“C” is for cut squares, not cat

Diane  On the Alberta/Montana border wondered if Toby filed himself in the “C” drawer, and then she wrote a wonderful post about her father leaving the cookies under “O” for Oreo in his filing system, but looking for them under “C” for cookie.   My “C” drawer is refilling itself, so there will be more quilts.

Thanks to everyone for the kind words about Jan’s project to fill the world with quilts.  Here’s the story.  Although not officially diagnosed, I admit to a touch of obsessive.  Or is it compulsive.  Whichever, it keeps me doing “something.”  Jan is an artist and I have no idea what keeps her cutting fabric into little bits and sewing them together a new way.   

We quit weaving in 2003 and by 2004 Jan was quilting full time and I transitioned to my elected position with no authority in my township.  Most days of the month I’m out of the office by noon. For several years  I spun and knit, for a local gallery, until they closed.  Then I walked into the studio and discovered those tubs of fabric scraps that quilters can’t throw away.  I immediately devised a plan to work them off and made steady progress at those scrappy blocks until Jan’s customers began dropping their scraps behind my chair and stealing away.  Like a bag I had over looked.  Just like Topsy, it grew.

We learned about keeping busy from our mom, who always had something going on.  Quilting, needlework, canning, gardening.  She was seventy when we moved here, and after the bustle of putting things away she was out of projects at hand.  She walked right into the studio and said “Teach me to weave.”  We did. 

All my life Mom quietly demonstrated the wider purpose of doing.  When I babysat a little girl down the street Mom had me take her downtown and buy school shoes and a coat.  When the church needed a piano, they got hers.   I read the genealogical letter Mom wrote for my daughter’s research, and Mom learned by example.  She said about her father, He never was much of a church goer, but, theBroadview Baptist Church and everyone around him benefitted from his generosity.  No one in the neighborhood went hungry.  He was most happy when everyone around him finally recovered from the depression and got off WPA.

And I learned from my Grandma Rolf, Mom’s mother.  I spent time with her when I was  young, and we rode the trolley from West 25^th street to meetings of rooms full of ladies.  They cut and sewed  piles of clothes, while I sat on a chair and ate cake or slept in a corner.  It may have been the Broadview Baptist Church.  It probably was clothing to be donated.  I remember entering the room once, about five years old.  The ladies already there were quite dismayed.  My grandmother let go my hand, looked around, took a deep breath and said “Pull up your corset strings ladies, we have work to do.”

Some people write books.  Some people build skyscrapers.  Some people create art.  Some people sew five inch squares together. As long as Jan has guild friends who need to clear their stashes, the “C” drawer will be in business. 

OMG

Jan just got in from her guild meeting tonight.  This is a group of long arm quilters, mostly newbies, who started up a year ago and meet to exchange knowledge.  They asked Jan to help them start the guild and hoped she’d hang around and lend her business and long arm expertise.  As usual, Jan’s having too much fun to leave.

Tonight she took all those quilts in the last post to Karen, the liaison to TLC, the home for the quilts.  This guild meets in Karen’s quilt shop, so all the quilts were held up and admired again.  Then Karen told the group how Jan had approached her to make quilts for TLC and expanded the offer from crib size to bed size, and these were the bed sized quilts.  Then Jan explained how her sister had made 188 crib size quilt tops to be turned into charity quilts, and she had about 80 of them quilted.  Then Karen presented Jan with these five inch squares to go behind my chair.

Then Jan pulled up Cup on the Bus and everyone gathered around and read the last post.  They all looked at the empty drawer full of kitty.  Then everyone present said they would bring another 100 five inch blocks to the next meeting to go behind my chair.  And other long arm ladies said bring some of those tops that still need quilted, we’ll do them.  Can you believe it?

TLC

My sister’s new quilt donation project is Transitional Living Center, actually two group homes in Medina County.  They house ninety six severely and profoundly mentally retarded adults.  I don’t want to imagine being the caregiver there, the pain and the joy, day in, day out, a career that probably does not span the life of one of the residents.  What comfort the homes must bring to relatives who remain involved with their children or siblings in the homes.

I just finished quilt top 188 for Jan’s original Pregnancy Care project.  She has “contained the chaos” and finished out six of them into twin bed size to go to TLC, plus one she made.  Three have gone.  She just finished binding  one last night.  I’m almost sorry my hands can no longer control a needle enough to help with the finish needle work.  Almost.  I can still wield knitting needles.  And type.

Jan came back from a guild meeting last week with more donated fabric for the quilts. Apparently this job will never go away. That’s fine. Work is a blessing. Here are the TLC quilts completed.

This drawer used to be filled front to back, top to bottom with five inch squares.  Now a resourceful cat can pull it open and get it.  Not because he needs to, but because he wants to.

Since the containing chaos project is slowing, I’m taking some time to put together a quilt for Caroline, for her new bedroom.  Carol’s bear is guarding the blocks,  paper pieced snowflakes. There will be lots of sashings, but no borders!

Containing the chaos

One hundred eighty odd quilt tops (just crib sized tops!), I am down to the dregs in my drawer and no scraps have been quietly abandoned behind my chair.  Now that I am so close to scrap eradication, I can divulge my secret.  Jan told people I had a secret formula for assembling the colors.  Here it is.  Lay out thirteen piles of five inch squares.  Use one square from each pile.  When one pile is gone, replace it with another.  Genius, eh?

She laid out the latest twin size quilt using one of the crib size centers and said she just loved how the borders contain the chaos.  How apt.  Look at all the pin wheels blowing the chaos back, and a sturdy brown fence around the pin wheels.  Now we need a plan to contain world chaos.

Quilted and ready to be trimmed.

Containing the chair.

Over the top

When Jan came back from hauling the latest stack of charityquilts to the distribution committee of her guild she was upset.  Seventy five baby quilts have gone to Pregnancy Care, and she wanted to start the stream back up for Ronald McDonald House.  She found the Ronald McDonald coordinator and was told No, enough had already been done for them.  Jan was so angry she turned and left the meeting.  In the parking lot she met the Pregnancy Care coordinator, who, of course, was happy to take more quilts for little babies.  But Jan came home to do a re-think.

She put the question out to her large quilting network, do you know a volunteer agency that could use quilts?  You can guess the response.  She met with a quilt shop owner who coordinates a homeless outreach program in another county.  Jan showed some crib quilts, which were happily accepted.  But Jan pressed.  Couldn’t you really use larger quilts?  Twin size, for instance?    Of course, but it was so much to ask, and she had never had a guild commit to that size.  She found she hadn’t asked the sister whose sister is committed to scrap eradication. Whose sister is committed to giving back.

I stayed in my corner, sewing those squares, completely unaware of Jan’s new crusade to place quilts.  That’s what I do best, and the drawer of squares got further ahead of me over the holidays.  I was sewing, but our guests were hanging out in the studio cutting.  Sigh.  It never goes away.  And I’m up to 175 crib size tops!

When Jan outlined our new project I thought I could help by using more five inch squares in one top.  I gave that up quickly, for two good reasons.  It increased the number of five inch squares from 117 to 180.  That doesn’t sound so radical, but for me it was a quantum leap in coordinating odd colors.  More important, it isn’t Jan’s style of quilt.  Now, I like borderless quilts—the blocks just run out to the end.  She likes borders.  Can’t have too many.  Flying geese.  Half square triangles.  She has any number of pattern names she uses for borders.  My limit would be my favorite, scrappy, and I’ve done those.  But apparently she has even more scraps stashed in her corner and is compelled to turn them into complicated borders.

She told me she intended to take some of my “more interesting” little tops and add borders to bring them up to twin bed size.  The first two went by me so fast I missed taking pictures.  Here’s the one she just finished.  How cool is this.  I think some kid will like it.

At the end of my resume….

My sister is the last gainfully employed person in this house.   Her husband is retired and putters in the yard.  I’m retired and putter in government, until someone runs against me some election and I’m turned out.  She runs a quilting business.

Jan and I actually retired at the same time, me altogether and Jan because she was done weaving.  Just like that.  Digital.  She went quilting.  We were weaving all around her in the studio and she was sewing little squares on the sewing machine and quilting little quilts on a pretty little frame.  She came home from a quilting show and said there was a big machine there but she stayed well back so she wouldn’t swoon.   “Just buy the damn thing, we’ll figure it out.”  We had to sell three looms to make space for the Gammill.

Jan is an award winning quilter in this amazing art form. 

Some of her ribbons.  Transparency woven by Taria Kubini.

The studio is lined in quilts.

Actually, she no longer enters shows.  She realized her customers were not entering shows with quilts she had quilted for them because they could not compete against her quilts and quilting.  Now the customers win the ribbons, which is perfectly all right with Jan.  She has moved on to being an organizer of a teaching venue for quilters, QuiltingwithMachines.

 (In the event I never mentioned it, she is the right brain, I’m the left in our long business partnership.) 

The looms and weaving equipment were sold, the studio gradually filled up with quilting paraphernalia, and she set about establishing a customer base for her new art.   I was busy figuring out how to make my little chunk of government more effective, and really didn’t get far into the studio.  But when I did, holy cow.  When we were weavers either one of us could say “It’s only thread” and put a failed warp straight in the trash.  Apparently quilters are not able to do that.  There were bins and bins of scraps.  Apparently you never know when you will need to root through five pounds of scraps to find the perfect one inch square.

“What are you going to do with all this,” I asked one day.  Well, sometimes she used them for scrappy borders and she was thinking of a scrappy quilt in her spare time.  These are rudimentary paper piecing techniques, I learned.  Well, any fool can sew fabric to paper.  I commandeered a scrap bucket, reduced a phone book of pages to squares by the time honored method of folding on the diagonal and cutting off the excess.  When a page is covered with sewn on scraps it gets a final press and trim to the proper size.

Behind my sewing machine a quilt from odd sizes and colors.

A phone book or so later I still couldn’t stand the chaos of either the mix of colors or the mix of strip sizes (oh, be still left brain!).  So, I sorted it all by color into drawers and cut everything into one and one half inch strips.  And kept on sewing. 

Proper sizes and colors for a scrappy quilt, thank you very much!

 Both my daughters and all my grandchildren got quilts for Christmas that year.  My friend Ann has a pile of quilts that she graciously continues to accept. But the scraps never went away.  Jan’s customers would leave the studio and I would find a bag of their scraps discretely abandoned behind my chair.  One time I was so frustrated with my inability to tame the scraps that I went drawer by drawer and sewed all those strips end to end (yea, just like denim!), packed them into half a dozen thirty gallon garbage bags and hauled them off to Linda, who wove them right into rugs that now live on floors.  I had done it; the scraps were gone!  I returned to a new load of stash culling by a dear customer.  Sigh.

About a year and a half ago Jan asked me to help her figure out how to maintain her profit if she offered customers some discount on their regular quilting for every baby quilt they gave her to quilt for charity.  Now, Jan has done acres of charity quilting.  Quilts for soldiers, quilts for schools, quilts for orphans, all done by various guilds as projects.   But this was a personal challenge.  One of her guilds had asked the members to each produce one charity quilt over the course of the year for Ronald McDonald House or Pregnancy Care.  One year later one quilt had been turned in—Jan’s.  Fine.  Apparently it was down to her.

People being the busy folks they are, I doubted she’d get much for her offer.  With a gleam in my eye, I also saw a way to get rid of those pesky scraps.  To hell with asking people, if she was willing to keep on backing and quilting them, any fool could sew five inch blocks together.

Well, I’m ahead of her.  I’m closing in on quilt 150 and she has quilted and bound about half of them.  Pregnancy Care got the first fifty and Ronald McDonald House will get the next fifty.  And, you guessed right—bags of fabric continue to be abandoned in the studio.  It’s a good thing—those little suckers eat it up.

The left brain has to know this stuff.

 Good quarter inch seams + good pressing = good quilt.

More to press behind the iron.

A tub of pressed tops.

Another tub of pressed tops, and a tub of backings.

Quilted and bound, Jan will fell the binding soon.  Nice red flannel back.

Another stack for McDonald House.