Great Quilts, Great Stories

In Lowell Massachusetts this old savings bank is the New England Quilt Museum. And this is one of the many banners.

Saturday morning, October 20, I met Pam Weeks who, with Kate Hanson Plass, curated the show I'm in: Great Quilts, Great Stories. One of their motivations was to make history come alive through "material culture".  So often history as we grew up with it was based on men, conquests, inventions, & explorations. Women had hardly a place in the books I/we studied.

I didn't meet Kate, but here is Pam.

 

She gave a tour for me & the docents that morning, so we could learn more about all the quilts. One of the quilts in this show had been put on the cover of a book on quilt-making I bought in the 1970s.

Here are some of the other quilts in the show.

I'm not going to be able to tell you their stories, though each had one.

You can see that these are all conventional & classic quilts, each made with fabulous skill, dense quilting, etc. Textile places tend to be dark to preserve the cloth, so I had to lighten all of my photos.

This Red Cross quilt made during WWI & others were others less conventional. 

And a marvelous "Don't Judge a Man Till You've Walked a Mile in His Shoes" story quilt. An elder talks to the youth, & possible trouble is ahead on the road of life-- black cat, snake, dead skunk,  and so on. The shoes are at the bottom.

And then me, in my space in the exhibit, with 10 quilts honoring the people & things that make my quilt-making possible.

(Oops! I touched the photo by mistake, it fell, I had to fix!

I'm really not allowed to handle the quilts any more!! The Museum owns them now.)

About 22 people came from various patches in my life. 

We ate together & had champaign, thanks to Mary Beecher Price.

Lowell is a place with a lot of feminist consciousness. 

The first women's labor organization in the USA was in Lowell.

There are several sculptures about women.

I am very happy that my project is in Lowell and at the NEQM.

Then Kate Layzer, my niece, found a plaque celebrating a visit William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Philips & George Thompson made to Lowell. We scrubbed the faces down.

This is no relation to 'my' George Thompson. This one was a British abolitionist.

Garrison named two sons after these two men.

And finally, some shots of Lowell.

  Lots of old brick everywhere, old buildings, old mills, & renewal.

 

And unspeakably beautiful days!

Thanks to Nan Heminway & friend, Mary Beecher Price, Myra Ramos & her daughter-in-law Michele, Pam Smith Hendricks, Lee Thorndike Sprague, Nancy Hansen, Peggy Latimer, Joan Countryman, Emmy Preston, Sally Ropes Hinkle, Greta Keyes, Cory Hurley McPeek, Pat Jackson, Kate Layzer & her sweetie, Don, John Harwood,

Lynne Harwood, Faith Gilbert, Upty Terry Clouse, Diane Haley, & if I've forgotten anyone, I'm truly sorry. I did forget some married names.

Thank you for coming. It was lovely sharing this with you.

And thanks to George for brick-like support!

That's it for now.

Beginning of Trip East

Sunday last we had one of those long days extended by getting up at 4am to get a 7am flight to Toronto.  After a 3 hour layover there we went on to Hartford. We got to Sal & Dick Warren's house at 10:30pm. They had just been to a 4 hour community planning meeting to try to figure out how to stop a huge line of windmills going in an an extended ridge line near them in Grafton VT. So they were pretty spent too. The impact on small roads, personal property, wildlife, and watersheds would be huge. No community in Vermont has successfully fought this off... yet. They are hoping.

We've has fabulous weather: sunny, high-flying-sky days.

Lots of this...

On another note Sal bonked herself on the head with a jar that fell off a too-high-to-reach-except-with-a-spoon-oops-ouch shelf!! Serious enough so that 3 days later she's laying low.

But she & I still had time for talk. And George & Dick went out for a toot in Dick's MG.

Of course they had an adventure. The MG quit, George came home for Dick's car, getting a ride from a friendly neighbor near the breakdown point, and then the MG was towed home.

Ah, true boyish fun. And no sweat!!

One day I went to the Putney Spinnery where knitting wool is spun, sometimes to order.

It is such a cool place.  

This woman is spinning two lots of one ply wool into one lot of 2 ply wool. She's using serviceable but old machinery. She said she was "bobbin hopping" though she didn't exactly explain what that meant. I still haven't looked it up.   There was wool lint everywhere!

There were several offices looking pretty much like this one. Functional semi-order.

This was someone's order ready to go out. I once knew a Pappenheimer, but didn't ask!!

There was much good talk.

At the end Sal & I recorded some wrinkles that we have.

The drive to Lowell was sublime. Lots of light pouring through lightly-leaved woods. New England towns going by. Not enough time to capture all of it!!

That's it for now.

Summaries & Saying Goodbye to #408 in Kihei, HI

I first came in Maui in 2002. I came on Feb 14 & left the 21st. The first morning I was here Gene & Ellie took me for a morning walk on Sugar Beach.  I met George. He had befriended Gene, my uncle.

And so began my relationship with Maui.  Two years later I started a correspondence with George and two years after we got married.

As we are now packing up 408 & preparing to move out I thought I'd show some of the quilts I made while I was here. This was a mosaic I made from dishes from Zimbabwe!

The ones that I associate the most with being on Maui are one2 I made in my "triangle period". These three were my first real foray into quilting by machine.

The colors came from an amazing lucky-find tablecloth I got on Maui. I think of the Bird of Paradise flower! I love what can be done with shapes that are slightly "off".  They add so much character to work.

There also was a 3-month period, another year, in which I did concentric circles. I did quite a few in Maui. I have sub-standard photos, but I am beyond feeling/being fussy/proud about this.

This is a detail of one.

 All the circles were done by "raw appliqué" -- no edges turned under.

They were all quilted by hand.

Then there was the winter of stripes = simplicity!! I sewed together bands of color, may 6 or 7 of them.
I thought of them as chords. Then the chords were assembled into compositions. I loved/love this way of working. Here are various chords. These were hung over a door where I could think about them!

Here are some of the subsequent pieced products...

This one had a comical story My chords all curved. So I inserted wedges to straighten the curves out a bit.

This final one is after quilting on a huge quilting machine I use "upcountry".

Me, driving the quilting machine & loving it.

Thanks to Russell whose machine it is (a Hamill) & who was such a gracious helper! 

OTHERS...

I called this one Yellow Ladder.

And then this...

This was the Left-Overs Scrap Quilt from all the striped quilts. Waste not, want not!

So all of these came from the year 2010-11. Then came the Year of the Retinal Tear, 2011-12.

These are the last ones I composed here. This one was done entirely by hand.  My machine was getting serviced in Honolulu. And I couldn't read because of the retinal tear repair. I had time for handwork!

Green Triangles.

This one I made with a gift from Karla Thompson.  I started it here in April & finished it in Vancouver.

I'm amazed when I look at this body of work that Maui has inspired in me.

Thanks to Russell, Marilyn at the Maui Quilt Shop, Shawn King (my sewing teacher for several years), Michael James, book which got me thinking about stripes again (which I found at the Maui Quilt Guild), Barb Jenks who took me to the Maui Quilt Guild & George who didn't fuss about apartment fabric mess.

That's it for now.