The First Christmas

Quilt No. 158

June 2026

I generally do not do commissions, but a request - now that's something entirely different. How could a request ever be denied, especially one that you realize you've been waiting for all your life? Well, maybe not that long...but close.

A Facebook friend contacted me from the other side of the country to enquire if I would be interested in contributing some postcard sized quilts to their annual nativity themed tea, a fund raiser for Crossfield United Church. My drawer of picture fabrics rattled in the next room when I read that request. Did I have any nativity themed fabric?  I did indeed have some very special nativity fabric. "Pick me, pick me!" yelled the anxious fabric.

I'd purchased a nativity panel to make a cloth book several years ago. The fabric designer had created such appealing characters! It made a very delightful little book.

I still had a bit of that fabric remaining.  Another piece of nativity fabric came to me when I requested friends and relatives to send me a scrap of fabric for my Tree of Life quilt. One family had given me a panel of nativity-themed fabric. It was a wonderful reflection on our shared childhood memories of attending Mountjoy United Church in Timmins. While we remembered the same things about that time, we did not meet until years later. I had used a small part of their fabric to add leaves bearing their names to my tree. The rest was added to my nativity fabric collection. I had occasionally plundered this fabric to make a couple of 4x6" postcard quilts, but scraps of it still lived on. 

That wasn't the end of sources of nativity fabric. During my many years working as a hospital librarian, I was lucky to get to know a great many wonderful staff members. One of them was our hospital pastor, Deirdre. She and I had numerous wonderful conversations, and she would frequently give me things she knew I would like - tiny stuffed snowmen, ceramic Christmas decorations, a grammar-themed sweatshirt, mini Muskoka chairs, fascinating newspaper clippings. Deirdre had enjoyed a long career as a teacher and school librarian, but answered a different calling after she retired. She completed a Masters Degree in Divinity. I followed her progress as she went through the steps to become ordained in the Anglican Church, a journey I had never before witnessed.  While not a quilter, Deirdre did enjoy sewing and we often talked "fabric". Sadly, my friend Deirdre was passed away in 2023. 

One night I was uncharacteristically organized and I arrived at our quilt guild meeting earlier than usual, almost the first one to arrive. A large box had been donated to the guild, a box of beautiful fabric. Most astonishing of all, it was a box of Deirdre's fabric that her family had thoughtfully given to the guild, a group she was not involved with. For me, it was like reconnecting with my friend, and I unabashedly went through the box, setting aside more than a few fabrics while choking back my emotions. I knew that Deirdre would have wanted me to have some pieces in particular.  These included several fabrics that matched or duplicated fabric I'd purchased myself. And...it included another nativity panel!  Deirdre was still showering me with gifts more than a year after her passing.  Of course.

So, when the enquiry was made about the possibility of doing nativity themed postcard quilts, it linked all those many-sourced pieces of fabric and memories. I could easily dig into an enjoyable challenge. I am very fond of making these miniature quilts, and at last count I had made well over 300. These were used as various greeting cards, gifts, and occasionally were sold. 

I offered to make six for the Nativity Tea.. As I communed with the fabric I found that I had enough fabric to make ten, no wait, twelve could be made! This left behind an endearing fabric piece depicting Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus. The larger scale made it unsuitable for postcard sized quilts. It was way too adorable to ignore! I decided that if I cut the scene out of the background fabric and added a new background with a stable, the little family would never again have to be stuffed into a drawer with a bunch of cranky fabric. And so, yet another version of The First Christmas was created. 

As the small wall quilt and accompanying postcard quilts make their way across the country, I will be remembering my friend Deirdre, her intellect, her generosity, and her ability to still do good in the world she no longer inhabits. 

King of the Mountain

 

Quilt No. 137

October 2021

This quilt began as yet another chunk of Setacolor-painted fabric that was looking for a raison d’etre.  It was hanging out with its pals in a dark drawer, a place not known for its easy escape.  Once a piece hits that drawer, it generally stays there, sighing under the weight of newly added layers of unused dyed fabric.  

I wanted to attempt thread painting a pine tree, so I grabbed this piece of wintry fabric.  As the tree took shape, so did the background – suggesting a snowy mountain.  Eventually I completed the lonely tree on the somewhat aloof background.  It was all very sterile looking.  I had no plans to take it any further.

A cut-out snowman intended for another project mysteriously migrated onto the piece, and much to my surprise, brought the whole experiment to life. Instead of ending up in the pile of test bits doomed to anonymity, the piece now begged for the addition of borders, and I was happy to comply.  The King of the Mountain had claimed his realm.

The Owl's Tree

The Owl’s Tree

Quilt No. 132

October 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This piece was rescued from the original Harvest quilt panel.

Julie's Tree of Life

Quilt No. 100

November 2018

I admit it. I’ve been pretty smug about numbering my completed quilts, 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!

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.

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.