The Big Why

 

Whenever I start sewing the binding down on a quilt I start about sixteen inches away from a corner and sew towards it. Getting the first corner out of the way quickly is fun, but it means when I turn the fourth corner, I am well and fully in the home stretch. 

I am very eager to finish this quilt and toss it over the back of the couch and see it with the pink pillows for a few weeks before the Christmas decorations come out.

I've been telling you that Millie has been acting really demanding. This photo should really give you the idea of what she looks like when she Wants My Attention. 

(I told you!)

Later today I'll be meeting my dad at a local restaurant to gift the Garden Party quilt to Marjorie, the Lady Priest. I've made a PDF file of the story of her quilt and collected all the in-process pictures and copied all to a flash drive for her. I hope to have photos tomorrow. 

Pretty sure there will be tears.

So now I'm going to tell you something you may have heard here before, but it's the kind of thing we quiltmakers shouldn't forget. It's WHY we make quilts.

I believe that quilts are Magic. I believe that the very best present EVER is a quilt, that it supersedes money or any other THING. What separates a quilt from "other gifts" is time and touch. Quilts take time to make. Time to plan, to design, to sew, to quilt, to bind. During that time whoever makes the quilt touches every square inch many times. I believe that touch STAYS with the quilt, that the quilt holds that touch, that caring, those thoughts and then surrounds the persons who are wrapped or covered in it. 

Don't believe me? Go back to the very beginning of this quilt blog, back to July and August 2008 and read about the quilt I made for my goddaughter Violette. Violette's quilt was the first fully free pieced quilt I ever made. It had free pieced letters, asterisks and butterflies. It even had a cat hiding in a garden of flowers. I worked on that quilt for over four months, agonizing every inch of the way. I never gave up, even though the quilt changed many times from inception to completion. Violette lay under the quilt exactly once, when I took her picture. Ten days later she died.

To say I and her family were bereft is an understatement of epic proportions. I was disheartened that a quilt I had worked on for so long would be forgotten, tucked away in a drawer somewhere. One of my friends reassured me that would never happen. "Just wait," she said, "that quilt will be a comfort. You'll see."

After Violette's funeral (the quilt covered her tiny casket; not exactly the way I wanted to remember it), her eldest brother put the quilt on his bed, "so she wouldn't be alone." Weeks later her mother admitted that during one particularly rough night when she couldn't sleep, she went to get Violette's quilt from her son's bed and covered herself with it. "I fell right back to sleep, and slept so much better... I slept under it a lot after that. I even woke up one morning to find my husband sleeping under it...  It has become the quilt everybody wants. When anybody here is feeling blue or they are sick, they sleep under Violette's quilt..." (And every time I visit, I get to sleep under it. It always brings tears to my eyes.)

Yeah. Hearing that story took my breath away. But since then, I've heard other similar stories, so I know that quilts REALLY ARE as Magical as I think they are.

So remember this: When you gift a quilt, the recipient does not care if it is an original design or if it came from a book, a pattern or a kit. They do not care if the fabrics are "designer" or left over. They don't care if you bought fabric from eQuilter or the local big box sell everything store. They do not care if your seams are perfectly straight, if your quilt lies flat or if the tips of the triangles are chopped off. They do not care if the quilt was custom quilted, or hand guided quilted, or quilted by a long arm machine running a CAD program. They do not care which side of the quilt you finish sewed the binding on. They do not care if it was sewn by machine or by hand. They don't even care if it was never in a quilt show. Or even if it was.

What matters is that it came from YOUR hand. From YOUR heart, from YOUR time, and from YOUR love. What matters is that it came from YOU. That YOU made it. That YOUR touch is in it. 

NEVER underestimate the importance of that.

That is the rock bottom reason I make quilts, and frankly, I can't think of a better legacy.

I'll never be a millionaire. I'll never be so famous everybody knows my name, but there are people I love who sleep under my quilts every night and feel that love. Hell, even I don't sleep under a quilt I made. I sleep under a quilt that my best friend made for me, and another friend of ours quilted.

Like I said, tears.

**Update: I added a photo of Violette's quilt.

Three Quilts for March

 I like making quilts, and when I figured out I could make a table quilt, I decided to make one for each month of the year. (I love bowls, too, and this gives me an excuse to have a spiffy bowl for each quilt.)

March is my least favorite month of the year. It's usually grey and dull and blah and muddy. So black and white is a perfect quilt for March. This is Terrazzo, a Slashed Squares quilt. Readers ask if I really eat on the quilts. I do, but I use a placemat. You can see one at my place in the photo above. It's black and white and pink. (my pal Julie made me a set.)

I decided to show off some other quilts this month. So I changed the one that lives on the back of the couch. Julie made this one too. It's called Hidden Potential, and it's made from my dud letters. About ten years ago when I was planning a class on free pieced letters, Julie suggested I send her my duds. "Just because YOU can't use them doesn't mean they are bad," she wrote, "and your students need to know that too."

Julie sent me this quilt for my birthday a while back. I love black and white and colors. It's cold here at night in winter, so I like to have an extra quilt on the bed. I figured this one was March-ish too. What's funny, is Julie also made the quilt underneath, the one that has lived on my bed since I got it, and if that isn't a compliment, I don't know what is.

Lynne & Julie: Swapping Duds and Making Magic

In late 2010 I was planning a class on free pieced letters, and I wanted a sampler that showed different kinds of letters.

The quilt Nine x Nine was the result.

As usual, making the quilt generated a lot of dud letters.

 "Send them to me!" Julie wrote, "I'll make a quilt out of them. They are duds to YOU, but your students need to know it's still possible to make a great quilt!" I sent her all my dud letters, and then I prepared another box full of ALL the leftover bits I had squirreled away - mini trees, asterisks, butterflies, some free pieced houses and anything else I could find.

Julie had no negative associations with my box of duds, and she made this quilt. There were so many pieces Julie would make a second quilt. She said it would be the back. While she worked on that, I had an idea.

 I had been making a Rules quilt for myself, and made this black and white RULES word, which wouldn't work in the quilt. I looked at it and saw "jULiE" and "chRiS". OH HELL! Chris would quilt the quilt Julie was planning... so I went into the studio...

Using the letters from RULES, I made JULIE and CHRIS. I put them in the box, sealed it up to mail it to Julie the next day. Then I went to bed.

I'm lying it bed and it hits me.. SHIT!

The next day after work I went into the studio, and prepared something else for Julie and put THAT in the mail the next day.

Two days later, Julie wrote to me, "Lynne... I just got your box... I have an idea...."

"CHECK YOUR MAIL TOMORROW!" I wrote back.

We had BOTH had the same idea. Since the quilt would be made from my letters and bits and pieces, and JULIE would be putting the pieces together and CHRIS would be quilting it, it would be a three way collaboration. It only made sense to have all three of our names on the quilt.

 As soon as I saw this picture of the "back" of the quilt, I told Julie I wanted a second quilt, and that I'd pay for the quilting. This was too good to be only the back of something. Julie included three houses in the quilt, and her explanation was: "Our houses have brown on the ground because we don't have any snow here in the winter. Your house (with the red roof) has white on the ground because you have snow right now."

I didn't have the heart to tell Julie that I when I made that house I envisioned it as a house on the Mediterranean Sea in bright sunlight with a tiled roof and surrounded by flowers. Heck, I'd take that as my house! Funnily enough, years later I would buy a house surrounded by flowers with a red door.

This is the picture Julie sent me back in 2011 as she enjoyed the quilt before sending it to me.

I was thrilled when the quilt arrived.

I went home that night in 2011 and put the quilt on my bed, and it has stayed there ever since. If that isn't the highest compliment you can give a quilt, I don't know what is.

But don't feel bad for the "Hidden Potential" quilt Julie made. It comes with me to every quilt class and lecture I give. I want students to know that even things they think are "duds" (I no longer consider them "failures") have potential.

I was going to show this photo later in the story, but as Julie pointed out, it really belongs here. This is me, Julie & Chris (l to r) and the Magic Happens quilt. Julie reminded me that Chris quilted the quilt with black and white variegated thread, because my cat Millie is black and white and "her furs will be right at home."

Washing Machine Shuffle

Somebody asked me what I did with the leftover bits of quilts that didn't work. This quilt is an example of what to do with those leftover duds. My pal Julie asked me to send mine to her several years ago and she made me two quilts. This is one of them, and it is made of leftover letters from my Daft Zebras and Nine x Nine quilts as well as some other experiments (houses and trees) and a baby quilt I made (asterisk flowers and hearts). Julie made the quilt from my pieces and Chris quilted it. When I knew that was going to happen I made our names and Julie included them in the quilt. It just goes to show that duds are only duds in the eye of the beholder.

I love this quilt so much it has lived on my bed for almost ten years. Every time I try another quilt it just looks blah.

So why is it on the blog today? Because the other day I was doing laundry and I thought, hmm, maybe I should wash this too, so it took a trip through the washer and dryer ("washing machine shuffle") and when I put it back on the bed I was struck by how much brighter it looked.

Ahem!

Duds, Glorious Duds!

Every word quilt I make generates lots of duds or "misfit" letters.

These are from Nine x Nine.

The letters in the lower half of this photo are the "duds" from my quilt Daft Zebras.

The only letters worth keeping in this photo were the "out of the box" ones that formed an arc above the box in The Black Box quilt.

The BOX letters on the bottom of this photo are all duds.

Now, duds aren't BAD letters, they just don't "work" with the rest of what I've made. So I set them aside. I might use them in another project, and I might even raid them for bits of fabric.

But most of my dud letters have made their way to my friend Julie.

 Back at the end of 2010 she told me I should send her my dud letters "because students need to see that the first letters they make aren't BAD and can still be used to make a beautiful quilt."

 She made this quilt, Hidden Potential, for me. I love it.  I then sent her another box of my leftover bits including some houses, stars, butterflies and other stuff.

The result was this quilt, Magic Happens, a collaboration between Julie, Chris (our fabulous long arm quilter) and me. I love this one so much it lives on my bed.

Julie and I have talked about how she takes what I consider a dud and makes magic out of it. "When I get your castoff letters, they don't have any negative associations for me," she says. "So it's easy for me to use them in something new."

Good point!  Check out what Julie made with my castoff letters from the Black Box, Red Letter Alphabet and Mashed Potato Crayons.

The letters may be mine, but the rest, Create With Abandon, is all Julie's.

The lesson, Rebecca, is that it's all in how you look at it; that inspiration, and (hidden) potential, is everywhere.

Even in the castoff bin!

Happy Birthday Julie!

Today is my pal Julie's birthday.  Julie is my best pal. We've been email and internet friends for over four years, and in less than two weeks, we'll meet in person for the first time. I can't wait.

Julie has made me several quilts, and I love them all.

The first was Obsolescence,which Millie and I both love.

This was the result of a quilt swap. I made a Rules quilt for Julie (above.)

Later, Julie asked me to send her all my duds and orphan letters so she could put them together in a quilt to show my letter-making students that there wasn't really any such thing as a "bad" letter.

She ended up making not one, but two awesome quilts.  I love them all!

Happy Birthday Julie!

Happy Birthday to You,

Happy Birthday to You,

Happy Birthday dear Julie!

Happy Birthday to You!

Magic Happens

Magic Happens is here! These are my friends, Daniela and Maryann, holding the quilt up. They both loved it.
Everybody loves the back - it's all black and white fabrics. How perfect!
The quilt was a real show-stopper as it hung on the dividing wall on my "office." Even the guys stopped by to comment and ask questions. ("Who are Julie and Chris?")
Chris quilted it in a variegated black-and-white thread. It makes me think of my tuxedo cat, Millie! I love it!
Can you tell?

Julie, Chris, our collaboration has been fabulous! Thank you both so much!