Tag Archives: quilting

Opening Our Eyes

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Sometimes, I find the most stunning beauty right in front of my nose. Often enough, I’m sure I miss the moment, preoccupied with the trivialities of the day, the busyness of life. But every now and then a moment sticks, and I’m able to transfer, if not the actual beauty of a thing, than at least my interpretation of something I once thought was beautiful.

I thought I’d share a couple of landscape quilts. The first was from several years ago.  I seem to have an ongoing fascination with trees.   Living in the midwest, trees, sky and grasses are our landscapes. So that’s my focus. Occasionally, we’re lucky enough to find a bluff, or even a small hill, usually near a river. As much as I try to let abstractions come through, I still have a tendency toward realism. I’m working on it.

Last year, I met some friends for coffee in a coffee shop in a small town nearby. Quaint, cozy and lovely.  As I waited for them to show, I gazed out the window at the chilly November view.  I did a little sketch on the notepad I had with me.  That sketch turned into this wall hanging. (yes, those are my toes at the bottom)

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with Spoonflower. If you haven’t checked out this website, you really should. What a hoot.  You can download any graphic or photo and turn it into fabric —  a fatquarter, a yard or 10 yards, depending on what you want to pay.

I printed up a couple of yards of this fabric. If you look closely, you’ll see that this is actually a B/W picture of reeds and their reflection in a very calm lake. The graphic on the fabric makes a wonderful nature-inspired abstract. I’m still not sure what to do with this fabric, but I’ll think of something in time. For now, I just get a kick out of knowing it’s designed from my photo.

 

Who Are You?

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I never knew my mother-in-law.

She died of breast cancer a couple of years before I met her son.  (www.breastcancerawareness.com)

She was a mystery to me–a woman in pictures taken long before I came into the family, a person my husband could not describe other than, “dark hair, not very tall”.  As time went on, he characterized her to our son as someone who could terrorize small children into eating their supper. “Eat it hot now, or cold for breakfast,” my husband would quote her as saying.

This always makes me smile.  Because while he remembers her as a mom, I’ve grown to know her as a person–through her quilts.

Now I don’t claim to be a Quilt Whisperer, but I’ve done enough quilting to understand the process.  And it is a process, you know: choosing a pattern or designing your own, selecting fabric, color placement, cutting, piecing, and on and on.  If you’re not someone who enjoys the process, (Are we there yet, are we there yet?”) don’t even start.

Yet so many choices are made along the way, that by the time a quilt is finished, it’s very much like a life story.  Some days, I’m so tired of the colors in a certain quilt that I can’t wait to be done with it and pitch it into a corner.  And much like certain books, sometimes I’m so attached to the work, that last stitch of binding is bittersweet, knowing that I’ll never recreate this quilt again. The fabric was so lovely, the process so fulfilling and the time of my life so remarkable, that I’m sorry to have it all end.

Even an ugly quilt has its place in my life.  I dedicated precious time, effort and creativity to bring it into existence.  Every stitch in every quilt tells my story.

And so it is with my mother-in-law. Her quilts tell the story.  Little by little, piece by piece, I learn about her by watching her grandson snuggle under a quilt made long before she knew precisely who would enjoy it.