QUILT GALLERY

 "Quilts need air and sunlight every week,to keep them fresh......"
                            -Dorothy Adamek (Carry Me Home)

I was trying to find some of my favourite quilts. Problem is, there are so many, so many pics, so I thought I would start here. With the Winter Solstice.  Took me 7 months to hand quilt.  I took a class to learn how to applique. The teacher kept yanking off the leaves and complaining   it was supposed to be in pastels. Why hadn't I done pinks and yellows, like everyone else?  I got bored. So I quit the class and did my own thing with it. 

 Civil war quilts ( Vintage lat 1800's) fascinate me to no end. A lot of the squares are simple.......

 But when you put them into a Sampler Quilt,  they kind of go snap, crackle pop.

 My mother never was a quilter, nor her mother. She was a seamstress.  But she taught me to crochet. We crocheted the lace panel on the next quilt. But we never got it finished. Summer after summer we plowed through crochet thread. But it never got any bigger. Was supposed to be a huge tablecloth.  For years I kept it in a box in storage. Forgot about it.Then a few years ago I decided to try something different.

 I saw an idea for a Memory Quilt. Basically wild appliques of all sorts of laces, hankerchiefs, what nots, attached to a quilt panel. 

 I even attached the  remnant from her 1936 bridal bouquet

 Everything else had rusted away, but one length survived.

So I made it the focal point, centred  with the amethyst kilt pin she liked to wear and her pewter cross. I got that cross for $25, when I was a teenager in Victoria. Hid it till Xmas. She would walk by that antique shop week after week and look at it in the window. Then when I bought it, it was gone from the window. She lamented  about that.  At Xmas she was thrilled. I never got her anything she seemed to like. Until then. She loved that cross and wore it day after day, until people at the bus stop  came to think she was a nun, and ask her to bless them. She had a hard time with that, so eventually she only wore it around the house, or for  company . 

 I draped her brass ended 70 year old tape measure, pins, brooches,  earrings, doilies we made. Friends gave me gifts of pearl collars, hankerchiefs, gold leaf fabric ......

 I added my Grandfather's Grouse Foot Kilt pin, complete with claws. Apparently he got it at the airport in Scotland in the late 40's to bring as a gift to my mother. She never wore it. She was always afraid it would get lost.

 So many things kept in boxes and drawers, now out on my mother's quilt. It's not something her conservative self would probably do. We were very different, but not that  different in some things; in her own way, she was inspiring. I think her Memory Quilt is quite cool. Her memory lives on my wall.  Quilts are funny that way.

 Something else I love to do is collect ethnic quilts. I picked up these Kartha quilts recently, at a local 1000 Villages free trade fair at Christmas. Soft cotton sari fabric, all hand sewn. Softest things ever.

 Another of the Civil war quilts is the Log cabin style. It looks like stained glass when you hold it up to the light. It's believed that many quilts from that era held hidden messages for the abolitionists who helped get slaves to the North and freedom. The design of the Wagon Wheel  sewn into a quilt, for example, meant that the local blacksmith would help some slaves  escape.

 A LOG CABIN quilt, hung outside a house, was the sign  that  the house was a safe house. The log cabin square with a red middle meant trouble and to continue on. If it was a yellow square it meant caution. Any other coloured centre meant it was a good house to turn to.

 Northern Star quilt square was the sign to go North to safe houses and freedom.

 When the travellers reached Canada, they were given a quilt square of roses. It meant freedom was obtained at last.

 Many of the quilt symbols and ideas for the Underground railroad were obtained  through verbal tradition.

 Sometimes a quilt was just a quilt. Meant to keep people warm and give the feeling of safety. A quilt is an incredible thing.

 Meanwhile, I have a lot of fabric to wade through. Not sure how many quilts I've done. Maybe  a couple thousand....maybe more over the years.My house is polluted with fabric.  So, moving on to  the next pile  that has a quilt lurking somewhere in the depths....

 Photographs 2019

                                                   Spencer and Smokey 2017