Souls (2022)

 

Quilt No. 143 (Formerly No. 52)

July 2022

I’ve learned quite a bit about quilting in the sixteen years that have elapsed since 2006 when I did the first iteration of this Souls quilt.  You can see how it looked in 2006 here.

Below is the original inspiration for that quilt, as I’ve previously described in that much older post:

Tuesdays with Morrie, a long-standing bestseller by Mitch Albom, tells the true story of his relationship with his professor, Morrie Schwartz. Mitch meets with Morrie every Tuesday afternoon as Morrie progresses through the devastating disease process ALS. His view of life and what is meaningful is profoundly changed as he begins to absorb Morrie’s final lessons.

Mitch Albom writes:

 As my visits with Morrie go on I begin to read about death, how different cultures view the final passage. There is a tribe in the North American Arctic, for example, who believe that all things on earth have a soul that exists in a miniature form of the body that holds it – so that a deer has a tiny deer inside it, and a man has a tiny man inside him. When the large being dies, that tiny form lives on. It can slide into something being born nearby, or it can go to a temporary resting place in the sky, in the belly of a great feminine spirit, where it waits until the moon can send it back to earth.

Sometimes, they say, the moon is so busy with the new souls of the world that it disappears from the sky. That is why we have moonless nights. But in the end, the moon always returns as do we all. That is what they believe.

I’ve always felt that my quilted interpretation of this philosophy was too simple and did not sufficiently honor the waiting animal and human souls.  In 2006, the quilt I made reflected the degree of quilting experience I had at that time. In 2022, with another ninety quilts under my belt, I was finally ready to change it up a bit.

Flying Geese Block

I removed the binding and all of the hand quilting, and discarded the wide black border. After all those years, I still could not come up with an appropriate looking set of animals to grace that swooping curve that cut behind the moon. So, instead of a trail of animals, I put in a strip of off-center curved flying geese. So, where are the birds? There are no actual “geese” – the term “flying geese” means a quilt block made of a central triangle with two end pieces that turn the block into a rectangle. I used a fabric that transitioned though several shades of blue-green so that there would be a colour change with each successive flying geese block in the swoop. The blocks include shimmery gold fabric stabilized with iron-on cotton. A second “swoop” was added in by couching two lines of gold cord and then quilting between those lines.

I re-quilted the whole piece and added quilting in the moon.  I placed wool roving over the Earth and quilted over it to make some nice swirly clouds. This still left the question of where to put the animals. I decided to move them to the outer border of the quilt.  For each animal, I used a line drawing, printed it out, and pinned the printout to a square of black fabric. I then stitched oh so carefully along each line on the printout, and then removed the paper.  Sounds straight forward, but it was an exercise in Herculean patience, as each block took 2 – 4 hours to complete. I then sewed these blocks together to make new borders for the quilt, attached them, and covered up the exposed backs of these squares with a really wide facing on the back of the quilt. To my amazement, it all worked out, and I felt that the souls were finally better served as they waited to be returned to their new lives.

Souls (2006)

Quilt No. 52

October 2006

Tuesdays with Morrie, a long-standing bestseller by Mitch Albom, tells the true story of his relationship with his professor, Morrie Schwartz. Mitch meets with Morrie every Tuesday afternoon as Morrie progresses through the devastating disease process of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). His view of life and what is meaningful is profoundly changed as he begins to absorb Morrie’s final lessons.

Mitch Albom writes:

As my visits with Morrie go on I begin to read about death, how different cultures view the final passage. There is a tribe in the North American Arctic, for example, who believe that all things on earth have a soul that exists in a miniature form of the body that holds it – so that a deer has a tiny deer inside it, and a man has a tiny man inside him. When the large being dies, that tiny form lives on. It can slide into something being born nearby, or it can go to a temporary resting place in the sky, in the belly of a great feminine spirit, where it waits until the moon can send it back to earth.
Sometimes, they say, the moon is so busy with the new souls of the world that it disappears from the sky. That is why we have moonless nights. But in the end, the moon always returns as do we all.
That is what they believe.

Quilting Notes

The Earth  The Earth was created using Setacolor fabric dyes, with the silvery Shimmer Pearl added in a final layer, to create swirls of clouds.

The Sky  The initial sky background I made for this quilt used numerous strips of different black fabrics with gold stars. It was too cluttered looking, so I decided to use only one piece of fabric for the sky. As I started to take apart the discarded “sky” to reclaim the fabric, I envisioned using it as a night sky, with penguins on an iceberg. This became a small quilt entitled, What Do You Suppose Is Out There? It was finished before Souls, which became stalled in its wait for suitable objects to use as souls.

The Souls  The human souls were easy to find. My daughter readily agreed to let me use the tiny Guatemalan worry dolls she had received as a child. In Guatemala, children tell their worries to these dolls and place them under their pillow. In the morning, the worries are gone. The other souls were more difficult to locate. I tried unsuccessfully to find buttons or any metallic or plastic or wooden embellishments to use as animal figures for the souls. I finally gave up looking and began canvassing fellow crafters for a solution. Bonnie Spylo, of Bonnie’s Scrapbooking, found wonderful wooden animals at a Michaels store when she was travelling. I found a few additional souls in the form of iron-on patches.

Procuring souls was one thing, but how to arrange them on the quilt? This proved to be a huge hurdle, so I pinned the quilt on a large piece of cardboard and kept rearranging the souls on a daily basis. This went on for weeks. By this time, the quilt had been finished and waiting for the “souls” to be applied for 4 - 5 months. Eventually, I tried arranging them in a flowing curve that wanders behind the moon. This arrangement gave the quilt a feeling of motion, as though the souls were being pulled along together in an unbroken chain of life.

The Moon  It proved quite challenging to find just the right shape for the moon. Although there seemed to be an infinite number of moon shapes in drawings and pictures and shapes I created myself, none of them combined the correct proportion of crescent shape and pointiness that I wanted. With a great deal of trial and error, the final shape was finally achieved. The golden moon fabric was recycled from a favourite blouse.

Additional Notes
Selecting the quilting lines in the sky required a distant vanishing point far beyond the borders of the quilt. Several tables and rulers had to be called into play in order to get the lines set up in the right configuration. To attach the wooden animal souls to the quilt I glue-gunned a piece of wool on the back of each animal, and used a large darning needle to run the wool through the quilt and tie it at the back.