A few weeks ago, I mentioned in a post that I was trying to come up ideas for a quilt for my grandson H. I promised him one for the new room he will move into in the fall and he sent this bar graph:
He also sent this explanation in case I didn’t know what a bar graph was:
So I thought and I tried to imagine those colours in something I’d like enough to spent the necessary hours cutting, piecing, and then quilting (daily for months). In Victoria last week I went shopping for fabric because our sweet fabric store in Sechelt closed last year and I didn’t have anything in my trunk that would work. I piled the fabric on the table and waited for something to come to mind.
H. (like his other boy cousins) is intrigued by the fact that his grandfather and I built our own house. He always asks questions about the process and on many mornings during summer visits, I’ve seen John showing him how there are footings that hold the beams that hold the joists that hold…and so on. One length of lumber cut and pieced with another:
And then it occurred to me that I could make H. a log cabin quilt. You don’t see blue in his bar graph but I know he likes blue. So I did what I do, clumsily, which is to try to figure out the ideal size for each log cabin block and how to sash them (to make up for my careless measuring and piecing) and how to eventually come up with a quilt that is a good size for a bed. In 2020, I made my friend Anik a quilt to thank her for designing the pages for a chapbook I wanted to make to celebrate my 65th birthday and although she didn’t know she was getting a quilt, I’d asked her what colours she liked, and she told me. Like H.’s colours, they didn’t immediately bring a design to mind but then I thought of how Anik had lived in a panabode cabin when I met her and how a few years later she moved to the Netherlands to begin a life with Walter. I made four log cabin blocks with paths between them (partly because of my careless measuring and partly because those paths still exist between our houses, though we are continents apart).
H. lives a province away and in a few months the work will begin on a new house for his family. While that work happens, I will be sewing his quilt. Yesterday I made the first of 4 big cabin blocks and I hope to finish the other 3 today and tomorrow. Then the sashing, the borders, and eventually I’ll sandwich the pieced top with the lovely batting I ordered last week and the flannel I chose in Victoria for the back (for coziness).
In a log cabin quilt, the red represents the fire at the centre of the home. This morning ours is burning warmly, wood cut and split and stacked in the woodshed by the grandfather who loves to show his grandsons how a house is built. How the beams are built up of long lengths of 2x12s spiked together, the joists crossing them. The pattern is close at hand:
here I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
“When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off.”
And I say this to Kai
“Look: We’ll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with—”
And he sees.
Note: the lines are from Gary Snyder’s “Axe Handles”, one of my favourite poems.
...Theresa Kishkan 