us forward.

So, when challenged at our quilt guild to come up with a “light at the end of the tunnel” quilt, I went down a few tunnels, ultimately deciding to yield centre stage to my fictional friends and mentors who have journeyed the unanticipated tunnels with me over the years.  The next post details the beginning of this journey.