Quilters Relish Their Artwork, Piece By Piece Women Of All Ages Fill This Guild With Generations Of Talent
The 75 women in the Colville Piecemakers Quilt Guild are used to foolish questions.
Questions about why anyone would want to whack a perfectly good piece of fabric into little pieces and then put it back together at enormous effort. Or what good is a blanket that’s so valuable you can’t sit on it?
“My husband says that all the time,” Mary Andres said with a chuckle.
The proper thing to ask a quilter, she explained patiently, is to see her “stash.”
Every quilter has a stash, it seems. It’s a trove of fabric for future projects. Collecting it is supposed to be about as much fun as whacking it up and putting it back together.
Unused pizza boxes are great for storing stash, Anne Morton said.
It’s difficult to understand how anything without a motor could be that much fun, but about 55 women braved ice-coated roads to attend the guild meeting earlier this month. They even endured a Chamber of Commerce-style business session to make plans for the 3-year-old club’s first public quilt show in September.
Then the fun began. The group presented a large quilt its members made for the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity.
The quilt will be first prize in the Habitat Hoopla fund-raising raffle March 2. An indication of the quilt’s value: second prize is $100.
Piecemakers like to hand out recipes, too.
Robbie Griggs said her sauerkraut salad “sounds absolutely awful, but it’s wonderful. You’ll like it.” Several people said Griggs wasn’t exaggerating.
Show-and-tell also is popular. Members line up to show their latest projects, many of them still in progress.
Terry Husby’s richly detailed rendering of a Victorian mansion drew a chorus of “oooohs” and left no doubt that quilting is an art.
No one is excused from show-and-tell.
Slumped in the far corner, trying to amuse himself with a Game Boy, 16-year-old B.J. Hysom didn’t seem to be paying attention. His mother needed help hauling some boxes and was holding him hostage.
Although there are no men among the Piecemakers, quilting is not exclusively for women. President Bunny St. Clair said there were several men in the guild she used to belong to at Anacortes, Wash. But that group lacked the Piecemakers’ half-dozen or so teenagers.
The Piecemakers are mostly middle-aged, but range from 13-year-old Jessica Conowitch to 85-year-old Irene Miller. Many are working women.
Heather Miller, 18, thinks quilting is exciting: “It’s an art form that’s growing anew. It’s a connection to the past and yet it’s growing…”
Miller also used to attend Colville’s Quilters Too group, which meets during the day to work on quilts. Quilters Too is an older organization, but much smaller.
This month, Piecemakers member Rosalie Schwartz taught how to make a variety of Christmas ornaments that could be sold at the group’s quilt show this fall.
“Put buttons on them,” she advised. “Buttons are the real up-and-coming thing.”
In quilting, too, the Piecemakers blend new ideas with old.
The small blocks they assemble into quilts often are based on patterns so old they don’t know the origin. Take, for example, the star-like Tippecanoe design. It apparently has something to do with an 1811 battle that, when put to music, helped get William Harrison elected president in 1840.
New or old, though, all of the patterns are subject to personal interpretation. Quilters express themselves through their choice of color and the details with which they embellish a pattern.
St. Clair asked for bunny squares in the group’s “bag lady” exchange program. She got Picasso-like stylized rabbits, embroidered rabbits and even one with floppy ears that dangle off the fabric.
Mary Andres works bugs into everything she does, sort of like Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo appearances in his movies. Her husband, former Stevens County Sheriff Dick Andres, runs an extermination service.
A prolific quilter, Andres has even made quilts for her cats. She believes in using quilts even though some of them require hundreds of hours of work and sell for hundreds of dollars.
“I don’t see any sense in having them if you don’t use them,” she said. “If you put them in a trunk, the beauty is lost.”
Heather Miller agreed: “Quilting is the only art form that you can wrap other people up in your love with.”
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