QUILTERS

A tumble of brightly colored fabrics, dazzling and disorganized. The proposed picture being created involves the wide-open beaks of 3 or 4 nestlings, yelling for food. The vivid red printed fabrics are for the insides of their tiny mouths and the yellows are for their growing beaks. Most of the rest of the picture is the brown nest and undistinguished surrounds. The quilter tells me there will be magentas and purples in the surrounds, especially purples.

Quilters’ fabrics are usually prints or batiks. The trick seems to be to represent one medium, photos or paintings in another—the printed fabrics of seamstresses. The art is in the transformation, and the creativity of achieving this transformation, thus adding something more.

Quilters can take a year to finish a quilt. Either they can quilt a traditional pattern that hearkens back to early settlers of North America, especially those who quilted to help pass long cold winters when the world shuts down and every living thing rests. Others go for creative representations of nature, people, buildings, events and even more esoteric topics.

These quilters on Madeline Island School of the Arts are doing the representational type of quilting.  As I stroll through their classroom I see mostly bird designs, one crab, flowers, and a significant event of a newly married couple standing on either side of the Kenyan equatorial line. He is in the Northern Hemisphere and she is in the Southern Hemisphere, and they are kissing. ‘This was 30 years ago,’ says the quilter, ‘and I’ve always wanted to recreate this scene in a quilt to hang in my house. Now that our kids are grown and I’ve got an empty nest, I’m doing it at last.’ She smiles with the happy memory of her honeymoon in Kenya.

There is a quiet chatter amongst the quilters, who are mostly on task. They are trying different colors against their schematic maps, ironing fabric fragments, pinning pieces in place, grabbing an occasional drink, and a creativity-sustaining chocolate chip cookie.

I notice that some quilters keep their fabrics in tidy piles, folded, and sorted by color. I return to see the nestlings. The quilter is not at her table. The jumbled fabrics are more jumbled than before. This woman is dynamic and diversified. Out of the apparent chaos will come a beautiful quilt, I am sure of it, but just now it looks like the tangled fabrics might have defeated the quilter, who has walked away to recover her calm.

Sensitivity, creativity, perseverance, accuracy, and gentleness seem to be the hallmarks of these artists, some of whom are men. Quilting is not my medium – it takes too long, requires too much patience, too much planning, and paying painstaking attention to detail. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate this art form and the people who practice it.