Quilt No. 47 January 2006 / machine quilting completed November 2015
One minute of silence seems
hardly enough time in which to reflect on the wars of the past, let alone the worries
of the present. But in 2005, as I sat at
my desk at work, the one minute of silence on Remembrance Day was enough time to have the entire
design of this quilt slip past the background of my thoughts. I put it on paper, and began working on it
soon after, completing the quilt in January 2006. The quilt has since traveled around to a few
Remembrance Day displays, but I was never quite content with it.
By 2015 I had an additional
decade of quilting experience under my belt, having completed over 100
quilts. I was “renovating” some of my
older quilts – a great way to practice my machine quilting skills. Just like archery, restringing your banjo,
and taxidermy, machine quilting is a skill.
And the only way to acquire a skill is to practice it. Yes, your
teachers, your mother and those pesky nuns who taught you piano were all
right. You have to practice. Don’t fool
yourself into thinking that James Bond automatically
knew how to slay bad guys, woo beautiful women, and fly any object with wings
and a motor. He had to spend plenty of
time practicing all that stuff until he got it perfect. Machine quilting is
exactly the same, minus the bullets and the helicopters.
I was convinced machine quilting
this piece would be a couple of afternoon’s work. Possibly my eyes were crusted over with
stupidity – it’s hard to imagine a more inaccurate time line for a project. I
first went with a fairly widely spaced round of quilting. It looked so bad I thought I might have to
demote it and use it as a door mat. At the back door. I then got serious about doing this quilt
right, and machine stitched carefully around every object on the quilt. Also, the poppies had originally been meant
to look as though they were lying on the lawn.
I know. It never worked for me
either. I added in stems and leaves to
push the poppies into the foreground where they belonged. I then very closely machine quilted the
entire quilt. This caused the side
borders to puff out like relentless waves rolling in on a beach. No matter how much quilting I added to the
borders they would not be tamed.
Ultimately, like many things that are defiant without explanation, they
had to be cut loose. Chopped. Banished.
After all, there was the good of the whole to consider. A fitting philosophy perhaps, for a quilt depicting the results of war.
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| The above photo shows the machine quilting on the back of Never Forget |
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