This is the other bookend to my life this past fourteen months: my father died Monday afternoon. He was 98, a wit, a smart man with grand ambitions, most of all for his children.
Finally that gulf between he and Mother — opened up in November of 2022 when she left this earth — has been closed.
I wanted to write about Road to California this year, but aside from some bright moments, I wept on and off all week, probably in anticipation of the news I was to receive of his death. (It’s okay in my world to say death.) We all knew it was close.
So I’m going to pause for a moment before I pick up the strands of my quilting. Since he was an artist himself (and a businessman and a faith-filled scholar and a father-to-seven-husband-to-one), he knew about picking up that brush and getting back to work.
While the original version of the word meant light, frothy entertainment, this grouping of quilts was more serious, found in Primal Forces, an exhibit in the BYU Museum of Art. They were part of a traveling show from SAQA, and I was delighted to see them while visiting there for a wedding this summer. One of them, the quilt with “rocks” and “water,” I first saw in France while at the Carrefour Quilt Show in the Alsace region. It was like seeing an old friend. And yes, I always love that overhead thread sculpture by Gabriel Dawe that I led with. It’s too hot to do anything else, so enjoy the quilts!
NOTE: I put some of them together in “galleries;” click to enlarge.
Sonoran Spring, by Stephanie Nordlin
I loved the shaded window above these two quilts, reflecting the shapes in an architectural way.
I love the simplicity/complexity of the quilt above. It just vibrated on the wall.
Thank you all for your well wishes in the last post. It’s taken me longer than I wanted to write back to you, but I’m most grateful for all the lovely things you said. We did survive the “storm” and as I read about the weather that’s been going on at my friend Carol’s home this week (tornados! rain! lightning! more rain!), it confirms that we Californians are all a bunch of wimps. But thanks for understanding how excited/worried/confused we get by a change in our (usually) moderate weather.
Okay, summer. You can head on out, now. It’s back to quilting…
(All the colors in the center have been quilted)
P.S. Summer leaving? HA! In Southern California, our summers stretch outward into October. We have more hot days ahead of us.
I ran across some quilt baby pictures the other day.
And a tangent: Chaucer was on to something when he wrote “The life so short, the craft so long to learn.” I’ll explain, but first you should know that we’re cleaning out, preparing for some home renovation. Or as I like to call it, #kitcheneggedon, where we are moving our entire kitchen into boxes or onto shelves, and our refrigerator out into the garage, which meant that two of our four file cabinets had to go. It was time, really, to figure out what we’d crammed into those moving metal drawers so long ago. We filled one giant curb-side recycle bin, borrowed our neighbor’s and filled his, and I was still going strong. Glance, toss, glance, toss, glance….Whoa.
Several files stopped me dead in my tracks, as they were from the first series of classes I ever took, a veritable record of my how some of my quilts were hatched (hence, Quilt Baby Pictures for the title of this post).
• An embellishment class which sample I promptly tossed. The redeeming factor were finding two beading needles in the class kit, which I needed. • Two Laura Wasilowski classes: one on fusing, where we learned the Chicago School of Fusing fight song and that her first iron lasted 25 years, and a second where I made a reversible jacket (which I wore for years). • Debbie Caffrey Mystery Class in which I had fun, but when I took another Mystery Class some years later (teacher shall remain anonymous) it put me off that format forever. • A two-day Jane Sassaman class through Orange County Quilt Guild’s summer Camp Watch-A-Patcher, where she kept encouraging me to go wilder, bigger, more colorful. She’s genius. • And a Hollis Chatelein class about close quilting in quilts, a vanguard in that style of quilting.
• I found three classes in my files from Roberta Horton, a personal quilting hero of mine. I did what she called an African-American quilt (or Utility Quilt), a Japanese Quilt, and a Plaid quilt. • I also took a class from Mary Lou Weidman, where I designed a quilt in honor of my last child leaving home, in honor of our empty nest. The blob on the right is the full-size sketch of the quilt:
Empty Nest, Full Life • Quilt #56 in the Quilt IndexNihondaira, #53 in the Quilt Index
This is the quilt made with the Japanese yukata fabrics; we were encouraged to take our smallish square of yukata fabric, design a shape and assemble it, while merging and borrowing it, and extending the design through sashiko or embroidery. Roberta’s classes always gave me more than I expected.
This is from a class by Jan Krentz, because I so wanted to make a Lone Star Quilt, and she knew how. I used fabric my husband had brought me from Zimbabwe (yes, he’s a keeper) and I’ve not written about it on this blog. It was named Fiat Lux, because I finished it about the time I earned my undergraduate degree after 28 years of slogging. The motto of the University of California is “Fiat Lux,” so I adopted that for the title.
Fiat Lux, Quilt #57 in the Quilts Index
I found file folders for the Joen Wolfrom class I mentioned in the last post, as well as a few others, but the file that amazed me most of all was the one that held the papers from a class with Jean Ray Laury, the grandmother of the graphic arts quilts (in my mind).
I even saved a letter she’d written to me, returning the dollar I paid for some class supplies that she ended up giving out for free. Now that she is gone, it’s a treasure newly re-discovered, once long-lost in some random file cabinet (now gone) in my garage.
While it was a treat to find all these “baby quilt photos” I’m more than happy that I actually “raised the baby” and got it launched into the world. No, there will probably never be an embellished quilt — the interest just isn’t there to place sparklies and sequins all over a quilt. But those needles will come in handy when I have to restore the beads Carol put on her block for my Ladies quilt. Yes, I’m a fan of taking quilt classes. Only once have I come out of a class feeling like it was a waste of time (and I’ll never reveal which class it was).
“Time is draining from the clock,” says 2022 and Mary Oliver. Your loss, my gain says 2023. And here we are again, in a quote/poetry slam. (Quoted works are at the end.)
I made a few quilts, but not as many as usual. I think I made a lot more small makes, like a purse, or pillow tops, or patterns. Or maybe my “time is draining from the clock” and as someone who once had a “confident and quick” walk, I may be slowing down. Or distracted. Or sad. Or really happy. Or on a road trip. Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s like Oliver Burkeman says, that “The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”
Or making quilts. Or immersing in creative endeavors. Or writing a thank you note to someone who doesn’t expect it. I took this last one from another book I read, where the author’s mother noted that we should be thanking everyone for everything.*
So, thank you for reading. Thank you for your letters. Thank you for the conversation that allows me to know people from all over the United States, and from all over the world!
QUOTES/POETRY
*THE GIFT by Mary Oliver
Be still, my soul, and steadfast. though time is draining from the clock and your walk, that was confident and quick, has become slow.
So, be slow if you must, but let the heart still play its true part. Love still as once you loved, deeply and without patience. Let God and the world know you are grateful. That the gift has been given.
TO BEGIN WITH, THE SWEET GRASS by Mary Oliver (excerpt)
The witchery of living is my whole conversation with you, my darlings. All I can tell you is what I know.
Look, and look again. This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.
It’s more than bones. It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse. It’s more than the beating of the single heart. It’s praising. It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving. You have a life—just imagine that! You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another.
What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be… (excerpt from MORNINGS AT BLACKWATER, by Mary Oliver)
Arguably, time management is all life is. Yet the modern discipline known as time management—like its hipper cousin, productivity—is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine, or on cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch on Sundays. These things matter to some extent, no doubt. But they’re hardly all that matters. The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder. (from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman)
“We all owe everyone for everything that happens in our lives. But it’s not owing like a debt to one person—it’s really that we owe everyone for everything. Our whole lives can change in an instant—so each person who keeps that from happening, no matter how small a role they play, is also responsible for all of it. Just by giving friendship and love, you keep the people around you from giving up—and each expression of friendship or love may be the one that makes all the difference.” from Will Schwalbe. The End of Your Life Book Club. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
There are quilts in the post. I promise. But, first.
I found this photo of my mother while I was hunting for something else. As most of you know, she passed away mid-November [obituary], and yes, my brain is sort of strange right now. This photo was in a grouping of three of my mother and her two siblings:
And tucked underneath each of these was a photo of young baby, about 10 months old. I assume it was my mom’s sister Martha, who died of whooping cough when she was a baby, but I can’t ask my mother now (one of the things that happens when your mother dies, is that I go to call her up and ask her a question, but…). We are big on vaccines in our family, given that my father had polio and my mother’s sister died of pertussis.
Perhaps because my mother was a depression baby, she hung onto things. She was neat, tidy, not a hoarder at all, but she hung onto things. When my children were younger, I asked for books from my childhood. Later, much later — after all my children were grown — she gave me two of my books. I think she kept them around, first for my younger brother and then for grandchildren and then I think my Dad just schlepped them off to the thrift store in the end. And there are other stories, of earthly goods long-wanted, but now only after her death coming forward to be distributed. And some of her things won’t be given away until much later, which makes closure more difficult.
My earthly possessions, such as these quilts in a closet, just sort of stack up. Last year when we were all doing Zoom calls together, I promised my children I’d get together a list and let them pick what they wanted. Ooops. Inspired by recent personal events I finally put one together today. I’ll send it out to them, with some guidelines, and see what happens. (Hopefully, shipping will happen.)
I’ve long kept an online Quilt Index, as well as a digital version in my numbers-type software. I uploaded a version of it into Google Docs. Then I went through and tried to identify where all my quilts had gone: gifted, given, lost, tossed…the usual categories. NFD means Not For Distribution, and those are the quilts that I rotate up on my walls or use on our bed. Turns out I have about 78 quilts that can go now, with more to come. I’ll offer it first to the children and their spouses, and then to the grandchildren. And then I’ll decide what to do with the rest after they choose. (My husband went through the list and approved.)
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 