The Quilt (Part I)

I have been knitting. Oh yes, I have been knitting. It's all for gifts though so I can't show and tell just yet. In the meantime, allow me to showcase my mom's craft: quilting.

I don't remember my mother ever not quilting, though I know once upon a time she didn't. When I was growing up, one of the best rooms for playing in was Mom's quilting room; she had cabinets full of notions and shelves of fabric. To my great horror she would throw out huge scraps of that fabric, just the bits that were too small to become pattern pieces. I would paw through the scraps and salvage the bigger pieces to start my own fabric collection, sometimes even sewing them together in vaguely pictorial scenes. I put a swatch of green corduroy (what on earth was Mom doing with green corduroy that I wound up with that much of it?) next to a swatch of light blue and "appliqued" on a flower that the generous might describe as daisy-ish. I made an American flag with 10 stripes and about 3 stars. I took a kids quilting class at a local fabric store and made a passable wall hanging of, first, a garden of veggies and then a fusable webbing collection of hearts. I liked them ok, but I knew they were not the sort of thing Mom did and they were therefore not quite right.

Mom meanwhile was churning out beautiful bed quilts and lap quilts and wall hangings and all sorts of fantastic things. Here and there among the simpler ones were quilts she would call masterpieces- the ones she spent years or more on, with elaborate apliqued borders and miles of intricate hand quilting. There was the grape basket quilt, pearly gray and rich purples, based around a set of blocks for someone else's quilt top that never quite happened. And the Virtuous Lady, still in production (I think) in warm earthy colors with a border that makes me think back to medieval manuscript marginalia.

(illuminated page from a Bible, manuscript painting, Flemish, early 14th century.
Photo from Medieval Art, Verinoca Sekules
click for detail)

She's very good at those kinds of borders.

Quilting is the only thing I think Mom does that she gives herself due credit for being really really really good at. She accepts praise for being a good teacher, a good wife and mother, a good person, often too humbly. Her quilts are something else altogether. She gets her masterpieces appraised and has a dollar amount to associate with them. Quilts are not tifles and are only given away as signs of deep love to those she cares about most. I am one of the lucky ones and have never been without a quilt of my own. There are three that have been made just for me: a pastel shoofly that covered my bed for most of my childhood, a stark, linear blue and white quilt that she started for me when I was a baby and I had to grow into a bit, and a brushed cotton twin-extra long quilt that she made to keep me warm at college. Mom has never been stingy with quilted love, especially to family.

My family is full of creative people. You can't turn your head in my parent's house without seeing something beautifully handcrafted. There's a painting that I love of the ancestral barn, done by my uncle's uncle. Long silk and satin dresses in my old closet that my aunt made for my highschool dances. A beautiful photograph of a wooded river taken by my Grandpa and framed under his direction. My grandmother's quilts for my brother and I used to be there, but we can't bear to part with them so now they're with us. My mom's quilts, of course, are everywhere. And the house itself is my dad's creation, from the second story addition (electrical and plumbing too, yes) to the remodeled kitchen.

I do the knitting thing, of course, but this summer I decided I wanted to make a quilt. A real quilt. Pieced on a machine, none of this fusable webbing stuff. When I went home to visit in September, Mom and I went to the fabric store and bought a little bit of new fabric and used a bunch of her scraps to round out the collection. So there's a lot of Mom and a little of me in the fabric. I picked a pattern (Dutchman's Puzzle) and she did the math to make everything work out to the right size. She showed me how to use the rotary cutter to cut pieces and guided me through piecing the first block, making sure the points were clear and neat.

I had to pack up the sewing machine (borrowed from Grandma) to move it to New York, so the project waited. Once I got out here though, I went to town and the blocks are all finished now. I took a few pictures of my favorites; there are 16 blocks all together.

Animals make photoshoots tricky...