The Owl's Tree

The Owl’s Tree

Quilt No. 132

October 2020

This quilt ended up with exactly zero of the pieces it started out with. It redefined the term “fall”, as pieces fell from favour and were eliminated from the quilt. 

I started out with the Time to Harvest Fall fabric panel.  I have a love/hate relationship with panels – their design often baffles me. My first beef:  why do fabric designers make panels with pictures of unequal sizes?  There is no easy way to cut them apart and sew them into a quilt.  So…the very thing they are intended for – simplicity – is thwarted.  Clearly this is a conspiracy to force us to get out our rulers and calculators and add bits and pieces (alias sashing) until we have a set of blocks that are all the same size and can now be assembled into a whole.  The unlike-sized units on the fabric panel are creatively flustering. Usually, things are deliberately made into standard sized units – charm squares, jellyrolls, bolts of fabric.  Even strips of bacon are all the same length, well, at least until you cook them.

I once had a snowman panel printed with pictures. No two pictures were the same size.  I cut the various snowman pictures out, trying numerous unsatisfactory configurations until my crowning achievement was a Ziploc bag of frayed snowmen parts.  The arranging and rearranging of these shards played out over many sessions and lasted for years. At the end of it I had a single postcard quilt and a bag of bits that continues to make me groan with despair every time I come across it.

 Fabric panels can have a further frustrating challenge.  They’re are often printed with barely half an inch between the individual pictures. It’s also common to have a different colour border printed around each picture.  Being fabric, a certain degree of wonkiness invariably creeps in during the printing process.  The squares are never quite square enough to cut out without a bit of compulsory weeping. That elusive one quarter inch that is needed to cut out and sew the pictures onto the mandatory sashing strips can be impossible to find. 

None of the picture fabric from the Harvest panel ended up in the quilt, despite my best efforts with sashing.  The pieces were ultimately torn out and sacrificed in a desperate attempt to throw a life line to the central owl/tree block. That block came from a pattern in the Piecemaker’s Quilt Calendar from 1997, proving yet again my father’s sage advice that if you keep something for twenty years, you will use it.  However, I would have to say that did not always ring true.  The giant stone millwheel he brought home from the dump exceeded the twenty-year-use-clause, but was ultimately just too big to cart back to the dump. At least it made a good conversation piece, propped against the house.  For the first five years.

To finish the owl quilt, I used another panel, the Autumn Dream Big Leaf Panel from Hoffman. 

This was an impulse buy (my husband’s impulse, not mine), and ended up being yet another panel that I had no idea how to use.  My fabric panel collection is one of my favourites. It must be, because it now occupies more than one box. I keep repeating the same mistake of being seduced by panels that look pretty but offer no obvious way to be used.  I have a friend who says that we are doomed to make the same mistake over and over until we learn the lesson.  She just didn’t tell me that I would accumulate a number of boxes during that lesson.

I cut the leaf panel to make a border for the owl block, using appliqued pieces to hide the seams and/or complete the leaves into whole shapes.  Everything matched up nicely, but the leaves dominated the piece and the tree block receded into visual obscurity.  It was just life real life, where I could never quite pick out the owl in the tree. I eventually hit on the idea of appliqueing the brown fabric into what looks like a border between the block and the leaves.  This tamed the beast enough that I could live with it.

The owl reappeared and settled into his tree and sighed, glad to be done with it all.

This piece was rescued from the original Harvest quilt panel.