Quilts

Tonight I thread 3 needles at a time with lengths of strong cotton and I push them in and out, drawing the layers of pieced work, soft batting, and plain backing together. The stitches make their own new pathways on the surface, tiny marks like the trail a finch leaves in the damp earth beneath the trees. I saw these marks when I left to walk to the hospital twice earlier today. I saw the footprints of the finches and the samaras the finches have plucked seeds from and both of them led me away from the building towards you. It’s a map a child might have drawn, the short clipped marks of the finches’ feet, the arrows of samara. This way? Or that? —
                                   –from “Seams: piece-work in 20 uneven stitches”, an essay published in Sharp Notions: Essays from the Stitching Life

I’m going to simply add some photographs (not good ones, I don’t seem to be able to photograph my quilts properly) and notes so that I have an online record of at least some of the 40 quilts I’ve made over the past 35 years. I’m not a proficient quilter. I remember that the woman who first encouraged me to make a quilt and who offered advice all through its progress, anyway, I remember she told me, You’ll get better. But I never did. I’m too careless. I don’t plan well. I simply have ideas–to do with colour, with texture, with a kind of visual language that I don’t understand well–and I cut and piece and stitch. I usually have two quilts in progress at once and I like winter best for the opportunity it provides to sit in a wicker rocking chair by the woodstove in our kitchen, quilting by hand. I use pvc frames and clips or else big wooden hoops. I’ve been increasingly drawn to sashiko thread and the big-eyed Hiroshima needles and these days I almost always quilt spirals with long meandering trails between them. When someone asks me if I belong to the local guild, I have to admit I find the prospect of quilting in the company of excellent craftspeople intimidating. It’s something I do alone, to find things out.

I don’t have photographs of the early quilts: the first patchwork that used the remnants of a failed skirt, scraps from chairs I made covers for, some soft caramel-coloured corduroy as well as gold velvet curtains brought to Canada by my mother-in-law after her mother died in England; the pink and green god’s eye; the blue window I made for Forrest; the patchwork of fishing lures I made for Brendan; the patchwork of butterflies and cats I made for Angelica. I don’t have photographs of the star quilt, also for Angelica, that inspired “An Autobiography of Stars” in my book Phantom Limb or the log cabin quilt I made for my parents’ 50th anniversary or the tulip quilt I made for a friend who has now disappeared from my life or the chevron quilt I made for another friend, inspired the hot air balloons that drifted over our apartment the winter we spent in Utah. I don’t have a photograph of the pinwheels I made with Kaffe Fassett napkins I bought at the textile museum in Toronto for Brendan and Cristen or the saffron-sashed log cabin I made for Forrest, embellished with buttons from his great-grandmother’s tin, when he graduated with his first degree, or, oh, so many others.

Here’s a recent gallery:

The quilt on the left is a attempt to think my way through the process of framing our kitchen walls 43 years ago and the one on the right is my response to the atmospheric river weather event in 2021. I used Japanese cottons with some other bits and pieces. The one on the right is quilted with rivers, meandering, ox-bowed, and for the backing I used sheets I dyed with indigo, a few salmon batiked in a swirl, and the one on the left is quilted with spirals:

Sometimes I want to make patchworks with bright cottons and over the years I’ve accumulated some French prints. Here are a couple of those (I’ve made 6 all together):

The one on the left is quilted but not bound in the photograph; the middle one has just been pieced (and actually I’m just finishing off the binding now); and the one on the right is finished.

I made three quilts using either blocks or long panels of indigo-dyed cotton with batiked salmon. I only have a photograph of one of them, the second one. The pale squares are dyed with woad.

I added some detail to the salmon using fabric paint and in the last quilt, which is in Victoria (I gave it to Angelica), I embellished the fish with shell buttons and I batiked stones along the bottom of the quilt-top, adding shell buttons to suggest salmon eggs.

I’ve made each grandchild a quilt.

Top left is a French patchwork for the first grandchild, quilted with hearts. Top left is a single cloth quilt, showing the constellations in the sky over our house the night our first grandson was born over a swirl or spiral of salmon (he was born in October, when the fish begin to spawn near us). Bottom left is a kite, for our third grandson and bottom right shows a detail from a quilt for a little boy who loved to sing “the wheels on the bus go round and round.”

There are a few elements I return to again and again. Fish, of course, but also stars. I’ve made many star quilts and the funny thing is, I once decided I’d try to vary my piecing a little because it seemed that I was always making variable star quilts (several for us, and one for Brendan and Cristen, though I did once also make an Ohio Star of unbleached cotton and soft blue prints; it looks like it was sewn in the 1880s on a prairie farm by a care-worn woman using flour bags and sugar sacks), and I carefully cut out all the pieces for the blocks, I forget which kind but maybe constellation stars or morning stars, and began to fit them together, realizing almost at once that I’d defaulted to a variable star. Again.

Lately I’ve been drawn to single-cloth quilts, using lengths of indigo-dyed linen. I particularly like ne-maki, or tied stones.

There’s the atmospheric river quilt on the left with two tied stones quilts. (The header on my website homepage is ne-maki in progress…) The quilt on the right uses two shibori techniques, the tied stones as well as wrapped string. I meant to cut up the length for something else but I couldn’t bear to do that.

When I wanted to make a little chapbook of an essay, “Museum of the Multitude Village”, as a gift to family and friends for my 65th birthday, I ran into trouble trying to lay out the pages. I don’t have a proper page design program. But my friend (and Fish Gotta Swim Editions publishing partner) Anik See generously offered to do it for me. The file made its way from here to Dordrecht in the Netherlands and back and then it returned again for tweaking and she did it with good humour and patience. So I made her a quilt, a log cabin, because when I first met her, she was living in a log cabin near me on the Sechelt Peninsula, and I wanted to honour those days, as well as provide trails between the cabins so that we would have always have connecting paths for our friendship. (Photograph by Walter van Broekhuizen.)

Sometimes a quilt is a way to travel into a mystery, to weigh and ponder, in this case a cluster of things I thought were connected and I wanted to figure out how and why. I called this quilt “A Dark Path” and while I was making it, I was writing an essay, also called “A Dark Path”; the two are entwined in my thinking. (The essay appears in my last book, Blue Portugal & Other Essays.) It’s not a cosy thing. It’s quite austere. And I didn’t intend it to be a bedcover. I backed it with dupioni silk the colour of bread mold. It’s hanging on our living room wall.

When my Edmonton grandchildren thought they were moving to a new house (they will be, eventually, but that particular one didn’t work out), I said I would make them new quilts for their new rooms. Tell me the colours you like best, I said, and they sent bar graphs. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised? Their dad is a mathematician and their mum is a physicist. My granddaughter’s bar graph featured several shades of pink and purple. It took me awhile to decide on the design for her quilt. I couldn’t do stars or log cabins–the colours weren’t congenial for that– or one of my theoretical patterns, because along with the bar graph came a plea: Please don’t make a crazy design. And I realized that the times I’d tried to talk about the inspirations for various quilts–the atmospheric rivers, the damaged eyes– had filled her with a kind of fear that I might make something as weird for her too. Anyway, on the train from Bordeaux to Paris in November, I thought to myself, Why not use the bar graph as a guiding principle? Why not piece together strips of the cottons you bought in Vancouver on your way to the airport for the trip that took you to France? So this is what I mailed her last week. Her response was: Whoa! Those colours are so pretty1