Look – it’s a president with one of my quilts! Not the current president, but a president with ties to Georgia. The statue is in Franklin D. Roosevelt State Park, at Dowdell’s Knob, near Pine Mountain. We had this quilt along with us and I thought he might be a bit chilly.
Following the photographic lead of Kaffe Kassett and Bruce Lundstrom, I decided to take a quilt on a day trip. This bright fall day seemed a good time to bring Kaffe’s Walk Through the Woods. Kaffe Fassett is a California-born artist who has lived in England for the last 50 years or so designing knitting and needlepoint designs. Known for his bold use of color, Kaffe has added patchwork to his textile repertoire, designing vibrant quilting fabrics and using them in simple patterns. His books on quilting are fabulous photographic journals. He takes a collection of quilts to exotic locations and stages photos with extraordinary scenes. Bruce Lundstrom is the photographer mentioned in my latest post here.
Kaffe’s Walk Through the Woods is made from one of Kaffe’s patterns that I began while taking a class from him in 2009. The pattern is Diagonal Madness and is the result of cutting lots and lots of squares in two sizes and arranging them on a design wall to create patterns in horizontal, vertical, and diagonal rows.
My quilting sister Tess and I shared a work table that day and boldly chose to ignore directions. Here is Tess beside her rows of squares.
I thought my work was destined for the trash bin until Kaffe himself gave his critique and elaborated on the smokey, ethereal quality of my color choices. He remarked that he felt like he was walking through the woods with the leaves shimmering on the trees. So I had a title and reason to finish it – if Kaffe himself liked it, it was a keeper! But not right away, of course.
The pieces stayed rolled up in the flannel design “wall” we had used for quite a while. In 2012, I stitched the pieces together and had one of my longarm quilting friends, Kathy Darley, work her magic on the quilting. Just look at her feathers in the closeup – Wow! Click on this, or any other photo, to enlarge and examine details.
On this fall day, FDR enjoyed the quilt, too. At least one park visitor took a photo of a crazy lady warming a statue. I’d love to hear the stories the lady with the camera had to tell friends about our encounter.
The finished quilt measures 56” x 76”.
You can google Kaffe Fassett and “images” and spend the day being mesmerized and inspired by color. This link takes you to a page focusing on his patchwork, fabrics, and books: http://www.gloriouscolor.com. More info including videos are here.
A few days ago, I crashed a party. We were on a backroads jaunt and I remembered that some of my friends were attending a quilting retreat at a nearby wildlife refuge. I asked Jim to make a stop and let me say Hello. He asked, “Can you just pop in? Were you invited? “ I assured him, “It will be fine. They won’t mind. They will all be happy to show me their projects.”
Angie was piecing some animals. Mary was working with baskets. Jean had stars on her design wall. She had discovered that her alternate blocks were cut from directional fabric, unnoticed until they were put on the wall. She had lots of advisors to help her decide how to deal with this dilemma.
Joyce had two big appliqué projects: a Baltimore Album that just needs a few details and a border attached, and a fabulous Kim McLean pattern all with big pieces of Kaffe fabrics. Joyce is one of our guild’s charter members and she still produces more quilts than several of the rest of us combined! She was sitting beside Hilda, her BFF for more than FIFTY years. They have worked on many projects and been to many retreats and heard many stories in that time, don’t you know?
Dewey was there with his longarm machine and an eight-foot table. He had already quilted two quilts at the retreat for other participants and was doodling on his machine while he waited for others to get backs prepared for him to quilt their tops.
Here is Donna working on a One-Block Wonder. And Dewey had just finished the quilting on her Friendship Garden before the retreat. Now she can add the binding and label and it’s done!
Mary had run to the store, but her work-in-progress is here. Mary is the organizer of this event. Someone has to take charge and she does it well! She reserves the space, organizes the guest list, plans the food, and assures that everyone has fun. And she is successful, because these people plan their calendars around Mary’s retreat dates. Because of her, the sisterhood thrives.
Lynn was putting the finishing touches on a garden scene, while Eleanor was working on a batik project complete with labels to insure that every block ended up in exactly the right place.
We are Bed & Breakfast travelers sometimes. When we leave home, we like adventure. B&Bs provide a unique experience every time. And, in thirty years of enjoying this, I can’t think of one that didn’t prove to be positive. Of course, there was the one where we stopped and looked around, but choose not to stay the night because it seemed spooky to Jim.
We’ve stayed in B&Bs in the mountains, at the beach, in warm weather and cold (oh, my goodness was it cold once in Charleston – and our room was at the back of a long addition to an antebellum cottage. We thought the heat must have been distributed from the front to the back). We’ve enjoyed them in small, medium, and large cities, and in out-of-the-way places that made us wonder how guests ever found them often enough to keep them in business.
I suspect some of those people remember me as the lady who takes a sewing basket wherever she goes.
The tiny desk tucked in a corner made us think of all the creativity that had come from such quaint attic spaces. Jim commented on the quaintness at the same time that he said he would go insane ducking his head all the time. My reply was that many creative people did just that – went insane.
The make-do decor in B&B’s is always interesting. Many time inn owners have clearly been decorating on a budget, saving the big bucks for luxurious towels, fine soaps, and good food. This kitchen faucet intrigued us. Perhaps repurposed, it extended past the perimeter of the sink in most positions. Fun and funny to us!
I’ve written before about how stitching soothes my soul. That happens when I’m in front of the tv and multitasking, when I’m visiting with family and friends and my hands are busy, or sometimes when riding in the car. Those are often the times when my hand stitching gets done.
As I watched her video where Jude is adding white hearts to a heavily stitched white nine-patch and emphasizing the touch points of the hearts with red thread, she notices that they remind her of a scar. Her perception always gives me pause, and this struck me deeply.
I can’t explain why, but I had a flashback to my life working with teachers. One of my colleagues heard a teacher say, “we like this book because we can go in the classroom and teach without having to think about it.” Harriet said to me, “I don’t want teachers who don’t think about what they are teaching.” Indeed.
Sometimes I sew without thinking about sewing. And, that is relaxing to me, to be sure. The rhythmic pulling of thread through cloth allows my mind to be somewhere else, planning something. But Jude’s symbology in her work, her soul searching thoughts remind me to pursue even more depth in my stitching stories. She reminds me that only when we share the stories behind our work, the symbology we’ve included, the strategies we’ve used, do others really appreciate our art. I admit if I had seen the white hearts on white stitching, I might not have noticed the red thread, and if I had, I might not have made the “scar” connection.
Photos: The photos of the “beast” piece is one I was fortunate enough to buy from Jude. When her pieces go on sale, you have to be sitting at the computer watching (or lucky) because they sell quickly. I love having this piece to examine. Seeing her stitches and handling her work informed me of her techniques so much that I began to consider selling some of my own work. If my work could help another quilt maker with a particular technique, or if the final result gave a viewer satisfaction, than I would be willing to share it that way. You see images of the whole piece, approximately 6” x 9”, and closeups of the front and back.
The photos of the blue hearts are my work. I made that piece after watching Jude’s 
