Sew and Tell

               My eyes swept slowly over the pink, burgundy, brown, and green squares looking for loose threads that needed to be clipped. The quilting on it didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped, but it’s finally finished (I’d started making it in 2006). And, I am pleased with the piecing and overall look. The colors and blocks play well together. The zig-zagged brown border, representing a garden wall, was something I’d never tried before. With every quilt, I try to learn a new technique. I folded it up carefully, and went to get the other quilt.

               It was hanging on the wall of our stairwell. I used a broom to snag it, balancing it precariously as I pulled it down. It’s a cheerful blue and yellow quilt that I pieced one block at a time each month of 2004 for Pacific Fabrics’ block of the month club. I expanded it to fit a queen-sized bed, making two of some blocks, and adding solid blue blocks between the original 12. The “new” techniques I tried on this quilt were machine appliqué, and dimensional touches on the flowers and butterflies. Once I finished the top, it sat folded up for years, waiting to be quilted because quilting such a large quilt on a home machine is difficult.

              This summer I finally turned both of these queen-sized quilt tops into quilts, sandwiching them with batting and backs. I rented time on a longarm quilting machine at Trains, Fabrics, Etc. quilt shop in Tacoma and made a major dent in my stack of unfinished projects.

               This afternoon, I walked through the Gold Gate of the Puyallup Fair holding both quilts. Upstairs in the Pavilion, I filled out the paperwork to enter both of them, and glowed a little when the two ladies checking them in ooohed and aahhed over them. They joined the stacks of quilts that will soon be hanging for thousands to admire.

Another quilter and I rode the elevator downstairs and walked out through the dark, empty, cabinets strewn around the ground floor. We marveled over the way the fair is magically transformed each year from the haphazard skeleton that we were seeing, to the carefully arranged exhibits that we know we will see when it opens. Of course, we’ve both seen something similar before when we’ve taken hundreds of tiny squares of fabric and sewn them into beautiful quilts, each with its own personality.

We agreed that we weren’t entering our quilts expecting to win (although that would be great), but just to see them hanging in the fair, and to be able to tell our friends to go and see them. Nevertheless, as we walked back out through the gate and parted ways, we wished each other, “Good luck!”