The next few quilts that I made, that were not for babies, were inspired by a workshop at Quilting By The Lake (when it was on the Cazenovia College campus in the early 80’s) led by Terrie Mangat, and looking at her website now, I am still very inspired. She used repeat images, appliqué and reverse-applique, where the top fabric is turned under to “reveal” the fabric underneath, as in the designs of the San Blas Island people, which were rare and excitingly different from traditional American techniques. She also used buttons and beads and embellishments on her quilts to liven them up.

The first of these was “Diaper Days” which began with the repeated image of a silhouette of my then-toddler son Peter. There were three of him in the foreground of the piece, and one of them had a thought-bubble containing a potty. Diaper pins were another repeat-image in the border, and a free-hanging laundry-line was strung across the piece, on which about 15 tiny diapers were hung with tiny clothespins, on the line. I made the tiny diapers out of a whole one, cut up and stitched to look like the big ones. There was a store in N. Syracuse with a wonderful collection of “findings” and tiny plastic things in bins that were also inspiring. Tiny baby bottles, tiny clothespins, tiny diaper pins, and other “charms” that were attached to the surface after quilting it.

I’m sure that it was the bins of objects that helped to inspire the next quilt which was called “Kid Clutter”. Both of these quilts helped me to manage and find humor in some of the more tedious aspects of having small children; diapers (I figured out that each child required about 10,000 diapers) and chaos of mess on the floor; food scraps, parts of toys, random objects of clothing and the like. I remember thinking that after finally becoming adult, having my own house and table to keep nice, now it was a constant struggle to maintain it; the candlesticks on the table, and flowers, for example, with everything under the sun constantly spread out on the floor beneath. The repeated images in this piece, were mittens, apple cores, and slices of cantaloupe with bite-marks out of them, and the piece is embellished with tiny toys.

I was often asked, in those days, to “show and tell” about my quilts at my kid’s schools. The children enjoyed looking at this quite quilt a lot, and always wanted to play with the little toys.

The third quilt in this group of picture quilts is “Heavenly Bodies” which is a depiction of our solar system; not an easy task if one is trying to be accurate to any sense of scale. Rather than make a 20 foot by 2 inch quilt, I opted for poetic license, and tried to make the planets somewhat to scale relative to one another (still woefully inaccurate) and put them in a reasonable frame. I used buttons and beads to illustrate the Kuiper Belt, which might have been a tenth planet between Mars and Jupiter, and yes, I still call Pluto a planet! I was enjoying revisiting earth and planetary science which had so fascinated my in elementary school, and was still a hit with my children in theirs, by adding all the known moons of the planets; many of which were not known, or taught when I was first learning about them.

For the Earth, I used a Marimekko remnant which has particular resonance for me because I bought the piece myself, when I was 15, with my father, visiting Finland and specifically, the Marimekko factory. More to follow in next post.

Picture Quilts

Woodbine Medallion

Woodbine Cottage Quilt