This past weekend I taught my postcard class for a second time, this time at Cote Brothers in Auburn, and boy was it FUN! The students this time were really ready to branch out, even though some of them had never done anything remotely art quilty…boy did they succeed! It was especially fun because several of the ladies were returning students—that always makes me feel wonderful, because it means I’ve managed to teach them something well enough that they want to come back for more…HOORAY! and thank you. (Left to right are Sharon, Sue, Victoria and Rachel. Pam was over at the register I think, and Dawna had had to pack up and bolt before I remebered to take out my camera!)

I gave the students an overview of the techniques we’d cover including fused applique, using Angelina fibers (including ironing it over a stamp to get an impression), making a freezer-paper stencil and using both textile paints and Shiva paintstiks, making rubbings with the Shivas, free-form cutting (break loose from that template thing!), and making an edge-finish from yarn.

The first time I taught the class, the students had a hard time without a pattern to follow, so this time I made up 8 samples for possible postcards but encouraged them to “go for it.” I’m thrilled to say ALL of them did!!!!! No one used my patterns—HOORAY! I don’t know if it was the difference in the students, or that having the pattern there as a “safety net” to fall back on actually freed them up to wing it…who cares, I’m thrilled!

Sue spotted an applique quilt hanging on the wall (opposite where she is sitting), and launched into cutting this adorable snowman card (and given the near-arctic wind-chill outside, it was appropriate!). Here she is working on him, and in the “group
photo” below, he’s on the left. She cut the letters free-hand, and I think they look perfect!

Sharon made the postcard with two flowers saying “Heal” for her uncle, and Pam made the two on the right, including the lady with the bright “angelina” hair. Pam had brought a hideous / wonderful fabric, asking “what could you do with it, it’s SO ugly” It is pretty ghastly– pictures of the heads of LOTS of ducks…..I took one look at it and said no it’s not awful, it’s great…it could be rocks! Well, she got the idea: the loon’s neck is now striped socks on her lady and another head is the pocketbook (bottom right postcard in the group photo)!

Rachel barely made it to class, deciding to come only at the last moment. She brought some great upholstery fabrics and one or two commercially printed “hand-dyed look” fabrics. She used the latter and, loosely following one of my patterns, but cutting things free-hand herself, made this mountainscape with Shiva-paintstik through freezer-paper stencil snowcapped peak:

And Victoria made this Easter postcard, stencilled a great bolt of lightning, then added angelina to make it even more lightning-ey. We picked a couple different yarns from my stash (I take a bunch of stuff from my studio so students don’t have to buy a ton of stuff, which they can try and donate a modest fee to the “replenish the stash fund” and, if they like, then go buy themselves), and thought the gold and variegated tan twisted together looked best.

I’m SO happy with the postcards these ladies made! I’m finding that my estimate of students being able to make four or six postcards is way too high…most made one or two, but it has these folks bursting out of the box…COOL!

Well, it has been nearly two weeks since Coastal Quilters met (the local quilt guild chapter), and it has taken me this long to blog about it! That’s what happens when you’re switching computers, making two quilts, and doing all the other stuff besides! Since I gave a talk on thread, I was a bit discombobulated, and just enjoying show and share, when I realized I really should be taking pictures! I missed some great quilts, but got the OK from Betty and Carrie to share these two.

Betty is an AMAZING quilter! I told her that day that she has, hands down, the best “eye” for composition and basically everything out of anyone in the group including me, Jan, Roxanne and everyone else. Here she is (trying to hide behind her quilt). She does all her work by hand, and has a small apartment, so her pieces are small. This one has the most gloriously stitched and beaded dreamcatcher on the front…wish I had gotten a detail photo of it!

Carrie Hedstrom is a young (well, compared to me! Anyone under 40 qualifies as young!) mom, and budding art quilter who has recently joined our ranks. She used a piece of McKenna Ryan’s gradation fabric for the center of this piece (I think the colorway was this one) :

I thought it was a very effective usage of the fabric, and the quilting was interesting too…can’t wait to see where she goes/grows from here!

And you may have heard (including here, from me!) about our sub-zero Fahrenheit weather. We are in a mild spell..it got up to about 31 or so today, but this past weekend (when I was off teaching, then downstairs working on Monday and Tuesday) I didn’t turn the heat on in my studio / workroom over the unheated garage. MISTAKE! The heating pipes FROZE. You’d think the frozen-solid water in the cup inside my car would have been a clue, but nope…I was clueless. Well, we put electric radiators in both the room and the garage (with its single pane windows, one of which has two broken, cereal-box-covered panes) to thaw things out. The good news is that I have turned the water supply to the pipes which heat the baseboard heaters, and so far no apparent leaks or water damage…we may have dodged a bullet…PHEW! Ripping out walls to repair ruptured pipes isn’t fun, or cheap!

Meanwhile, Paul took this pic of three of the cats asleep in his room. They know what to do on a cold winter’s day in Maine! Tyger is the orange tabby, Zeus is the Siamese, and Hannah Chan is the mackerel tabby. Smart kitties!

Hi everyone ! I’ve been busy quilting and teaching, but wanted to tell you a bit about my dad, half brother Charlie, and friend Linda MacIntosh Wauchope, who introduced me to the existence of quilting magazines back in 1989 (and to those who read my posts on the quiltart and Janome6500, please excuse the repetition). I’d like to dedicate my donation to the FFAC Auction, the quilt in the previous post called “The Tree” to them. (For more info on the Reverse Auction,visit Virginia Spiegel’s website and FFAC Reverse Auction page here )

Daddy in the 1980s, with his afternoon cocktail and newspaper in front of the house

Daddy began smoking cigars when he was about 17 (back in 1916…yep, he was OLD–almost 59 when I was born). When he was 82, he got a cough that wouldn’t go away. On a Thursday evening, he wrapped up the day with his usual cigars (stinky, icky blech!), but didn’t have time for his morning cigar on Friday because of his early doctor’s appointment. The doctor told him he had throat cancer, and if he didn’t quit smoking and drinking he would die. He quit cold turkey and never had another smoke. He joked that at age 82, he wouldn’t like long enough to see if he’d survive past five years that would show they had truly “caught it” all. Well, he lived to 96 and died peacefully of old age. And he never smoked again, and only took up drinking in the last couple of years (Mom thought it was self-medicating for pain). Here’s a photo of me with Dad circa 1958.

Charlie was 46 when he was diagnosed with cancer. If anyone remembers the professional football player Rosie Greer, Charlie looked like him except he was white. At 6’4″, his weight ranged from 240 to 300 pounds, he called his car a rolling ashtray, and consumed 4 packs of cigarettes a day (in addition to being an unreformed alcoholic).

My two half brothers holding me, summer 1958, Tom J on the left, Charlier on the right.

With no health insurance, Charlie (known outside the family as Chuck, but to us he is always Charlie) delayed health care. By the time he was diagnosed with cancer just before Christmas, it was too late for anything other than palliative care. He died three months later. Since he was in his early 20s when I was born (to daddy’s second wife), he was more like a distant cousin to me. But I remember he called me “Peanut,” and when he was around we laughed and laughed and laughed…he was SO funny, and could tease people in such a way that not only were they not offended, they’d be laughing harder than anyone.

Graduation from High School, 1975, Charlie in his “adult” size! and ever-present shades.

Linda was there when I was at the beginning of my quilting journey, she was a knitter who quilted, and she was a good friend. I met her when our spouses were assigned to the US Embassy in Libreville, Gabon (her hubby was Ambassador, Paul was his deputy–that meant neither Linda nor I were allowed to work at the Embassy even though we were both foreign service officers, too–which meant Linda and I had no income but lots of time to quilt, play, yak, eat and have fun).

When I was pregnant with Joshua in 1993, I remember going to lunch in April with her. I was two months along and the button on the itty-bitty waist of my red pleated skirt was already getting tight. As we left the restaurant, Linda looked at my waist and (drat it all, she was right) told me it would never fit again. Then she told me this weird bump had “popped up” near her diaphragm. The next day, she went to an appointment with the doctors at Johns Hopkins (we lived/worked in the DC area, but her family was from Baltimore, so she always went there for medical care). One week later, the doctors removed and ELEVEN POUND tumor, the size of a honeydew melon which the doctor needed two hands to lift. They thought they had gotten it all.

Six months later, as Linda was preparing a baby shower for us, she got this ominous feeling. Unfortunately, she was correct again. The cancer was back. By the time Joshua was a couple of months old, she was in chemo for myolyo sarcoma (spelling? or was it lyomyosarcoma?) Anyway, it is a particularly virulent form of cancer. If anyone deserved to live based on positive attitude it was Linda. During chemo weeks, she’d schedule lunch dates for Monday to Wednesday so she’d have something to enjoy each day (by the end of the week she felt too yucky for company), and said all the nurses wanted her because she was cheery. Since I was then on maternity leave, I’d pick up another friend at work and Monica, Joshua (nursing at first) and I would pick up lunch and head to Linda’s chemo room. They ran through the regular treatments, then moved on to experimental chemo courses. By the last round, Joshua was inhaling four jars of baby food at a sitting and working on chewing with his many new teeth.

Linda finally told the doctor that she didn’t want to spend what was left of her life sitting in doctors’ offices finding out how much her cancer had grown. She told him she’d be back when she needed morphine, and that’s what she did. Her husband took an early retirement (about six months earlier than planned). Her sons were about the age mine are now…3rd and 8th grade. Linda, ever the Type A, called the teachers and asked them to cut the boys some slack, since she was dying! She planned her funeral, and gave away quilting books and fabric (I still have some). She offered to give me a quilt top I’d helped her with a couple of years earlier, and instead I offered to quilt it (KING sized!) for her. Fortunately, on of they guys at work said, when I answered his question about Linda that she was told she had six months, that that usually meant half that time. I started quilting like a madwoman–I’d get Joshua into tubby and bed, then go quilt until bedtime. I got the finished quilt to her two weeks before she died, in August 1994, and she was still able to hold a pen and sign it, and insisted that I sign the label too. Her hubby still uses it on his bed. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone stronger than Linda, except maybe her mom, who was there at home with her holding her hand when she died.

I miss them all, and hope that some day (not too soon please) I’ll get to hug them again, and laugh, and tell tall tales, some of which will be true. And in the meantime, I think every now and then I hear Linda cackling away, sitting up on some cloud, at the latest idiocies from inside the Beltway.

This may be my all-time favorite photo of me with my dad and brothers, circa 1964/first grade (I think in Sausalito, California, where we lived at the time, but maybe in San Francisco?). I always think of this photo as “Three Gangsters and a little girl”

To all who have slogged through this far, thanks for bearing with me, and for letting me remember Daddy, Charlie and Linda. And MAJOR thanks to Virginia, for organizing this on-going fundraising effort, and to Karey and all her helpers at IQA / Quilts Inc., for helping further the cause.

Cheers, Sarah

It’s DONE..well…except for the hanging sleeve and label, of course! Yes, my piece for the FiberArts for a Cause Reverse Auction is finished, and I’m really happy with it! In fact, I made two pieces at the same time that are small variations on the same theme. The first, for the Auction, is A Sense of Place 1: The Tree. The second is A Sense of Place 2: The Wall. Here is the FFAC piece:

I had initially wanted to do a wholecloth nude figure, but by the time I made up my mind and asked Virginia if a nude would be “OK” (Virginia Spiegel is the guiding spirit and force behind this incredibly successful fundraiser to fight cancer and support cancer research) someone else in the group was doing a nude. Virginia said I was welcome to do a nude, but I decided I’d rather do something else. That night I dreamed I made a quilt of one of the stone walls that criss-cross the state of Maine, with the winter snow crisp and bright around it. That quickly decided the subject!

The Tree is about 20 inches wide by 26 inches tall, and is made of fused /collaged applique using commercial cotton batiks and prints and a bit of hand-painted fabric, extensively machine quilted. Edge-finished with a chenille-yarn. Here is a detail of The Tree:

And here is The Wall:

This piece (roughly 30 x 26.5 inches) will be entered into shows, including the one our mini-group The Frayed Edges will have here in Camden, Maine, in August 2007 at the Camden Public Library. It will be for sale after August (or possibly a bit later than that). Here’s a detail photo of this quilt:

First…Happy Birthday, Daddy! If he were alive, today would have been his 108th birthday! Yes, my dear old dad (who was 58, almost 59 when I was born!) was born on this day in 1899. He wanted to live to be 101, so he could say he lived in three centuries. He almost made it, and lasted until he was 96. Many happy returns, Dadddio-o-o-o-o-o!

The morning started out wonderfully: a light dusting of snow, from-scratch blueberry muffins, and Kathy the first to arrive, so I had her and hubby dear witness my signature on the contract with AQS (here’s me grinning like an idiot!)

Kate and Hannah arrived shortly after than, just as the phone rang with Deborah calling from Dallas! Deborah…we need you…we all forgot to take pictures of the food! At least I managed this photo:

(sorry my friends about the photo….obviously I should have said “smile!” first instead of catching you all in the middle of something…. and the other photo I took was worse!….that’s Kate on the left, Kathy in the center and Hannah on the right.) I gave a mini-quilting lesson on machine quilting today, smooshing a day’s worth of tips and tricks and such into about 2 hours. Eeeek but FUN!

Lunch was salad, potato-turkey kielbasa soup and kate’s incredible apple-walnut cake with Applejack Brandy sauce…YUMMMMM! But the best part came late in the day: after way too long on the market, there is an offer coming in on Hannah’s house (which is gorgeous, in a nice quiet location, woodsy but sunny lot, and did I say gorgeous?)…at long last. So please beam good thoughts (and high numbers) towards Bowdoinham, Maine!

I have nearly finished The Tree and the The Wall quilts, so will try to post by Wednesday…need to take decent pics, which means getting out the tripod! Stay tuned.

And to all who have written, and many of whom blogger sent to me as “no reply”, with congrats on the book…THANK YOU! Your encouragement is incredible…I might even sell twenty copies! Won’t be out for eons (think late 2008 / 2009), and I need to work, so will sign off for now.