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.

Julie's Tree of Life - The Stories

Every leaf on my Tree has its own story, which nicely parallels how I think of my quilts.  The stories and the quilts are intertwined - you cannot have one without the other.  I’ve chosen to tell only a few of the many stories on my Tree here.  I’ve also kept it to first names. 

Lily's Wedding Gown 

Lily. Shortly after my request went out, a package from Lily arrived.  Lily is one of those rare and endearing people who are always thinking of you and setting aside little goodies of interest that she knows you will like.  Her package contained a Toronto Star article on garments, plus several Christmas card fronts for me to upcycle.  She knows how much I enjoy the artwork, and she is especially likely to send me cards with penguins, remembering how much I admire them.

The very next day another package arrived - two large white envelopes carefully taped together.  Here is what was written on the first envelope:

Lily

peau de soie (silk) portion of hem of wedding dress, August 6, 1960

portion of crinoline from wedding dress

Wedding dress designed by Lily and Stella of Stella Gowns of Winnipeg, made by Stella

Gown donated April 3, 2013 to non-profit the brideproject.com on Broadview

To be honoured with a piece of such a cherished and momentous garment seemed far beyond what I had imagined for my tree.  I opened the next envelope.  In the envelope was a portion of one of her husband’s “diabetic” socks.  This was no ordinary sock, but a heroic sock that had been part of the armament Lily had used to heal her husband’s foot sore that had been caused by diabetes. It had saved him from an amputation.  No two other objects could have better symbolized the great depth of a marriage in its 53rd year - the joys, hopes, sorrows, pulling together in times both happy and sad, remembering and honouring better days.

When I thanked Lily for the fabric, she told me she had donated the wedding dress (minus my snippet!) to The Brides’ Project.  The store owners were thrilled to have this wonderful “vintage” piece.  I hope it brings her some peace to know the dress and its spirit live on in my Tree of Life.

Florence and Malcolm (my maternal grandparents). I still have pieces of a quilt top my grandmother completed, likely in the late 1950s or early 1960s.  Her leaf contains several fabrics from that quilt.  There is a red, white, and blue dot section.  I had a piece of clothing made from that fabric - shorts and a “pop top”.  Everything had silly names back in the sixties. The purple/black portion was from one of the dresses she made for herself.  Nothing was wasted back then.

When I think of my grandfather, I remember the Porcupine Tartan vest he always wore on special occasions.  This was a unique plaid fabric designed to represent the Porcupine geographic area of Northern Ontario, created and patented in the 1950's by family friend Eva Connor.  You can read about the history of this tartan here.  To my surprise, my cousin Mel had saved the vest for over forty years.  I'm pretty sure my grandmother sewed this vest. It was sent to me in response to my request for fabric for the Tree quilt.  It looked so pristine; it was hard to believe Grampa had ever worn it at all.  I was supposed to use it to make leaves for my cousin and his wife, plus my grandfather.  But how could I ever cut up something so precious?  After much deliberation, I scanned in the fabric, printed it out on cotton, and used that to make the three leaves.  Whew.  The vest remains uncut!  I suspect my grandfather would have been relieved.

Percy (my father). My father passed away 37 years before this quilt was started, so there wasn’t much around in terms of fabric. Only one item remained. My sister still had his WWII sleeping bag, and she willingly parted with a small piece of it for the quilt.  The sleeping bag had accompanied him during his service on many ships in the North Atlantic during the war.  It had a memorable presence in our house when we were kids.  It was monstrous in size and weight, lined with 100% wool (of the super scratchy variety), had a hood, and a duffel bag to heft it around in.  It was neither beige nor brown but something in between.  It was big enough that that two or three kids could straddle it, and ride horseback though the living room until someone caught us.  Dad was an active and dedicated Royal Canadian Legion member, holding many offices over the years, so I added one of his Legion pins to his leaf.

Mildred (my mother). Mom loved to do needlework, but had little patience for framing it, so I still have pieces that were finished decades ago but never hung.  I actually cut up one of her linen fingertip towels for her leaf.  This was a plucky move on my part, because we weren’t allowed to even touch those guest towels when we were kids.  I used it as a backing for a very intricate petite pointe she did on fine thread-like mesh.  It likely dates back to the 1940’s.  I marvel that anyone ever had enough stamina to struggle through something so delicate.

Ida (my paternal grandmother). Ida has the honour of being represented by the only non-leaf on the tree!  My grandmother lived in New Brunswick, very far from our Northern Ontario home.  We traveled there only one time, in 1965.  It seemed as far away as Mars to me. She had been a school teacher and had raised eight children, despite being widowed while all her eight children were still young enough to be living at home. From her teaching days she had saved several felt cut-outs each with a holiday theme – a tree, a turkey, a shamrock, a heart, a pumpkin, and so on. She gave these to me and I would play with them on a box covered with white flannelette.  I’m bewildered that this captivated me for so many play sessions, but I enjoyed this activity for a number of years.  Clearly, simpler times! I chose to use the turkey because it was the only piece with enough space in which to sew her name.

Lori (my sister). Lori gave me several pieces of fabric for the quilt including a piece of Stewart Hunting Tartan from a jumper made for her by a roommate back in the 1970’s. The gold/white/black flowers on the left side of the garden in the quilt are from fabric she bought for me.  Also, the white/gold/pale blue and green upholstery fabric to the right of the roses was sent to me because it’s one of her favourites.  I used the same plaid fabric for husband's leaf, and added in antique feathers from his mother’s favourite hat.
  

Connie. Another early piece of fabric came from my friend Connie.  She often sews and is well known for her skill in making surgical caps for her physician daughter, Laura and her colleagues.  I believe her sewing skills were well honed during the years when her daughter was a child with an impressive collection of Cabbage Patch dolls.  I’m not sure what the final number topped out at, but I do know the Cabbage Patch crowd could occupy the entire top of a large bed leaving zero room for human interlopers.  These well decked out dolls left Connie with plenty of fabric to choose from, so she wasn’t forced to plunder her wardrobe for my Tree.  The green fabric with gold accents in the shape of leaves and flowers does remind me of Connie. I also used it to line the garden path on the left side of the tree.  Connie is pure gold, and remembered to bring me this piece of fabric despite the many far more urgent worries in her life. At that time Wesley, her grandson, was just approaching two years of age, and had been undergoing intensive treatment for a brain tumor for many months.  I’d previously made a quilt for Wes, so I used fabric from that to add leaves for Wesley and his mother.  He is a very special part of my Tree of Life.

2019 update:  Six years later Wesley has just turned eight years old, and despite some physical struggles, is doing well. I follow his progress on Facebook.  He has contributed so much to his family and has many times been the literal “poster boy” for fund raising and public awareness efforts at Bloorview Hospital and elsewhere.  He is an endless ray of sunshine and one cannot view the infectious smile on Wesley’s face without being warmed to the core! 

Sharon. One of the first pieces of fabric I received for the Tree was not a fabric at all.  It came from Sharon, a friend of my sister.  Sharon is an athlete, competing in many places as a long-distance runner.  I’ve always studiously avoided athleticism, lest I take a fit. Or become fit.  I can never remember which one it is.  Sharon had participated in a 24-hour team race in Katowice, Poland the previous summer.  Her “fabric” was from a running team identification “bib”.  The bib is a kind of fabric/paper, so designed for its durability.  It included the bib number, the location, the IAU logo, the race name and date – so much important info to try to capture on a single leaf!

Bruna. I met Bruna through Compassionate Friends. This group is self-described as a “A self-help organization offering friendship, understanding, and hope to bereaved families that have experienced the death of a child”.  They asked me to help them create a memorial quilt for their group.  Each family contributed one block, and I put these together, creating a pair of quilts.  These quilts, entitled Always With Us, currently hang in the building that houses the Timmins Public Library.  For my Tree quilt I used some of the Always With Us border fabric to create leaves for Bruna, her husband, and two of their sons. For Adam, their son who passed away during his teen years, I used a bit of his shirt and a piece of a cherished childhood “blankie”, tying together his life as a young child and a teenager. I never got to meet Adam, but I feel that his leaf carries a significant presence on my Tree.

Janis - a friend from university, is an avid world traveler and scuba diver.  She sent me a piece of neoprene from her wetsuit – a truly unique piece of fabric to add to a quilt.  Surprisingly, the sewing machine had no issues when I free motion quilted her name onto the neoprene.  Through Janis, I came to know her scuba partner, Helen, but only in the “virtual” sense, since we live thousands of miles apart.  Since Helen and I are avid quilters, we communicated over the years via email, and later by Facebook.  Helen, despite never having met me in person, sent me a lovely piece of red batik, and I happily added her to the quilt.  In 2018 I was finally able to meet Helen in person at Quilt Canada in Vancouver.  As is often true about friends of friends, I felt that I’d known her for many years.

Bobby.  Bobby’s contribution was truly unique for the magnitude of time and distance it had traveled. He gave me a piece of a plaid towel that he had brought with him when he emigrated to Canada from Glasgow, as a young lad of eighteen years.  He arrived by himself to work in a mine, a better opportunity than could be had in 1950’s Scotland.  His wife, my cousin, gave me a piece of a kitchen towel – a most fitting item considering how much time we’ve spent together in family kitchens over the years. One of our mothers was always the chief cook, so we were usually placed on dish towel duty. My cousin’s son Rob sent me his tartan tie from Scotland. I included the label from the tie on the Tree, since it seemed unfair to cut up a perfectly serviceable tie and then not let it keep its identity.

Angel Leaves – the tree felt distressingly incomplete when I thought of the very close friends and family members who had passed away and for whom I had no fabric. For a few families I had leaves for the entire family unit minus a spouse who had passed away.  I wanted to include these loved ones but had no fabric for any of them.  Eventually (and I do mean eventually – it took years to come up with the idea) I used a piece of fabric with angels printed on it.  Angel leaves were made for my aunt and uncle, for my father-in-law, and for several others.   

More leaves are described below.  I haven’t included names here. Not knowing who would want privacy, I’ve conferred it to all.  Leaves with names machine quilted onto them have been made from the following items that were given to me:

• A scarf from a long-gone lifelong friend that we purchased together, to compliment a magnificent and too expensive white coat.

• Shards from a friend’s grandmother’s quilt that were made usable by adding layers of stabilizing iron-on cotton.

• A bandanna that had borne witness to years of the transformation of a yard from weeds to a garden of exquisite flowers and shrubs.

• Wedding gown fabric – a piece of exquisite 5 layered and beaded fabric.  This was enough to create six leaves to stand in for a blended family that has come together to share their new lives in love and happiness.

• From my sister-in-law, fabric from individual projects she had made for the entire family, including her husband, her adult children and their spouses, and her five grandchildren.  Each fabric represents a unique project and interest, with hockey clearly being a family favorite. 

• From my husband’s aunt, a quilter, painter, and needlework expert, I similarly received one fabric for each family member, including her son and daughter and their spouses and her grandchildren.  She selected fabrics from quilts she had made for each person.  Each quilt highlights a personal interest of the recipient.

• A piece created especially for the tree with bead work on hand-painted satin.

• Frog fabric (I may like penguins, but I love frogs).

• Tie-dyed T-shirt fabric from a memorable session of creating T-shirts for one family.

• Fabrics from the daughter of a friend. Her daughter had made quilts or PJ’s for their family members. She sent me a piece for each person, taking my non-sewing friend off the hook of trying to figure out what to send to me.

• The team logo from a baseball cap, designed by the person who gave it to me.

• A too-small jean jacket with an entire city appliqued around the bottom (I’ve used this in many projects!)

• A dainty crewel embroidery gifted back to me from recipient. Yep.  I did the embroidery in the 1980’s.

• Owl fabric from a quilt that I helped someone get started on. My friend loves owl fabric and flip-flops between the acquisition of owl and moose fabric for various projects.

• Nancy Drew fabric from someone I’ve never met in “real life” but know through work connections. We have a shared nostalgia for all things Nancy Drew.  I’m not going to mention our similar weirdly dark sense of humor. 

• From a friend who is a weaver, two pieces that she wove herself, blue hand dyed silk and cream viyella.

• Tie backs from the bedroom curtains from a happy place – a winter retreat in Florida.

• A piece of a silk scarf, a gift my friend received from her mother.

• Plaid PJ fabric from my husband.

• Corduroy from my daughter’s favorite kindergarten skirt.  

• A chunk of a favourite t-shirt from my son-in-law. 

• A large piece of green leaf fabric from a fellow quilter helped flesh out the garden on both sides of the pathway.

• A fabric panel depicting a manger scene. I made a leaf for each family member out of the individual sheep.

• A piece from a favourite blouse that had finished off its lifespan by resorting to fraying.

• PJ fabric with monkeys, to include both a fellow quilter and her grandchildren

• Fabric depicting sawn logs and so much more – memorable as it was fabric from a first quilting class.

• Plaid cotton with German short-haired pointer dogs.  Both these uncommon dogs and this fabric were beloved by the contributor’s whole family; her mother used the original fabric to make a pair of pajamas for her father.

• Fabric from guild members containing butterflies, ladybugs, hummingbirds, blueberries, fabric that had been made into a maternity dress with a matching sundress for baby, a cherished Ralph Lauren fabric, a hoarded batik fabric, a Japanese print fabric.

• Birdhouse fabric. 

From cottage friends:

• A favourite piece of 1980’s upholstery fabric from the wife, accompanied by a chunk of the couch fabric from the husband (!)

• Plundered fabric from their cottage, representing two different generational eras of family ownership.

• Beloved fabric from preserve jars.

• Fabric from Africa received as a gift in the 1960’s. (See Gift from Africa quilt).

Did I put in a leaf for myself?  Absolutely.  Mine is a picture of The Denton Bear with his family.  They are my cartoon strip and they have their own public Facebook page at The Denton Bear.

And...if you had enough stamina to read this far, yes, of course it's not too late to send me fabric so that you can be added to my tree!  After all, what do trees do?  They grow!

Beyond the Palette

Beyond the Pallette

Quilt No. 128

One day my friend Joan phoned me up.  “I have this crazy idea” she said.  A mixture of fear and excitement charged the phone line between us.  

“Do you remember Bob Ross?”

Bob Ross, why was that name so familiar? I was pretty sure he was a sort of mildly famous person, or maybe he was that chiropractor who’d fixed my neck.  

I was non-committal.  “Sort of…”.  

“He’s that painter on TV” she said. Ahhhh yes, of course, Bob Ross.  Curly afro’d hair, gentle soul, kind voice, fabulous landscapes turned out in a half hour.  The Joy of Painting! A man with enough magic to make you think that you too could paint the gorgeous scenes that effortlessly appeared on his canvas. He always wielded this giant palette and you couldn’t help but want one of your own to brandish.  

“What about him?”  I worried that maybe he was coming over to dinner, and I’d be needed to make emergency dessert.  

“Have you ever heard of Cherrywood Fabrics?” This time I was sure of my answer – I had not.  

She went on to explain that Cherrywood was a company in Minnesota that made hand dyed fabrics and that each year they put out a challenge.  For a sum they would send you a bundle of their fabrics, and you would create an art quilt using only these fabrics, 20x20 inches in size.  Just like Bob Ross’s paintings, it sounded easy.  We would make this a mutual project, and we would knock it off in a day or two.  We ordered the fabric.

When it arrived, I waited until Joan and I were together before we did the reveal of the fabric. We sliced open the heavy envelope and there it was.  Eight fabrics.  At first blush none of the colours exactly went together.  Each piece of fabric was a different size, all of them relatively small. A slick of sweat broke out on our mutual brows.  What on earth had we done? Joan was not an art quilter; I had never designed a quilt with such a limited and possibly non-harmonious colour range.  

I would like to say that ideas came fast and furious.  They did not.  Looking for inspiration, we went online and looked at photos of Bob Ross’s artwork.  Wow – more intricate than we’d remembered, and here we were with a mere eight colours and no palette knife.  We sighed and she went home. I slid the fabric under another pile of fabric, an easy place to get lost in oblivion at my house.

Shame took over. Neither of us wanted to be so easily defeated…we took anther stab at it.  We kind of liked his barns, and maybe we could do something with a palette shape.  Joan was currently exploring curved flying geese, which has nothing to do with geese, but is a series of triangles sewn in a curved path.  Slowly we cobbled our concoction together, filled out the paperwork for the contest and hoped for the best.  

I got the news in an email that our quilt had been juried in. I was over the moon, and phoned her from my cottage, where the reception is spotty at best.  Through the static alternating with dead zone on the phone line I yelled that we were “IN”.  At her end, it sounded like a foaming maniac was on the line. She calmly hung up and locked her door.  

I wondered if Bob Ross ever had this much artistic angst.

Gift from Africa

Quilt No. 127

February 2019

Ah, the vibrancy of Africa. This quilt was a fun departure from the tediousness of my usual constructions.  And it is very much a Gift from Africa, the fabric having been “gifted” three separate times.

It was first “gifted” to a friend of mine (Gift No. 1). She was given a large piece of Veritable Real Java Print in the 1960's when she worked as a nurse in West Africa. She had stored it faithfully and carefully for many years, possibly with a twinge of guilt.  If you don’t sew, how do you honor a large piece of exotic fabric?  After fifty years there was still no answer to that question. When I asked her if she would care to contribute fabric to my Tree of Life quilt, she thought of the African fabric, and gave me all two meters of it (Gift No. 2). After I made two leaves for the Tree of Life, there was still two meters of fabric remaining. It was in perfect condition, a testimony to the high quality and longevity of the cotton.

I felt that both she and the fabric deserved some kind of reward. I decided to make a lap sized quilt for her (Gift No. 3). For this this quilt, I used one of the large central motifs printed on the fabric, and added five borders on the sides, and four borders on the top/bottom. The vibrant green border fabric gives it a sort of "forest" feel, an almost organic ooziness. For the flip side of the quilt I chose a serene white, to match her décor. During the machine quilting process, I matched the thread colour on the quilt top to the colour of the fabric.  However, I kept the thread on the back of the quilt (the bobbin thread) white in case all that colour took her whole living room hostage. She could always display the calming white side of the quilt.

As I was working with it the fabric intrigued me so much that I wanted to learn more about it. It was obviously “African print fabric”, made in Africa, right?  Wrong!

I discovered that, historically, most “African print fabric” was made in Europe. In present times it’s mostly made in India or China.  So, in essence, the only thing “African” about it is the market in which it is sold.

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries Europeans were busy exploring the wonders of Indonesia.  One of those wonders was the exquisite local wax print fabrics that were made in Java.  Local artisans were very skilled in the technique of painting wax onto fabric to act as a “resist” when dyed. The fabric was painted/dyed in several sessions to achieve very detailed double-sided prints, a tradition likely borrowed from India.  Excellent quality batik-style “wax prints” were the order of the day.

When the entrepreneurial Dutch discovered this fabric, they sniffed out a potential business opportunity. They carted the fabric back home. Surely with a little automation they could crank out this fabric more easily and more profitably!  A bit of industrial tinkering ensued and they came up with a wax resin process, applying the resin mechanically with rollers.  It looked a lot like the Indonesian fabric, but instead of being a true double-sided batik, the print was only one sided.  It also had a less pristine more “crackled” appearance. Undaunted by their results, they sailed back to Indonesia, planning to undercut the fabric market.

Instantly, the Indonesians pooh-poohed this one-sided fabric. They weren’t buying it. The Dutch were stuck with the fabric. If they had been Fabricland, they would have had to rid themselves of it in a buy-one-get-two-meters-free sale.

As happens with many adventures with new products, this wasn’t the end of it.  As the Dutch sailed to and from Indonesia exchanging goods, they stopped to trade and resupply in West Africa.  There was already a bit of a demand for the Javanese fabrics there. Locals had become familiar with them in the early- to mid-1800’s.  Western African soldiers had been sent to fight in the Dutch East Indies. Upon return, they brought back Javanese fabrics for their wives. Locally, only a limited amount of fabric was being made, so new fabric was always welcome. The primed African market gushingly embraced the new fabrics the Dutch were offering. Gradually, these fabrics came to be known as “African print fabrics”.  This planted the idea that the fabrics were African made. The Dutch happily forgot about their failed Indonesian marketing scheme and began designing fabrics that would appeal to African tastes.  African print fabrics remain hugely popular today, and regardless of manufacturing origin, they are a joy to work with and to behold.

For more on the history on these fabrics, visit Mazuri Designs.

Look Up at the Stars

Quilt No. 129 

January 2019

"Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up."                Stephen Hawking     (1942-2018)

Stephen Hawking’s words bring us not only wisdom but comfort.  I thought of them many times as I worked through this quilt.  “It matters that you don’t just give up”.  I’m pretty sure Mr. Hawking wasn’t thinking about quilting when he said those words!  More than once they kept me from throwing the unfinished quilt and the torn-out remnants of my hair into the dumpster.  As I chugged along for ten months, there were many technical issues that made me want to just give up.

How to capture a life lived in a wheelchair but not defined by a wheelchair?  How to keep the delicate organza layers from shredding? How to get white text onto dark fabric?  How and what to quilt on the borders?  How to keep the differentially quilted surface flat? How to keep plugging away after the tedium of the first several hundred beads had not only drained my patience but set my teeth on edge?  All this had to be resolved.  And every bit of it was infinitely trivial in comparison to what Hawking would have faced each day of his adult life. 

Diagnosed with ALS in his early twenties, and given a prognosis of only a few years of survival, Hawking somehow conquered the odds. He not only lived into his mid-seventies, he managed to unravel the physics of black holes and teach us about the origin of the universe.  He became a best-selling author, a husband and father, an esteemed professor.  He traveled widely, including into space, collaborated with colleagues, championed the disabled.  He became a familiar character in pop culture, doing gigs on Star Trek, The Simpsons, Big Bang Theory, and despite not having anything other than an electronic voice, contributing to the recording of a Pink Floyd song (Keep Talking).  The first thing friends and colleagues say about Hawking is what a great sense of humor he had.  So, when you consider that all of this was achieved despite great physical challenges, “Don’t just give up” is more than a trite piece of advice. Hawking clearly lived by those words.

I’m inspired by life stories of survival and achievement. This quilt, designed on the day of his death March 14, 2018, strives to capture the famous scientist as the beauty of the cosmos opens up to him on his final journey.  I tried to imagine something with enough light to take the darkness of the unknown universe and make it sparkle as it welcomed Mr. Hawking.  I spent much time experimenting with gold thread, organza, beads, and crystals to chase away the darkness. At times I was knee deep in test pieces! Even adding text to the quilt became a major obstacle.  After working my way unsuccessfully through lettering by machine quilting, hand embroidery, and painting, a desperate search lead me to sheets of printable organza. By placing the words for the quilt in a Word “text box” with a dark background I was able to achieve the white font that I wanted. 

Gravestone at Westminster Abbey

If you view the details of the gold free motion quilting on the border of the quilt, you will find planets (including Earth), stars, galaxies, the Starship Enterprise, moons, and Hawking’s Equation.  Prior to his death Hawking requested that this equation be placed on his gravestone.  This is located at Westminster Abbey, between Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, placing him with very esteemed company. 

The whole time I was working on this quilt I was considering various options for its title. In fact, it was finished before I settled on a title. One very early morning I was tossing ideas around in my head while making coffee.  “Look Up at the Stars” I said to myself, involuntarily glancing out the kitchen window.  It was still dark.  Most of the sky was blocked by the house next door, so I could only see a small part of it.  In that tiny bit of jet-black winter sky there was a single very bright star, or perhaps a planet. In over thirty years of making coffee and looking out that window, there had never been a star in that spot. I stopped auditioning titles.  The cosmos had made its selection known. 

Hawking discovered that radiation can escape from a black hole, contrary to what was previously believed.  So, it would seem that black holes aren't entirely black at all. Instead, they emit a glow now called Hawking radiation to honor his mathematical equation.  This extends our understanding of how the universe grows and changes over time.  Well, for some of us it extends our understanding. I would not include myself in that group.

Stephen Hawking recognized no limitations personally or professionally.  He had many lessons to teach us that were beyond mere astrophysics.  After his death, Hawking's children released a statement with this quote from their father. “It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.”

What mattered was not how different Stephen Hawking was, but how much like us he was.  For that alone, I thought he deserved to be honored with a quilt.

Hawking’s Equation

T = Temperature (radiation temperature)

H = Planck’s constant (quantum mechanics)

C= speed of light (from Einstein’s formula)

8 π = meaning it is spherical

G = Newton’s gravity constant

M= mass of a black hole

K= Boltzmann’s constant (energy of gas particles)