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The Practical Art of Quilting

By Kris Grant

Back in the days of a young America, when bolts of fabric were hard to come by but a pioneering spirit prevailed, the ladies of the time found a way to combine sociability with practicality.

They got together to quilt.

By necessity, recycling was in vogue in those days, and the gals would save scraps of clothing — garments that the youngsters outgrew and pieces of trousers after the knees had worn through — and reassemble these odds ’n ends into creative patterns. They’d sew strips of cloth into blocks and designs that resulted in new tapestries, new pieces of art.

Then they added function to that art with a layer of “batting” and a backing material. Sewing the three pieces together, often in patterned designs was then, and is now, called “quilting.” And those quilted pieces, used as bed covers and throws for the most part, took the chill off many a winter night.

Quilting is enjoying a renaissance throughout the nation; you’ll find quilting guilds, quilting fabric shops, quilting classes and quilting TV shows by the dozens in San Diego County.

And quilting is beginning to be appreciated for its artistry alone: through the end of this month Coronado’s Museum of History and Art presents “The Fiber of Coronado,” a show sponsored by Quilt San Diego/Quilt Visions, a San Diego-based nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion and appreciation of the quilt as art. The group puts on a juried international quilt show biannually. The Coronado show features art quilts of our city ranging in size from just six inches by nine inches to 38 inches by 30 inches in the museum gallery. Larger entries are displayed at other venues throughout town (pick up the guide at the museum).

You’ll find quilts of the Coronado bridge, the Hotel Del Coronado, the passion for gardening, sailing and the seashore.

Coronado quilting aficionados are downright devoted to the pastime. Just ask any of the ladies of the “Do Drop In” quilting club.

The informal club, which has no dues, officers or formal membership requirements, instead encourages anyone who likes to thread a needle to “do drop in” at their meetings held the first Wednesday of each month. Locations rotate among the sort-of-members homes, and a recent meeting was held at “Quilting by the Sea,” Diane Shaffer’s new quilting home business located on Orange Avenue.

The Do Drop In group is a new incarnation of a traditional quilting bee. In the olden days, all quilting work was done by hand, with the most high-tech gadgets being a pair of scissors, needle and thread. Yes, Elias Howe invented the sewing machine in 1846, and that speeded things up a little, if you were one of the lucky (and rich) ladies to own one of the newfangled machines. But during the Westward Movement, those machines were few and far between. For the most part quilting was hand work.

To take the tedium out of the stitchery, ladies would join up for quilting bees, get-togethers where six or eight gals would sit in a circle, grab a piece of the quilt, stitch and gab away. Not only did the work go faster, the bees became the backdrop for social repartee.

Today, at the Do Drop In, ladies continue to get together, not to stitch but to chat, mostly about quilting. But also about crocheting and other needlework, and to show-and-tell their works-in-progress and finished works of art. And, truth be told, the chitchat often veers in many directions, wandering to kids and travels, recipes and the local social scene.

Shaffer picked up the quilting bug a year ago, after enrolling in THE adult education quilting class taught by Shannon Player.

“Quilting is absolutely addictive,” Shaffer said. “Ninety-nine percent of people who start quilting get hooked. What attracts me are the choices of fabrics; simple fabrics, but when you combine them in patterns, the
resulting tapestries are fabulous.”

When it came time to bind her quilt (sewing the three layers of material together), Shaffer decided she wanted to do it herself, but not by hand stitching; by binding it on a long-arm quilting machine. Two problems: the machines cost $20,000 and they basically require the same footprint as a pool table. That single quilt was getting to be a mighty expensive do-it-yourself proposition, but Shaffer convinced her very understanding hubby that she could simply take in other quilts to cover the cost. Of course, there was the question of where to place the behemoth, especially since the Shaffers live on a boat.

Okay, it’s a yacht. A 3-bedroom/3-bath yacht, and Diane swears she and her very understanding husband and two boys could have accommodated the long-arm on the long boat, but it would have been inconvenient (Ya think?). But to serve her customers, Shaffer found the perfect “second home” for lease on Orange Avenue, complete with a Batchelder fireplace in the living room, which the Do-Drop-In quilters enjoyed immensely when their klatch met there on a chilly night in December.

Because she operates a home-based business, Shaffer is not allowed to put signage on her front door. No problem, as the pastel-quilt-painted door told club members “this must be the place.”

Coronado native Cathy Hewitt is the mainstay of the Do Drop group. Hewitt has been sewing “my entire life,” but didn’t take up quilting until a former neighbor, since transferred to Guam (Navy, you know), invited her to an evening quilting social about three years ago. Since that time, she’s made a dozen quilts, some throw-size for sofa backs, some for beds.

“I’ve made two Fourth of July quilts, one quilt each for my boys — one’s in college and the other lives in Mission Bay — a Christmas quilt with appliqués, and now I’m working on a Halloween quilt,” Hewitt
recounted.

Do-Dropper Sally Inglis said she was introduced to quilting shortly after arriving from Australia for an extended stay.

“In August of 2001 we met and decided to do red-white-and-blue quilts,” Inglis said. “Even though we all used the same pattern, they all turned out differently. We chose to do ‘sampler’ quilts, where each block has a different pattern. Look, this is called ‘puss in the corner,’ and this is ‘true lovers knot’ and I really like this
one, ‘strength in union.’”

“The following month was 9-11, so our choice of colors was even more appropriate,” Hewitt reminded her.

“In Australia, I do ceramics and paint, but my quilt is my American thing, my memory of my first visit
of America to take back home,” Inglis said.

Memories. You’ll find a lot of them sewn into every quilt.

For each phase of her son Sam’s life, Camille Butler has made him quilts: a crib-set of pastel purples, greens and yellow fish; for his preschool years, a dinosaur quilt in all primary colors, and a current “outer space,” quilt with colors of deep blues. As she quilts, she saves scraps for the ultimate memory quilt she’ll give Sam as an adult.

For her son Thomas, Inglis recently made a Buzz Lightyear quilt. “He chose all the colors and he was only four,” said the proud mom. “He had his ‘good pile,’ his ‘don’t want’ pile and his ‘maybe’ pile, then he went back and made his final selections.”

Heavy sigh from mom. “Of course, when the quilt was made, after three minutes he turns it over to the backside because he only wants to look at Buzz Lightyear.”

Quilts not only evoke memories of the fabrics that go into them, but recall times and events when they were made.

“That’s my ‘sniper’ quilt,” said Hewitt. “I was visiting my girlfriend in Washington, DC at the time the sniper was on the loose there. We were afraid to go outside so we stayed inside and quilted up a storm.”

Quilts make memorable gifts as well. Butler and fellow quilter Jane Fletcher gave former Village School 1st-grade teacher Mrs. Date the ultimate retirement gift.

“She was fantastic teaching the kids art,” Butler said. “So we assigned each of the kids in her class a square and had them paint flowers in a Georgia O’Keefe-type motif and sign their names. Then I found a Monet-type fabric to tie all the squares together.”

Two years ago quilter Kathy Barker made a T-shirt quilt for her niece,
cutting out the fronts and backs of T-shirts from the teen’s collection of flag team, class and other event-type T-shirts, then uniting them with a bright border.

“It represented her entire high school life,” Barker said.

Like Butler, Joy Rottenstein learned to quilt by enrolling in Shannon Players’ quilting class at Coronado Adult Ed. A seasonal visitor to Coronado, Rottenstein had previously enrolled in a sewing class in her native Chicago.

“I failed,” she said. “It just wasn’t enjoyable so I didn’t stay with it.”

But when Rottenstein arrived in Coronado (which she calls “heaven but you don’t have to die to go there”) for a six-month stay, she stopped in at Fabrication at 1136 Loma Ave., the tiny fabric, sewing and gift shop that’s packed with charm and ideas. Owner Robbins Crehore Kelly directed her to Players’ quilting class. That was a year ago and now Rottenstein has completed 10 quilts. Yes, 10 in one year.

“If you don’t have little critters pulling at your apron strings, you just keep going,” Rottenstein said. “You know what the beauty of it is? You’re watching something grow.”

Rottenstein said that an unexpected pleasure comes with quilting: “It’s a sisterhood,” she said looking about the room. “Everyone helps everyone else.” Can working women find time to quilt? By day, Leanne Cook is a management analyst for US Air Force Pacific where her days are indeed hectic, she said.

“I found when I came home to my sewing machine, my mind could rest and just my hands would move,” Cook explained. “I’d set a goal to do two or four squares in a night and I found it relaxing. I’d keep going and going and going and then I’d be done. And I really like fabrics, the colors, the patterns and being able to do your own interpretation of a theme.”

Cook, a native Hawaiian, was, you guessed it, another student who enrolled in Players’ popular class and is nearing completion of her second quilt, this one a crazy-quilt pattern. It incorporates nine fabrics reminiscent of the ‘60s and Cook’s Oahu island roots: there are koi, origami birds, woodies, longboards, sushi, sake and
a fabric with an island boy and his girlfriend under a palm tree with Diamondhead in the background. And there’s a pattern that depicts Cal Rose rice bags, which Cook said was a real find.

“Our rice always came in these bags with the stork on it, and that pattern really takes me back.” The quilt will be a gift to husband George, her “aging beach boy,” she laughed.

Cook’s log cabin quilt, titled “Kuu Home O Kolonako;” Hawaiian for “My home in Coronado,” is in rich gold and reds and was recently displayed in the window of Coronado Floor & Window.

Cook will have her quilt quilted at Shaffer’s where she’ll be able to choose from dozens of design patterns that include stars, seashells, flowers, diamonds and figure eights, then put the binding on herself via machine.

For their log cabin quilts, students learn to choose six dark fabrics and six light ones and then lay increasingly longer strips into squares. “It’s a fun basic design that no one ever grows tired of,” said Player.

Today, Player said, very few quilters hand-stitch.

“To me, the creative part is choosing the fabrics and how they all come together,” she said. “That’s where the artistry comes in. I’d be way too impatient to hand-stitch everything.”

Quilters tote bags of material to class that they cut into strips with another highly coveted newfangled invention; the rotary cutter, which operates like a pizza cutter. And each brings her own sewing machine. An oldie-but-goodie machine favored by the quilting set is the solidly built black Singer Featherweight, first manufactured in the 1940s and 1950s. The crème de la crème is the Bernini.

“My friends told me to get a Bernini,” said Rottenstein. “But I don’t think I deserve one yet. I’ve got a Singer and besides, those Berninis have too many bells and whistles for my taste.”

Once a week they strip, they iron, they sew, always being careful to get that exact quarter-inch seam.

Player has accumulated dozens of quilts around her petite home and is toying with the idea of maybe selling a few.

“It’s tough though, because you never get the money out of them that reflects the time you put into them,” said Player. “Just selecting fabrics takes hours. But I may part with some to a few good homes.”

Hewitt said she keeps her quilts folded up and displays them with the seasons.

“No,” she said, “I just don’t think I could ever sell my quilts. Too many memories, you know.”


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Reprinted with permission from Coronado Lifestyle, "the little magazine with the BIG impact."
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