What Do You Get When You Cross A...

I have been with a group of quilters this summer, those in the church basement who are “Dancing on the Head of a Pin”. Recently Val, one of the newbies, and I discussed how quickly and blindly some of us fall in love with quilting. You can see it in a beginning class – some of them can't dump their flat points and misshapen blocks into the dust bin and get out of there fast enough. Others latch onto quilting like none other, and are planning their next forty-eleven quilts as they patiently and meticulously pin their current project. A group of very intelligent newbie-threadheads, they could choose among a limitless number of pastime activities. I asked some of them why they chose quilting.

It challenges one's reasoning capabilities to hash this out. For some, the attachment takes minutes, not days. “Shop hop”, an unheard-of term for these people in June, is now replacing the desire to be on time for work. I also hear the word “retire” conjugated in various ways:

“When I retire, I will quilt all the time.”

“I waited until I retired to start quilting, because I wanted to devote lots of my time to it.”

“I don't feel like retiring in the evening until I have worked on something linty.”

Okay, I admit the last one was mine, but it uses a form of the verb “to retire”, and indicates the level of obsession we feel about our passion. Perhaps it's the level of passion we feel about our obsession. Whichever suits your fancy, “to retire” and “to quilt” are frequently used in the same sentence.

Bev joined up. She lives across the street from Marie, one of the better quilters in northeast Iowa. Bev had somehow acquired a table runner project. I'm not sure if she bought it as a kit, or if she and Marie found the pattern and the fabric to get her started. Bev had cut out her table runner, then stopped. I got the impression that she didn't have the guts to continue, and joined this beginning class to finish it up. The fabrics are pastel and pleasing, their patterns forgettable, yet utile in their ability to melt the pallet into the whole. There were lots of comments on how pretty her fabric choices were, even before anyone knew how they were going to be used. Bev had been consulting with Marie about quilty things, and had obviously absorbed a lot of pertinent information from their discussions. Her table runner and this class were her opportunity to put thesis into practice.

She finished that table runner in a matter of weeks. Finished! Not only pieced, but quilted and bound, too. She quilted a motif – dragonflies – into some of the blocks, thus not restricting herself to stitching in the ditch or a quarter-inch away from the seam. She bound it up, too, and can tell you what she has learned in the process. And about her plans for the next quilt. And she asks about the next class. Bev was among the quilters I schlepped up to The Piecemakers quilt guild meeting in July, and she signed up on the spot.

Bev told me she always loved to sew, and had made her wedding dress. Living across the street from Marie for years, she was always looking at those quilts and wondering how Marie made them happen. As an experienced garment maker, Bev didn't think she could really grasp what she was looking at until she tried it herself. She wanted to demystify the process. She has been downsizing her life in these very early retirement years, but wanted to make one quilt, one puny little table runner, so she could appreciate Marie's better. When I told the class about having fabric stashes, she tuned me out with disinterest. She didn't want more stuff to put away.

I need to call Bev to apologize. I didn't mean to interfere with her plans for an orderly retirement. She is already burning out of control. She recently bought a new machine, and has two more quilts on deck right now. She was just commenting to Marie this week that she needs to run out and get some more fabric.

Tamie has quilters in her family. Her sewing machine was her high school graduation present, so you know she has been a threadhead for awhile. It was fun to see her daughter Tina come to church in the frilly and lacy dresses Tamie made for her when Tina was a youngster. I like the fact that Tina and her brother Nathan saw their mother sewing, since their generation were given “Consumer Science” where there had once been “Home Ec”. Tamie had already tried her hand at quilting, and is a better-than-respectable piecer. Her comment? “I want to learn to do it right.” She understands how long it takes to make a quilt, if you do it yourself from start to finish, and she didn't want to be looking at some foolish mistake for years to come. Though a serious student, she is also good-natured and playful. Her choice for the quilt class was a wisely-chosen project that allowed her to master basic techniques, yet give her the confidence to know she could continue on her own. What she really wanted to know was how to stitch the thing up, as she was already doing well with the piecing. We jokingly call her project “Cut Big, Piece Fast”. She has the quilt on her lap right now, stitching away. I can tell she's in no hurry, that she is loving what she is learning and basking in the amount of Tamie she is adding to her quilt with each stitch.

Renee only has one child left at home. He's sort of a trail-er, and the older two have been gone for a few years. After having three to run after, having just one is sort of like hobby-parenting to Renee and her husband Mike. Now she has time to try quilting. Read my lips -- she is good. She chose a log cabin quilt -- it has lots 'n lots of log cabin blocks in it, in one-inch finished strips. All of Renee's log cabin blocks are square. I think this speaks for itself – it's her first quilt, and all her log cabin blocks are square. The blocks are joined by sashing, and some of the sashing uses rail-fence-and-nine-patch, and some of it is sashing-and-cornerstones. The latter requires that she make connector squares in one corner of each of four log cabin blocks. It is picky and time-consuming, and she's doing it perfectly. Uh, Renee will be teaching the next class.

Renee told me she knew before she took the class that she would love quilting. She had been biding her time until the kids were gone, she was retired, and she could clean out one of the bedrooms for her own lint-filled pursuits. Always assuming that “retire” meant “quilting”, she was thankful to get her start five years prior to her projected goal date. “Otherwise I would have wasted five years when I could have been quilting!”

Carrie is the teacher's pet. Being an elementary teacher herself, she orders the learning process into segments, and completes each segment once she understands what she just learned. She's my pet because she made an Amish quilt, a 36” x 36” square with nine-patch blocks set on point, alternating with plain squares. Whenever she came to class, I would stalk her until I got to see her quilt. Amish quilts are my first-loves. She learned a little more about how important one's color choices are when designing an Amish quilt, and is quilting it up as I write this. I asked if she loved the feel of the quilt, now that it's sandwiched and she can feel the dimension her stitches add to it. You know they're hooked when they answer with their eyes before they even open their mouths.

Ranell has a determination that serves every new quilter well, with no unnecessary ego attached to what she is learning. When she discovered her quarter-inch marking was off after she had a block nearly completed, she took apart her Jacob's Ladder and put it all back together again so that it was a perfect square. On top of that, she let me use her experience as a teaching tool for the rest of the class. How god-fearing is that? Ranell had two more quilts started before she got her first, a Bear's Paw, all pieced. I guess you could say we performed a fabric-baptism on her.

Other beginners are Garnita, June, Les, Elaine, Janice, Jeri, Becky, Dawn, and Kathy. I won't be able to resist writing more about some of them another time. They all have sewing in their backgrounds, and I've seen what some of them (like Kathy) can do. Among them are a couple of natural designers (like Jeri) who have certainly knocked my socks off! We also have one multi-media artist, a full-time potter, who shall remain nameless. Let's just say her name starts with “D”, as in “Dawn”. Another broad hint is that we call her project “Dawn's Five-Minute Wall Hanging”. It turned out great – I am still shaking my head.

We have some excellent experienced quilters in the group: Kristen, Shirley, Sigrid, Hazel, and Ruth. Hazel is fervent in a very don't-brag-about-yourself Lutheran way. I love to see what she's made. It is always good and there's a story involved, in spite of the fact that she acknowledges her talent with a wave of the hand. Maybe she just doesn't know how good she is! Kristen is making slow and steady progress on a two color Ohio Star quilt for their bed. It's Amish-y, in black and a mottled royal blue. Two-color quilts are so striking, and one needs the assurance of their final wow-appeal to keep stitching. Quilters think ahead like that. What may appear boring isn't boring if you understand quilting. I wish I could go on about everyone today. They all bring their individual aims and ambitions to the whole.

A few would-be quilters signed up. They quickly found out there wasn't time for it right now, once they determined how involved it can get. My favorite was Laurel, who told me she discovered she didn't have time to buy the fabric for her project, let alone make a whole quilt. Someday, huh, Laurel?

Some have started projects, but their lives are such that they can't be in the zone right now, no matter how much they want to quilt. We're fine with that; quilting will be here whenever they come looking for it. We know how it is.

But I want to come back to Val. She and I were having the discussion to start with. Val, who never made a move towards quilting before June of this year, is now near-crazed with it. She is the single mother of one very active little boy. Val teaches at the community college during the regular school year, and takes the summers to be with Bjergen, her son. Aware that single moms need to find something of their own to counter-balance the constant demand of putting the child first, she thought she'd try quilting. The class happened to fall on the day of the week she had set aside to take care of herself. I tend to think Val knows who she is. You would, too, if you met her.

She selected a “medium” in the scale of difficulty for her first project. It's not that the blocks were impossible to construct, but there are several pieces in each, which ups the variables that could lead to frustration. She asked me questions when she was in the cutting stage, and drew boundaries -- make that clear boundaries -- about the order in which she could comprehend the answer and fit in with her own thought-out pattern. She designs in a similar fashion as I – for the person who will use the quilt. The need to add personal significance is as important as the uniformness of her seam allowances. Same here.

The result has been nearly flawless. Of course, no quilt is flawless, but every now and then you find a newbie that will go the extra mile to defeat as many bugaboos as possible. Way to go, Val. She had a vision for the outside border, and how it would relate to the binding. She dogged me until we figured out a way to make it work for her. She explored off the beaten path with backing choices, and even cell-phoned me from the street in front of my house, beckoning me out to tell her what I thought of the ultra-suede she was hoping to use. Don't worry, I got her back on track. Last week in class, she was trying to figure out how to make a pieced backing with a design that would perfectly coordinate with the quilt top. Sigh. I remember when I did that. She's starting to accept some of the limits of what you can do with a quilt, and perhaps understands better how those limits in themselves are exciting.

Val and I agreed that quilting allows us to be wildly creative and spontaneous, while at the same time doing things in a confident, neat, and orderly way. It's too subtle to explain unless you find yourself knee-deep in cut-up pieces of fabric. You will never know it's possible unless you quilt, and then you can't describe it. The closest we came was:

What do you get when you cross a hippie love-child with an anal-retentive wonk?

A quilter.

Copyright © August 2005 Kari E.O. Burns