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. 

Nancy Drew

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

Part of The Tunnel Journey

It’s hard to write about an icon.  Especially when the custom is to read about that icon.  And if that icon is your best friend in the realm of fiction it’s even more difficult. Now I wouldn’t want Nancy to think that she could ever supersede those great chums I went sledding with, or played jacks with, or crafted Barbie doll clothes with, but they were sorely lacking in the mystique that was Nancy Drew. 

Why oh why were my friends and acquaintances so deadly dull and lacking in mystery?  This in itself was a mystery.  Maybe they were just too young to be involved in what I came to know as “sleuthing”.  Nancy was the best, and even extended my vocabulary.

All knowledge conferred to children in the 1960’s was on a need-to-know basis.  And if it wasn’t a times-table, or tips on drying streak-free dishes, as far as my mother was concerned, you didn’t need to know.  The dividing line between adults and children at that time dwarfed the not yet doomed Berlin Wall.  So possibly the adults were keeping all those juicy mysteries to themselves.

As I worked through that line of thought, I could see that it didn’t make sense.  Wasn’t Nancy Drew a teenager or something around that age?  Then it hit me like an errant baseball bat to the head.  My sister, strutting around in her teenaged years, was hogging all the mysteries! I knew it!  But I needed to find clues to prove it.  I consulted my Nancy Drew books, The Hidden Staircase, The Secret of the Old Clock, The Sign of the Twisted Candles. Nothing there.  My eyes fell on The Clue in the Diary.  Now there was the item that was going to give me the clues I needed to solve the Mystery of the Missing Mysteries.  The cursive script in my sister’s diary was a bit hard to read, me still being in the printing phase of my literary development, but I muddled through enough of it to get the gist.  Boys. Dates. Basketball tournaments. Ugh.  Her life was even duller than mine.  After carefully combing through her diary, I pronounced her life completely lacking in mystery. 

How could Nancy live in a place that teemed with mysteries so numerous they outnumbered the pollywogs proudly swirling around in my pickle jar?  The closest thing that fell into the realm of mystery at my house was who ate the cookies stored away for Christmas. (Me).  Or, who forgot to hand over the teacher’s note about that incident in the schoolyard. (Me).  Or who hid all those undesirable pieces of pork chop under the edge of Dad’s plate.  (Also me).  Or who was the accomplice in the shooting of JFK? (Not me).

There was not one single solvable mystery to be had in my humdrum neighbourhood, which had stupid boring street names like Kent and Wilson, and not a single Lilac Inn or hidden staircase to spawn some interest.  Why were there lilac trees, but no Inn?  Not really worthy of investigation.  Even our house lacked mystery, having its staircase in plain view, no one having thought to hide it…and…it went down to basement, not up to some mysterious attic filled with dusty clue-rich treasures.  So unimaginative.

After reading our meagre collection of Nancy Drew’s till the covers fell off, and then reading those of all my friends, I grudgingly came up with a plan.  I would wait it out until I became a teenager, when gobs of mysteries would fall into my lap. I would solve them all, and maybe even let Ned help me, if Nancy could spare him. In preparation, I set aside the magnifying glass assigned to my stamp collection.

In the meantime, I would hang out with Trixie Belden.  She was more age appropriate anyway. 

Superman, The Man of Steel, on Cotton

 

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

Part of The Tunnel Journey

I’m trying to remember when I first stumbled upon The Man of Steel.  Probably, some older cousin forgot one of his Superman comics at our house.  Initial contact isn’t that important.  It’s the outcome that counts.

While I don’t know how the affair started, I do know that it has never really ended.  I still have that same fluttery feeling when I see that muscled blue unitard with the red cape flying defiantly behind it.  Surely this is the ultimate pinnacle of society’s ethics.  Surely it is a sign that one day we will seek to do only good.  And be able to fly.  My nine-year-old concept of Superman remains my adult version of him. 

 My childhood was littered with criminals, all of them fictional.  In this particular sphere, crime, in all its myriad ugliness, existed only so that Superman would have something to do - immerse himself in vigilantism.  It mattered not that he completely lacked any policing credentials whatsoever, and had never spent even one minute at any law enforcement academy.  He was an innate crime fighter, proving that you didn’t really need special training if you have enough passion. Without Superman, Lex Luther, the embodiment of badness, could easily take over the world in a single afternoon, subverting all that is nice and replacing it with all that is un-nice.  Bad without its corollary, good, is, well, just bad.  It’s the contrast that makes it salient.  And if you can add an amazing flying physique to that contrast it makes for some great escapist fiction, with a side order of morality.

But, despite all his prowess, Superman still had his foible. Notice that there is no ‘s’ on that word. Superman was assigned but one foible – susceptibility to kryptonite.  This substance is so synonymous with the concept of fatal weakness that things that cause us to fall prey to our flaws are now referred to “our kryptonite”.  Superman made that possible.

I always worried that I would find a chunk of kryptonite in the back yard.  It seemed possible, as other stuff showed up there inexplicably – bits of glass in brown, green, or blue (never clear), unidentified car parts, evidence of dogs we didn’t own, rocks that weren’t there yesterday. Landscaping wasn’t much of a priority back then, nor was there much guidance about where to throw your junk.  In the post WWII neighbourhood, you had a house, maybe a driveway, and likely a picket fence to enclose your kingdom.  Planting stuff was left up to God or Nature, depending on your leanings, and a mingling of grass and weeds was a more than suitable lawn.  The peony bush that crept over from the neighbour’s yard was dually claimed without further thought.  It was enough.

The on-going and seemingly insurmountable issue of the kryptonite threat kind of bothered me.  I felt like it shouldn’t exist, him being “invulnerable” and all.  But I could not deny the role kryptonite had to play in demonstrating how elusive and unreachable excellence could be.

The kryptonite thing got started when Superman’s planet spontaneously blew up, in what Wikipedia lists as a “cataclysmic event”.  There are no additional details.  In my ever-growing list of apocalyptic events to worry about, cataclysm doesn’t even make the first eighteen.  That kind of bothered me – if planetary annihilation happened to Superman, maybe it could crop up here too.  Thankfully, Jor-El, Superman’s dad, saw it coming. He built some kind of space cradle and jettisoned baby Superman into space at the last possible second, aiming it at the ever-reliable Planet Earth.  Baby Superman didn’t need food or diaper changes, so he was fresh as a rose and quite appealing when he and his space cradle plopped down at the Kent’s farm somewhere in fictional Iowa. They took him in and raised him like a single-bodied twin, with the Clark Kent/Superman alter-ego thing known only to them.

The ultimate downside of Superman's planet going kablooey (other than losing a whole planet full of very technically advanced people) is that it generated a whole lot of kryptonite, as is common with exploding planets.  And some of that foul mineral followed the super cradle to Earth.  Some of this kryptonite arrived sooner, some later, and most of it fell preferentially into the back yards of super villains, many of them babies themselves at the time.  This did not bode well for Superman’s future.

Kryptonite introduced me to a whole new term: invulnerable.  What? I had to look that up in the dictionary at school, the internet still being at least thirty years out from being invented, and Mom being too preoccupied with apple pie baking to stand in as a dictionary.  I discovered that things were either ‘vulnerable’ or ‘invulnerable’, but mostly the former. Kryptonite, in all its gleaming green glory, not to mention its alternatively coloured forms, could jolt Superman out of his never-going-to-need-a-gym state of health. He could be killed, or just be injured, or get sick. Superman could throw up.  

Was nothing in life perfect?

Despite the kryptonite affliction, Superman had a few lessons up his Spandex sleeve. Don’t be a criminal was probably the most memorable one, although I kind of liked the idea of crime, since it gave Superman and Nancy Drew a raison d’etre.  Other than that, it was all just the white bread world of Winnie the Pooh. 

Superman also motivated me towards independence.  Each Friday I was given my allowance, a quarter. It was never two dimes and a nickel, always a quarter.  Out of that twenty-five cents I had to come up with a sound financial plan each week.  Would I squander it on a sickeningly huge bag of candy, or maybe a modest bag of candy with an ice cream cone on the side?  A five-cent popsicle could also be good value for my money, leaving twenty cents for discretionary spending. But there was always that twelve cent Superman comic to consider. Issues of the comic didn’t necessarily come out every week, but the odd time two issues would come out in the same week, leaving only enough change for the purchase of a wad of gum drops.  Comics, however, could certainly be read numerous times, an excellent and lasting investment.  Foregoing the candy was a no-brainer.  I bought and read those Superman comics like a dying man reads the Afterlife Manual. 

Each Saturday I would take that twenty-five cents in my fist (never once losing it) and venture six block to the magazine store downtown.  I would bypass the local “corner store” in case they lacked the newest comic and induced me to waste my money on sponge toffee. It was a solo journey that I undertook with all the solemnity of a first climb of Everest.  If no new Superman issues waited in the display case, I would ponder other purchases, perhaps Richie Rich, or Donald Duck, or even Archie – but only if I thought this might be the week where Betty would triumph over that b----- , Veronica.  It was imperative to buy the Superman comic, lest he be stuck in kryptonite up to his neck.  If so, I would need to rescue him by grimly turning the pages until he out-witted his evil opponent.  After that, we would both need to retreat to our Fortresses of Solitude in complete exhaustion.

While Sunday school, regular school, and “the look” from Mom were all valuable in tweaking my moral compass, I could not deny that Superman played a more than a minimal role in the crafting of my ethics framework.

Lessons Learned

Invulnerability:  Good

Crime:  Bad

Kryptonite:  Really Bad

Financial Management:  Forego the candy

Walking to the Store Solo:  Stellar

Beaky (Or Julie?) the Greedy Duck

 

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

Part of The Tunnel Journey

 

When I was about eight years old my mother gave me a copy of Beaky the Greedy Duck.  I no longer have that book so I can’t consult it for a refresher of the plot.  However, I recall that Beaky was a white duck who wore a blue and white checkered pinafore, and lived with a bunch of other non-pinafore wearing ducks in a farm yard.  If there was an explanation for the pinafore it escapes me, as does what exactly a pinafore is.  What I do remember about the book was that Beaky, unlike all the other nameless ducks in the barnyard, was guilty of greediness.  A bad thing. 

 

This was the first time I ever stuck my head out of my childish self-centeredness long enough to examine my own character. Was I too weighed down by greediness? Had my mother given me this book as a lesson and a warning to mend my greedy ways?  Was I so far along on the Scale of Ultimate Greed that she could not face telling me, and had to let me discover my ultimate evil nature in a book?

 

This seemed odd. She was pretty skilled at telling me when I was too loud (my Dad’s Prime Rule being “no hollerin’ in the house”), or when I needed to be nudged back into unblemished obedience by remembering to take that clean hankie for health inspection at school.  A Kleenex wouldn’t do for that all important weekly event. It might get tattered in my pocket and was likely to come out with at least one gumball stuck to it. She was the picture of persistence on the topic of picking up the clothes that I’d artfully flung about my room.  But here it was in all its ugliness.  Greediness. I had a character flaw so monumental that it needed to be pointed out in a textual parable.  And this flaw was of such magnitude that I dared not address it by asking my mother about it.  It was up to me to mend my ways by avoiding the pitfalls of greed into which the motherless Beaky had unwittingly fallen. 

 

At age eight I was a little hazy on what did and did not constitute greediness.  Beaky wasn’t really helping me, seducing me into wanting a blue and white checkered pinafore just like hers.  Lacking the word for “coveting” I labelled that pinafore lust as “greed”.  Not only was Beaky not helping me, she was throwing gasoline on the fire of my greediness.  Why would Beaky do this to me?  Maybe greed wasn’t her only flaw. I began to suspect that all ducks were an unsavory breed, purposed with teaching naughty children painful lessons and subverting childish self-satisfaction.  Did adults know this about ducks?

 

Greed began to sneak up on me from everywhere.  It gnawed at me when I went for that second piece of pie…but not enough to stop me from eating it.  It glowered at me when I divided up the chocolates even though I gave away more than I kept.  What was the magic number needed to dispel greediness?

 

Possibly, “want” was greediness in disguise and I denied that my too-small gym shoes were in need of replacement, despite the appearance of my big toes through the canvas. When Christmas came, I circled an austere ten items in the Sears catalogue, not the usual twenty-five.  I clenched my jaw and left the picture of the Lincoln Logs un-circled.

 

But was it enough? Had Mother noticed how rarely the monster of greed squeezed me in its claws? If she did, she was adept at keeping it to herself. 

 

Like a dying leper clutching a Bible, I continued to read Beaky almost daily, searching for clues that would heal me.  When dust cover fell into a shambles my mother at last commented.  “You really like that book, don’t you?”  She failed to recognize that the stains she thought were Allen’s Apple Juice (the best kind, from the giant can), were actually tears of despair. 

 

I needed to up my game by giving something significant away.  Certainly not my hand-crafted Barbie clothes or the collection of scarves I’d knit for my stuffed animals. And not my Superman comics, which still had plenty of entertainment and enlightenment left in them, having been read a mere seventeen times each.  My eyes fell on my bag of marbles.  If I gave half of them away, I would still have plenty left to play with, especially since, being a girl, we did not play for keepsies.  That was for those crazed risk-taking bad boys with no respect for their own personal property.  I sorted out my least favourite ones with satisfaction - some of them being scratched, or chipped, or both.  I distributed them among various friends, and tried not to bite my lip too hard when I saw how emaciated that left the Crown Royal bag.  Battling greed required sacrifice.

 

No one seemed to notice my new found philanthropy, and how I always insisted that my second piece of pie be “not too big”.  How could I have extinguished a major, possibly fatal, character flaw and not one single person came forward on bended knee offering gratitude?  I was discovering how cruel the world could be.

 

One day when I came home from school, there was a brown envelope on the table.  For me. Oh joy, an unexpected gift, such a rare and precious thing.  My smiling mother directed me to open it.  It was…another book.  “Look! It’s the next one in the series. I subscribed for you - I know how much you loved Beaky”. 

Mick the Disobedient Puppy stared up at me with perceptive eyes.  I was pretty sure that Mick was about to make that duck look like a saint.

 

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.

Full Moon

Full Moon 

Quilt No. 133

October 2020

I can't help but feel that this quilt is a complete cheat.

One of the many fun parts of belonging to a quilt guild is doing the challenges. Recently, we did an “ugly fabric challenge”.  Participants brought in a piece from their stash, something that they considered to be ugly.  A draw ensued and each person received their “ugly” fabric, with no restrictions as to how it was to be used, except that it had to be recognizable in the final piece.  In other words, no over-dyeing or cutting it up into confetti-sized pieces, or using it on the back.  It had to be legit.

Some doozey fabric swatches came in, and since the person who donated each piece was not identified, even the purple fabric that looked so attractive in the 1980’s was game. That one, despite the randomness of the draw, went to the purple-hating quilter. Of course.

The piece I donated was viewed by several quilters as “quite nice” and “not ugly at all”.  There was even a comment of “Gee, I really like that one”. I viewed it with fresh eyes and decided that, yes, it was not nearly as unattractive as I had thought. I started to feel a teensy bit sad that I was letting it go.  Hadn' I once loved that fabric? Later on while combing through a drawer of fabric at home, I found that I had given away the wrong piece, and the one that was truly ugly was still grinning at me from the drawer. 

I was hoping to receive something I could really get my teeth into. But when my name was drawn I got a lovely piece of fabric. How could anyone ever view it as “ugly”?  However, while it was not exactly ugly, it did not easily lend itself to the creation of an art quilt. Doing a landscape scene and using it for a shrub or two seemed inadequate. I couldn't come up with an idea of what type of block quilt I might use it in. So, it was ultimately very challenging, and I could not come up with a single idea.  As the pandemic descended upon us, and guild meetings ceased, my thoughts turned elsewhere and the ugly fabric challenge was completely forgotten. 

Months later the guild reconnected via Zoom. There was no ducking it, the ugly fabric challenge was still on the agenda. With a deadline!  I had to dig down through the piles of UFO’s (Unfinished Objects) and USO’s (Unstarted Objects) that weighed down my quilt table and spilled over onto the floor. The pandemic and all of its uncertainties had not been conducive to creative quilting. But it sure had been conducive to creating a giant mess as I tried to come up with something I could work on (other than masks!) that would pull me out of a grinding feeling of despair.  Eventually, a pregnancy (not mine!) came along to save me, and a baby quilt was needed. As I completed this simple project, I noticed the yellow fabric had befriended the so-called “ugly” fabric in the pile.  It made me think of a rising moon with its pale yet inviting yellow tone.

The baby quilt that "saved" me.

The “ ugly” fabric, while not ugly, faithfully lived up to its ability to challenge.  No style of machine quilting and no thread had any visual effect whatsoever.  Metallic thread, Superior Glitter thread, rayon thread – all were simply eaten up in the lush busy-ness of the fabric.  So be it.  I let it gobble up the quilting and have its way.  

It’s never a good idea to argue with fabric.  And while I felt like I was cheating by having a non-ugly “ugly fabric”, the piece was defiant enough to give me a good challenge.  Mission accomplished!

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.

My Mother's Cats

My Mother’s Cats

Quilt No. 130

It all started out with a photograph of my grandmother that I had printed out on cotton at least 15 years ago.  I had tried to use it numerous times and failed every time.  This time was no exception, so I’m pretty certain it’s okay to designate that creative path a certified dead end. 

I built the entire crazy quilt around Gramma in the center, but the longer I worked on it, the less interesting it got.  Definitely a contrast problem!  I finally trotted out my Box of Special Things I Don’t Know What To Do With.  This is where I keep all those cute panels and odd cushion covers and weird socks and bits of embroidery that I Don’t Know What To Do With. It helps to legitimize this warehousing process if you mentally capitalize the name of box.

Absolutely nothing in the box worked until I came across these two exquisite sleeping cats done in crewel work. They were on a white background in a piece my mother had done sometime in the 1980’s or ‘90’s.  Cutting them out and using them on a leopard print background added the warmth the other neutral toned fabrics lacked.  Everything woke up.  Except the cats.

Thanks Mom!  And since she got left out of the quilt, here’s a photo of my beautiful grandmother. 

Almost Midnight

Almost Midnight

Quilt No 20, April 2001

Update March 2020

Have you ever looked endlessly at one of your quilts and thought “I love/hate you?” It’s the same feeling I get with do-nuts.  While I was pleased with the sleepy winter village and the big moon and sky of Almost Midnight, my eye kept snagging on the poorly executed binding.  I wanted to replace the binding, but I had no matching fabric for this twenty-year-old quilt.  The drawer full of black fabric was a bust.  Time for Google.

This wasn’t the first time this quilt had me quizzing the internet.  I initially saw a version of this quilt hanging in a quilt shop in a city some two hundred miles from where I lived.  It was charming!  I asked to buy the pattern.  They would not sell it to me. What?! I had to take their workshop to get the pattern. I explained that I lived impossibly far away, expecting them to be sympathetic and accommodating.  They were not.   They even seemed a tad on the gleeful side, saying I was unlikely to even find the pattern elsewhere, since it was from a long out-of-print book.  I would have to say that this is the only time in my twenty-year quilting odyssey that I have encountered any quilt shop employee who was uncooperative.  It’s been my usual experience that quilt shop ladies are the absolute best, and I generally want to shower them with chocolates and praise.  They did grudgingly tell me that the pattern was in an unattainable book called Piece on Earth, and that the quilt title was “Santa Cloths”.  The original pattern had a Santa with a sleigh full of presents where you see the moon on my quilt..

I’m not sure if I turned to Google, since in the year 2000, Google was still a speck in the eye of the internet, and cyberspace was largely an unpopulated wild west.  However, as a librarian, I was pretty familiar with the blossoming digital world, and I persevered until I located a used copy in a book store in California. This type of purchase is boringly ordinary now, but it felt like a glorious victory at the time. When the book arrived I ripped open the package in anticipation.  There was the quilt…but the pull-out pattern had been, well, pulled out.  It was after all, a used book.  However, the vendor had failed to describe it as an abused book.

Photo of "Santa Cloths" quilt in pattern book.

The game was on.  I scanned in the photo

and enlarged it.  I wanted a non-holiday themed quilt, so I replaced the Santa with a moon.  I used up my various black and gold star fabrics that I’d been collecting, and practiced my curved piecing on the moon and the sky.  I hand quilted it with gold metallic thread and capped it off with a less than stellar binding.  In my defense, I’d have to say it looked okay to me at the time…

Here in 2020 I once again found myself consulting the internet on behalf of this quilt, trying to find some suitable black/gold star fabric for the binding - kind of tricky, since in the trendiness of the textile world, this type of fabric is on the outs. However, once again, my search was successful, thanks to Fabric.com.

Our guild holds Sew Days every month or two. Members can take a workshop, or just bring their own project to work on.  These are most definitely “don’t miss” events, as we get to spend a whole day together immersed in quilting and friendship.  A pizza lunch is the equivalent of the cherry on top. My plan was to take this quilt to the next Sew Day. Replacing the binding would be the perfect one-day project.  To prepare ahead, I removed the old binding and repaired a wonky seam so that I could square the quilt up properly.  I’d originally neglected that as well.  While I was at it, I added machine quilting to the buildings and fleece roving for the chimney smoke.  I pondered why two of the houses lacked chimneys, but left it that way, since it was accurate to the original pattern photo.  My guess it those two houses have electric heating.

After I repaired the wonky seam, I got out my long straight edge and tried to figure out where to cut.  This very quickly revealed that the inner border was waaaay off kilter, being much narrower at the bottom than the top.  My chronic eye-balling of the ugly binding had kept this a secret from me until now.  Ugh. No way was this fix going to be completed on a Sew Day!

Now what? There was only one option.  The inner and the outer borders had to go.  I gritted my teeth and removed them. I would have to replace them with new fabric.  But that would give me a three-layered quilt surrounded by an extended area of only one layer of border fabric.  Batting and backing would need to be added in, and at the end of it, there could be no raw seams on the back that would reveal the deed. Double ugh.  Fortunately, I had lots of extra fabric, since Fabric.com had generously sent me several extra inches, as this piece was the end of the bolt.  Or maybe they just knew…

I attached the inner and outer borders as you would normally do on a quilt top.  I then hand basted batting strips to the wrong side of the new borders.  After querying more than a few befuddled brain cells, I figured out that putting facings on the quilt, rather than a traditional binding, would address all the problems, including covering the newly added batting on the back of the quilt.  It worked!  In order to avoid rippling the quilt interior, I added only one machine quilted line around the outer border, to anchor all the layers. 

The straightforward re-binding plan was just like one of those situations where you purchase a new refrigerator.  It’s two inches too tall for its allotted space.  You then need new cabinets…oh  they show the worn-out floor…gee whiz the stove now looks dodgy…It starts out simple and very quickly get complicated, expensive, and guilt-inducing.  But in the end, the whole quilt got an much needed update, and it has now been restored to the “love it” category.

Julie's Tree of Life

Quilt No. 100

November 2018

I admit it. I’ve been pretty smug about numbering my completed quits, having started this way back with Quilt Number 1, some twenty years ago. I can’t even remember how I knew to do that. Possibly it was dictated by some vague ancestral memory in my DNA. So, when Quilt No. 100 began looming on my horizon it was significant. 

“So, I guess you’re going to do something really special for your hundredth quilt, right?”  A couple of people said this to me, echoing a thought that was already sweating it out in a tiny corner of my brain. The weight of expectation hung on me like a dead pig being carted home from market.  It was true.  It needed to be something special.  Really special.

But what?

The option of an animal quilt was out. I’d already quilted a fox, bears, a couple of loons, fish, numerous frogs, penguins, birds (also numerous), elephants, parrots, dolphins, cats, a dog, and potatoes. Yes, I know that last one is a vegetable.  More serious subjects had included my series of WWII quilts - a military graveyard, a bomb cloud, Auschwitz, and Hibakusha (honoring the radiation-affected Japanese people).  Less serious and more whimsical was my song-inspired quilt series - Let It Be, Welcome to the Jungle, Crystal Blue Persuasion, Road to Shambala, Blue Collar, Private Idaho, Horse with No Name.  Then there were the fairy tale themed quilts - The Princess and the Pea, Who’s There, The Pond at Old Tranquility Farm.  Most quilts tended to be non-series outliers such as the pre-911 New York City skyline, the Norwalk Christmas (yes, based on the virus, ugh), the human brain, cactus, and even my own personal Library Cat.  No. 100 needed to get past all of these.

I wasn’t quite sure what I could do to set it apart.  One hundred blocks? Too obvious.  One hundred colours? Too tricky.  One hundred stomach ulcers?  Getting closer.  Maybe I could drag other people into this project.  Now there was something I hadn’t done before.  An imprecise plan took shape.  Involving numerous other people always makes everything easier, right?

I thought it over, but not in any great depth. I would ask everyone I knew to give me a scrap of fabric. And… and… I would take that fabric and make a leaf for each person and put their name on it. Eventually it would make itself into a tree, a Tree of Life!  How easy would that be? It was so simple I was almost done before I had even started!

Of course, as a quilter, I had forgotten that not everyone has piles of fabric lying around just waiting for someone to request a piece of it.  People who do not commune with fabric on a daily basis would rather give you a twenty dollar bill than try to figure out how the %$#! they are supposed to come up with a chunk of fabric.

I put out the call – any fabric, no restriction as to type or colour, and a 3-inch square would be plenty.  Now if that scrap of fabric meant something special, if perhaps it carried a story with it, so much the better, but that was an optional feature. In March 2013 I sent out my plea via email, Facebook, and at my quilt guild.  I held the line at accosting people in my workplace and strangers in the street.

Envelopes started arriving in the mail from far and wide.  Fabric scraps were pressed into my hand.  Stories poured forth as friends, mostly non-quilters, gave me their heartfelt pieces of cloth. Some of those stories are captured in this blog post.

Arrival of Fabrics

I spent most of the summer of 2013 making the leaves.  I added stabilizer and backing and cultivated each fabric fragment into something that would hopefully be worthy of their individual stories. Each piece had its unique challenge as I worked my way through bath towels, organza, polyester, PJs, upholstery fabric, neoprene, paper, socks, ties, and a logo from a baseball cap. I free-motion quilted each name in gold metallic thread onto each leaf. I got pretty good at doing script writing with a sewing machine.  By the end of it, I could probably have free-motion quilted a whole blog post, but I’ll save that fun for another day. 

First Leaves

After the leaves were done the whole project pretty much fell off the wagon, into the ditch, and rolled all the way to the Sargasso Sea of Design Despair.  I had a whole lot of leaves, none of which went with each other.  Clumped together they looked creatively appalling.  I was going to need something to harmonize all these dissimilar pieces.  More leaves!  That was the answer!  So…I made many, many (did I mention that it was many?) more leaves from a single piece of non-print fabric. I chose a lovely green fabric with varying shades, from quilter/designer Elaine Quehl.  This helped harmonize the leaves, but they were still lacking the main structure – the tree! 

Harmonizing Leaves

Maddeningly, I could not come up with a design for the tree.  I looked at trees on the internet, real life trees, trees in books, and dreamed about trees, most of which were mocking me.  No tree could be found to host my crafted leaves. I put the leaves in a box where they remained in the dark for a very long time.

 

Occasionally someone would give me fabric and I would make a new leaf and add it to the box.  My creative block grew into a wall that got taller and wider. The project sat untouched as I worked my way through another fifteen quilts. I just could not come up with a tree concept.  I would pull everything out, immerse myself in utter despair, and put it all away again.  Guilt and embarrassment about my creative failure followed me around like a chihuahua Velcro-ed to my leg. 

I am fully aware that not every creative idea comes to fruition, but I had ridden the horse of failure to a whole new pasture.  If you are going to experience a creative failure, why not involve every single person you know by asking them to contribute to that project? Why not amp up your regret by making people sorry they had chopped up favorite garments, wet suits, sofas, and wedding dresses, just for you?  I had more than a few anxious nightmares about the folly of this endeavor.

One day in 2018 my friend Lily phoned me.  She is endlessly supportive and if there was a Nobel Prize for Encouragement, Lily would be the uncontested winner every year.  She was hoping I’d send her a photo of two quilts I’d made many years ago.  These were a pair of memorial quilts that brought together blocks made by families that had suffered the loss of a child.  I had some difficulty finding the photo and came across a speech I’d given when the quilts were unveiled to the families.  In the speech I’d outlined how I’d come up with the design for the quilts.  Each contributed block was completely unique in content, colour, and design.  I’d divided the blocks by colour and let that guide the final design.  The individual elements had dictated the outcome for something that had a lot of pieces that did not necessarily go together in an obvious way. This was pretty much a bingo moment. The tree itself was of little importance.  The leaves were the stars of the project.

Design Wall

Strips for Tree Planning

I taped up my highly technical and expensive design wall (the white fuzzy back on a $2 plastic table cloth).  I rough cut some strips from unwanted brown fabric and laid out a prototype for a leaning tree trunk with a bunch of branches. 





                                            

Leaves. Will it Work?

Dyed Sky 

I started adding leaves, keeping families grouped together. The leaves did indeed begin to dictate the design.  I could tell that all those good wishes and beautiful stories would indeed blend into a tree of life for which I was the sole connecting link.

Eventually, I knew I would end up with this crazy colorful treetop.  I had no idea what would be on the quilt where the treetop ended, other than a leaning tree trunk. More stalling and creative foot shuffling ensued. How could I ever balance out something so top heavy?  I tried to focus on what such a tree would have beneath it. Well, obviously…a garden!

Uh oh.  Once again, there was no picture of this garden anywhere in my brain. I bided my time, dyeing all the background sky fabrics, and assembling them, adding the finished leaves onto the tree branches. 

Dyed Sky Fabrics

No fully formed garden grew in my mind.

I tried to imagine what I would have done to create a garden if the tree wasn’t there. With no particular plan in mind, I forced myself to just start with some fabrics and see where that would take me. Several people had given me largish pieces of fabric for their leaf.  Some of these had flowers or leaves on them.  I added fusible to the back of those ones and started cutting out the individual flower or leaf shapes from the fabric.  Bit by bit I arranged these into flower beds.


A Tree of Life would most certainly have a path below it, so I arranged the garden on either side of the path.  I came across a frog in my stash.  I have made enough frog quilts that others automatically associate me with frogs.  My tiny central character was born.  After that, it was mere weeks of arranging and top stitching until the garden had sprung up to grace the pathway and the green hills that I’d dyed for the background. 

The quilt was now 65 inches tall, a colossal size compared with my other art quilts.  It weighed about as much as newly birthed elephant, and quilting it on my regular sewing machine (not a longarm) took the stamina of a Sisyphus and the muscles on a Popeye. I used rayon and metallic thread as much as possible to pump up the sparkle quotient.
   

I had the tree.  I had the garden. I was almost there! But…I had this great big empty space between them.  The green hills looked forlornly empty.  Eeesh, yet another bout of creative block walled me in, and no amount of ice cream bars or cups of coffee could pry me loose.  More time slipped by which explains how something I began in March 2013 was only finished six years later in 2019.  Finally, I came up with some long tendrils and tiny leaves sweeping down from the tree.  These happily filled in the space and added a bit of motion. They also suggested that in life, there are always new things to come.

The Tree was finally finished! It currently hangs at the foot of a staircase in my house, and when I pass by it each day, I feel the warm presence of friends and family.  And like other trees, I can never declare it to be completely “finished”. I’m always hopeful of the possibility that more leaves will be added.