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!

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)

After the Fire

Quilt No. 124
August 2018

Ah, summer.  Hot weather, such hot weather.  We’re supposed to enjoy a pleasurable wallow in this sweaty scenario, but it can’t all be Popsicles and gallon jugs of sunscreen.  While summer does lend itself to many appealing options for activities, quilting is not always one of them. Often it's just too hot. Of course, you can always take your quilting stuff outside, but it’s usually even hotter out there than it is indoors.  On the plus side, the light is usually better out there, so at least you don’t need to drag your OttLite with you. Forget about the ritual slathering of the sunscreen.  A few dabs of that on a quilt and it will easily collect enough dirt to take first place in the County Mud Pie Contest.

Short of indulging in madness, it’s pretty hard to deny that we are in the grip of climate change.  Each year the extreme weather events notch up a little higher on the scale.  In this summer of 2018, hundreds of forest fires in British Columbia Canada have given that pristine area the worst air quality in the world.  It’s so smoky that tourists can’t even find the mountains.  People are forced to hunker down indoors hugging their air filters.  Two thousand kilometers away in the middle of Canada, Manitoba is sharing that bad air quality thanks to the prevailing winds.  Here in Northern Ontario numerous fires threaten remote communities. Pleas have gone out to forest fire fighters trained in previous seasons to rejoin the effort.  All these brave souls here and in other countries will put their safety on the line to protect communities and populated rural areas.  But not everything can be saved. For decades to come, people will be shocked when driving through these burned over areas, the war zones of climate change.  And while fires have always been a natural part of the life cycle of the forest, it’s still a bitter pill to swallow when we see an area completely spoiled with blackened trunks and exposed rocks. 

I wasn’t actually thinking about how any of this related to quilting when I started the quilt that became After the Fire.  By late June it seemed that every quilt I had started had become too large/hot/sweaty/complicated as I gave in to my usual battle with heat induced Summer Funk. The only way for me to power through this annual take down was to sweep all current projects under the bed and start a new one. At least they could keep the dust bunnies company under there. The enthusiasm of a new project can sometimes bring a full halt to Summer Funk.  But on the down side, pulling together a new bunch of fabric requires soooo many, many watts of heat-releasing brain power. 

To avoid having to sift through drawers and boxes of fabric, I turned to my scrap bag.  My beloved scrap bag has burgeoned into a bloated whale that would scare Captain Ahab out of his socks and into a diaper.  It even has a companion bag that holds all the scraps with fusible ironed on the back. Mixing ready to fuse fabrics with plain fabrics is guaranteed to ruin your iron, your ironing board cover, and your good nature.  Like church and state, the only chance for sanity rests in keeping these things strictly apart.

With no particular idea in mind I pulled out scraps, favouring the blue ones.  Hmm, didn’t these resemble sky and water when laid horizontally in rows.  Next, my eye fell on the wood grain fabrics.  There were only a few narrow strips left, since I’d used these in several other quilts, most notably LM + BD.  What wonderful bare tree trunks these fragments would make…

 

Preliminary fabric layout.

I had also recently acquired several fabrics from a friend’s collection. Her sand coloured fabric was the perfect sand/rock fabric I needed!  I also liked the piece of lace she had saved, and wanted to include it as part of the quilt.  And so…another Scrap Bag Challenge quilt was born.  As it took shape I could see how much it resembled the look of a forest after it had been swept by fire.  When this happens there is a long pause after the trauma of burning and before the green begins to shyly creep back.  Bit by bit life reclaims its territory.  It’s a humbling and patience-inducing experience to watch this process of forest renewal.   

Like real tree trunks, the ones on the quilt have a variety of colours, due to different dyeing sessions for previous quilts.  Here they ended up looking like different tree species.   I used Derwent Inktense Pencils to darken shadows on the left-hand side of the trees, and to enhance the shadows on the ground.  Machine quilting with silver metallic thread added light to the right-hand side of the trunks.  The lace? Well, such a serious topic needed some sort of whimsical element. Lace, like life, will always find a way.

Solo Fish

Quilt No. 123

February 2018

The year’s guild challenge was to do a “curves” quilt.  This definitely threw my fondness for straight edges into disarray.  Thinking outside the box is always troublesome, especially when your box is strictly straight edged and symmetrical.  If you were to chip open my skull and peer in at my brain, the convolutions would likely be arranged in perfectly straight rows of long boxes with  crisp right-angled edges.  What you wouldn’t see is any of those snakey sausage-like structures.  So “curves” as a point of inspiration didn’t leave me awash with great ideas.

Several months went by and the idea bank had a balance of zero.  Less than two months until deadline…

While working on Space Fish, I made some large folds in the background fabric.  This resulted in a lot of excess fabric on the back.  I cut the excess from the three folds and set these rectangular pieces aside.  Stacked together, I had to admit they had some appeal. 

I found a piece of dark blue polyester satin to use as a background for the rectangles.  The top of this piece had been hacked off in an asymmetrical curve, a leftover from some other long forgotten project.  Without even trying, I’d found a curve! 

The next thing I needed was a focal point.  I paraded many objects over the fabric until I came to the antique fish pin my husband had bought for me at Relics.  Finally, things were going swimmingly.  Adding in a few satiny waves suggested by the fish, I had it – the layout for my curves challenge quilt!

Space Fish

Quilt No 122

January 2018

There are no fish in outer space.  I think that’s a darn shame, so I’ve made it my mission to correct the fishlessness of space.  Somebody had to do it.

The background of this quilt is a piece of fabric I painted with Setacolor light sensitive dyes.  I overlaid it with cheese cloth and foil confetti stars.  I’m pretty happy that I did this outside, because the lawn mower was still blowing around tiny foil stars a whole year later.  Had I done this indoors I would probably still be spotting stars in my oatmeal or consorting with the crumbs under the stove. 

The fish are my first attempt at what I call “extreme trapunto”.  (Trapunto = stuffing).  I put fusible on the back of the fish but only fused the outer edges, squeezing the shapes while fusing them, so that they bulged outward.  This allowed for plenty of stuffing, yielding fish that are on the high end of the extreme plumpness scale.

Space Fish was quilted with various gold metallic threads plus Superior Glimmer thread to give it a little more sparkle.  You need that sort of thing when you’re in deep space.  Life in a nebula can be lonely, even for a fish.  

Cubist Phase

Quilt No. 121

December 2017

Cubist Phase is a bit of a departure from my usual quilting projects.  It came about because I simply could not resist the lure of something called a “One Block Wonder”.  I’d heard of “boy wonders” and “Wonder Bread” and grew up with “The Wonderful World of Disney”, so anything steeped in wonder gives me goose bumps.

For this quilting method, the claim of being a one block wonder is valid.  All the blocks, including the cube shaped ones, are the same in terms of their shape, so there’s just the “one block”.  But really, the “one block wonder” moniker misses the most exciting attribute of this quilt – all the blocks (excluding the cubes, which are optional) are made from only one fabric.  So it’s really a “One Fabric Wonder” quilt.  The quilt is made up of a whole field of blocks, all from the same fabric, and no two of these blocks are the same.  Surely magic is involved?

The quilt is constructed by lining up multiple layers of fabric so that the pattern is perfectly aligned in each of six layers.  That is, the bird in layer 1 is in the exact same location as the same bird in layer 6.  Where to go from there is far from obvious.  Like learning meditation or heart surgery, you need someone who knows more than you do to show you the way.  That person must guide you down the path that involves cutting these carefully aligned layers into strips and then cutting those strips into triangles, and ending up with something that ultimately turns into a quilt.

Despite my fondness for reverse engineering, I know I would be stymied if I tried to unravel how to construct this by merely looking at a finished quilt.  The whole quilt  appears to be composed of hexagon shapes, but no actual hexagon-shaped individual blocks are ever sewn together for this quit.  Wah?  Half hexagons only get upgraded to full hexagons when neighbouring strips are sewn together.  For this journey, I had to have faith, allow the rules to dictate my actions, enslave myself to obedience.  I had to suppress my natural tendency towards rebellion.  I had to soothe myself with chocolate, drink only decaff, and keep a cold compress handy for my forehead.

Original fabric prior to cutting for One Block Wonder

This quilt also requires patience if you are inclined to be motivated by the creative aspects of making a quilt.  With One Block Wonder, the creativity comes in the later phases when you start auditioning layouts for the blocks that form the hexagons you see.  It’s a waiting game.  Stamina is imperative.

I learned this procedure at guild meetings and a workshop.  For your own guided tour, Jackie O’Brien’s step-by-step videos  will have you one block wondering in no time.

I wanted to keep at least some of the birds and flowers from the original fabric visible as part of the quilt, so I’ve captured some of these “whole” objects on the border with raw edge applique. 

“One Block Wonder” or “One Fabric Wonder”?  This quilting technique is definitely both!

The Pond at Old Tranquility Farm; Kexy and the Fairy

Quilt No. 120

October 2017

View this quilt in the NJS 2018 gallery

Over the last year or so I kept seeing fairy creatures everywhere.  This hadn’t happened to me since I was five, and my dad and I worked our way through “Fifty Famous Fairy Tales,” one story at a time.   I still have the book’s alarming illustration of a green-ink line drawing of Rumpelstiltskin seared into my brain.  The artist certainly captured the rumpel, not to mention the stilt and the skin!  Fairies are once again popular.  They’re in gardens where they have houses, furniture, flower pots, or just humble doors backed up against tree trunks.  They grace t-shirts and cupcakes, make their appearance in calendars and continue in their unbroken stint as popular Halloween costumes.

So I thought -- wouldn’t it be fun to do a quilt with a fairy on it?

I looked at lots of pictures of fairies in Google images.  They certainly were plentiful and elegant.  Once again the lush illustration style popular in the early 20^th century story books caught my eye.  So many enticing fairy creatures to choose from!

I’m also rather fond of quilting frogs, so when I found Ida Rentoul Outhwaite’s 1922 painting with both a frog and a fairy, I knew it was the one.  The fairy was particularly beautiful, so gentle with her captivating pink dress and gauzy wings.  And the frog!  He was the quintessential frog that we all dream of – plump and green with an essence of royal frogginess that hinted at a princely lineage.

Ida Rentoul Outhwaite's Original Artwork

I was in fact, so enamored with Outhwaite’s artwork, that I completely took leave of my senses, forgetting the rules I have about things that I don’t quilt:  hands, faces,  feet. There’s a special subcategory of frog hands and feet that I particularly like to avoid, having previously driven myself to the brink of insanity while trying to needle turn the fabric to make slender frog fingers.  It was just like childbirth.  I completely forgot how wretched it was the first time around, leaving myself open to repeating the suffering.  And in terms of suffering, the frog and the fairy did not disappoint.

Their genesis in fabric was long and dizzying in its repetitiveness.  I became a card carrying resident in the land of Do-Over. At one point I was calling the quilt The Six Faced Fairy, a much needed bit of levity that took me through the six tries it took to do the fairy’s face.  Her arms took four tries, and her hair, dress, and legs a mere two attempts.  Only her wings were nailed on the first pass. What I learned (re-learned) from this was that my rule about no faces, hands, or feet, is completely valid.  However, I didn’t think Ms. Outhwaite would have approved of me adding galoshes and mitts to her fairy. 

I like to name a quilt early on in its creation, but this one remained nameless until after it was completely finished.  Nothing came to mind other than the utilitarian “Frog and Fairy” possibility.  Ugh.  I didn’t even know their names or their story.  Observing them, it’s clear that they are embroiled in a situation.  A question is being asked, or a plea is being put forward, or maybe a controversial point is being painfully explained.  Yet, despite having birthed them from the fabric fragments in a drawer, I could only guess at the topic of their debate. 

I needed to find out more about these two characters who had eaten up six months of my creative life.  The illustration is from the story book, The Little Green Road to Fairyland.  It’s an Australian book written by Annie Rentoul, and illustrated by her sister Ida Rentoul Outhwaite.  Ida’s illustrations were so captivating that the stories were crafted around them, not the reverse which is the usual case.  While very popular in Australia and England, I don’t think any version of the book was released in North America.

According to the combined international listings in the online WorldCat catalog, only one library in Canada has a copy, (none in the U.S), and that library is over 800 km from where I live.  Considered a rare book, it seemed unlikely they’d be willing to mail it out on interlibrary loan.  Purchasing a used copy of this almost 100 year old book was also out of the question at a cost exceeding $US 200. Sadly, no copies are scanned into Project Gutenberg.  I was going to have to get creative if I wanted to dig up the name of that frog! 

Wouldn’t libraries in Australia have a copy of the book?  I looked in the online catalogs of their national and state libraries, and they did indeed have the book in their various collections.  On the website of the State Library of South Australia, located in Adelaide, I noticed that there was a form I could fill in to ask a reference question.  Bonus - international requests were accepted!  And what could be a more important international question than the names of this frog and fairy?  I filled it in and sent them a photo of the quilt so they would know which illustration was of importance to me.  After two weeks and plenty of breath-holding on my part, my answer arrived.  The frog is named Kexy.  Disappointingly, the fairy has no name, and is simply referred to as “Fairy” but the location in the book places them at Old Tranquility Farm.  I had my answer and my quilt title: The Pond at Old Tranquility Farm; Kexy and the Fairy. 

I still don’t know what their debate is about, but since they refused to reveal it in the six months we spent locked in mortal quilting combat, perhaps it’s too personal and I shouldn’t pry.