log cabin check mate quilt 1994

This quilt had a lot of signifcance for me in 1994, as I decided on the layout of the blocks. To me one of the great things about quilting is how you can change the look of a quilt by taking the same block and putting it in various places. This quilt was the SAME size as my first one for Mindy in the class had been, but as you can see it takes on the form of giant check marks just by the arrangement of the lights and darks in this Log cabin block. I didn't want to struggle again with how to do the borders and knew there was a different way to do them, but I just couldn't remember what it was. So I asked another friend and my mother how to do the borders the 'old way'. I was told to add them to the quilt BEFORE the full qulting process and for me that has been a much easier way to go.
Sometimes with brain damage or with anyone, we each have our own way of learning things and once we find what works to unlock our minds and memories its a great thing to hold on to. For me the way of doing the borders and THEN quilting by machine or hand tying made all of the difference to my learning curve. The summer of 1994 after my youngest daughter's 10th birthday, my oldest daughter (who was 17) and I flew out to the east coast to see her dad and check out colleges for her to attend after her high school graduation in 1995. It had been a fun time for us to get to see her dad, step mom and half sisters again. On this trip we stopped in at an Amish farm house and I found a beautiful Amish quilt in maroon, teal and dusty blue on a black background that followed me home. That quilt in the Dahlia pattern became the master bedroom quilt. So when I was picking colors for the sitting room in our bedroom, for this day bed quilt, that was where I took my inspiration. I wish I'd had the foresight to have bought extra of THE AMISH fabrics, but I just didn't think that far ahead. At any rate once home and both girls were back in school, I started working on this twin quilt. The blocks started to come easier for me as I had so much repetition. I knew I didn't want to do the ;fields and furrows; layout again.
I'd had a conversation with my husband during the time I was making this quilt and I knew he was ready to take his wishesthat he'd spoken to me in 1989, when he told me this was too difficult for him to stay with us and other things came to light as well that were very hard for me to hear. So when I got to the point of placing the blocks to make a design from the lights and darks.... the giant check mark seemed to fit my mood of the moment.
This quilt became my 'check mate' quilt and did indeed go onto the day bed in our room. It was a sad time for me but at the same time I truly understood and I was happy that he felt I was getting well enough he COULD bail and be ok with leaving me to raise the kids. I didn't hold any ill will toward him or my situation but instead embraced it and kept working even harder to be the best I could be.
We had married in 83 and in 87 when my disability hit, I guess it was just too soon in such a young marriage. It was kind of funny though because I began to gather more strength of purpose, stubborness to succed, and my sense of humor really got the best of me with my addlepated mind, because every time I'd walk into our bedroom and see this finished check mate quilt, I would get a smile on my face and think to myself how truly blessed I had been these 7 years. My husband had stood by me and helped me with the kids, along with an army of others who as I got better each year would fall by the wayside and let me take on more of my own mothering and being a wife. So many things were still really hard for me but TRULY I FELT BLESSED that I had come so far! Life was handing me lemons, so I made lemonade and shared it with my friends. I don't drink the stuff, but we sure had good talks over the drinking of the stuff anyway.
I have always been blessed with an abundance of positive thinking and optimism, no matter what my circumstances were, and this was just one more hurdle I had to prove to myself I could overcome. My girls were the greatest kids a mom could have, and while we weren't problem free, we were a family of girls who knew we had love and would get through things, one day at a time, piece by piece, when we let love keep us going. WE knew it had to get better and we would find peace at some point. IT was a VERY hard time of our lives, but at the same time I am sure it wasn't as hard as the last 7 years had been on my girls. Unfortunately with my memory problems as it was back then I wouldn't know how bad it was, if not for the diaries I worked to write in and kept. I'm just glad my girls didn't disown me along the way lol ... and happy we DID have each other.
It is now 2010 and I don't know what happened to this quilt... but I think I gave it to the homeless or something once I no longer needed, nor wanted it around. But again I was happy because this quilt I FINISHED ON MY OWN. NOW I felt ready for whatever came next and was looking forward to my next class.

1st class 1994- log cabin pattern

This is the first quilt I made in a class after my brain damage and disability hit. The gal who taught it worked with disabled and brain injury people as part of their therapy. Elaine was the mom of the manager at the fabric store I always loved shopping at, so this worked well for me. Lauren (the store manager of Hancocks) had told me her mom would be in town and teaching numerous classes so why not try taking a class from her in hopes it would set my mind free in my learning and then I'd be able to quilt more on my own. It was suggested that I make a LOG CABIN quilt because there is a lot of repetition and its a good place to start. So that was the plan. My youngest daughter's 10th birthday was coming up in July so I figured I'd let her pick the fabrics for this quilt and I would give it to her for her birthday. There are bits and pieces of the memory I have lost about this process but I do know it was fun getting my daughter involved along the way. We'd bought the new house in March of 1993, and this was the following spring 1994.
My daughter walked through the whole fabric store of cotton fabrics and then went back and started pulling out 3 fabrics she really liked. I'm glad I was getting my patience back because this was a long process that day. Both of us though really enjoyed fabric stores so it was a good day, and SO fun to watch her eyes light up when she found cool fabrics.
This quilt (Elenor Burns Quilt in a Day LOG Cabin) required 3 darks, 3 lights, a center and 3 border fabrics. Mindy had scored a dark blue background fabric with blues, pink, purples with a bit of light teal in it as one of her fabrics, then she'd found a print that was a medium shade with those colors in it on a white background,and the dark purple. We spent another hour or so there while she continued putting her fabrics together. I marveled at her good color eye and for design. She knew what she liked and it was going to be a beautiful quilt IF I could figure this 'strip quilting' out. Because of this quilt being a twin sized, the layout was going to be 'fields and furrows', like a garden is planted. With these pictures you can see that is what it looks like. The pictures here are of this quilt finished, and a close up of one block so you can see her fabric choices.
This class was supposed to take 3 weeks of coming 2 times a week for 3 hours each class. My brain could only process for about an hour before I had to give up. I did some of the stuff at home in between the classes but it was a really HARD process for me this first time and certainly NOT the ZEN relaxing activity it NOW is for me!I did manage to get the 15 blocks done in the 3 week period BUT the quilting process by machine and those border techniques just confused me!Luckily for me Elaine was here longer and she worked with me for another couple weeks to get me learning how to do the machine quilting and borders done. HOWEVER the way she did the borders in what I now know is called a 'quilt as you go' method, just defeated me, so Elaine did those last parts for me after I had pieced the top and quilted the body of the blocks. Back then I was still having these realy horrendous headaches when something new was too much for my brain to handle, which was part of why this took me so long to do. Once the headache started, I had to stop whatever I was doing for hours or a full day ot let it pass by.
In this class I learned SO MANY QUILTING TECHNIQUES including; that you use a 1/4" seam on all parts. She gave me a little Dr Sholl's pad to use as my guide (something I use today for alll of MY students aged 7 to adult, as they first learn) because its so thick you can't go past it when you sew the 1/4 inch seams. I learned that you don't sew the seams open, as you would for making clothing but instead you iron them together in a certain direction so that makes the blocks lie flatter (each pattern tells you specifically which way to press your seams) and that was so cool to me because by trial and error I could see the WHY behind this method... or as I sometimes heard others say the madness behind the method, lol. I learned about color placement, as well as how to use the cutting mats, rotary cutter and special rulers for cutting. I learned about quilting or walking foot, other feet used in quilting, feed dogs, 1/4" foot, about using a medium gray thread on the obdy of the quilt so it blends into all the various fabrics, about safety pinning in preparation for quilting the top and sandwich of the quilt together, which in this one I did 'stitch in the ditch' and so many other things I am sure right now I am forgetting! THERE WAS SO MUCH information processed during this quilt making project.
I do remember this quilt made my head hurt a LOT but I also know I learned a ton and in the process I was becoming like a person lost in a desert searching for water, seeing an oasis in front of them, driving them on. FOR ME making this first quilt, in this class was the same thing. I had loved quilting and creating before, and I really needed and wanted a creative outlet besides the house projects that were nearly done (wallpapering etc).
After this quilt, I continued to take more classes every time Elaine came to town for another couple years until my divorce started in 1995. BUT THIS FIRST class quilt, to me, was just as important as the one I'd tried the year before on my own! IT turned out beautifully and is still being used today. The cool thing was that after I made this quilt for Mindy, she wanted to try a class on her own, not my teaching her ... WISE child to suggest someone else teach her. I was so proud of her first quilt she made. I think I will find her first quilt and put that in here at some point too because she, now at 25, is a fabulous quilter in her own right after taking a class at the age of 9/10! This first quilt gave Mindy and me a lot more than I think either of us realized back then! Mindy started the class before her 10th birthday and finished it the weekend after she turned 10. We were both sewing a lot and she wanted a machine of her own so we didn't have to take turns, so oln her 10th birthday not only did I give her the quilt I had made but also I gave her a Kenmore as her fist sewing machine, which she still uses and loves today. Since then she has made many quilts, friendship pillows and other things so I feel that gift was one that really opened her up for a creative outlet she enjoys. I will talk more about her 'friendship pillows' later in this blog. I was both a girl scout leader for both of my girls starting in 1984 with my oldest and then with my youngest when she got into first grade, and making log cabin block pillow became something Mindy wanted us to do in girl scouts. So we did. I will see if I can find those pictures and include an entry on here about them soon!

This is the first quilt I made after my brain damage. I had been trying to figure out since 1989 how to tell which side of the fabric was the right side and the wrong sides because I knew you had to put right sides together in order to qult, or sew anything for the most part. I really struggled with this quilt that was to go into our new house we'd bought with these colors in the formal living room. I don't remember now if I bought these fabrics or had them in some stash of mine from when I had quilted before. I knew back then that I didn't want to do this quilt like my mom and grandmother had, with cardboard templates. I had watched quilting shows on TV over the last year and saw they were doing something called 'strip quilting' and that looked like a lot of time saving effort. AND to me, for myself , with my no energy status these days, it just seemed like the right thing to try. So I thought about the size of quilt I wanted, how many blocks I wanted by how many in length and started to rip the strips to the right width. Then I sewed the colors together in what I THOUGHT was the right way I'd seen on the Quilt in a Day show. Once I got those sewn, I put them in rows and started sewing the rows together into the main part of the quilt. I did it in a day and was so proud of myself. The next day I added the borders and then didn't know what to do for a backing so I grabbed a sheet that looked like the right color, layered it all together, pinned it and tied it on the living room floor, using embroidery floss I had from an old project. The next day I bound the quilt by bringing the backing over the front, pinned and sewed it and it was done! I was so proud of myself for figuring this out on my own and put it on the couch for the night.
When I looked it the following morning though, I realized I didn't do it very well, and knew I needed help in learning how to quilt properly, again. I could see back then and especially now all the mistakes I made in not matching corners, not using the right fabrics (don't use a sheet if its not all cotton, when every things is else IS all cotton in your quilts) and more. BUT for me that day was a celebration for me to realize that all I needed was someone to show me how to do it right and it would unlock more of what I hadn't gotten on my own.
I was still learning it was OK to ask for help, because I was relearning something. I still couldn't make clothes at all but here WAS something of my old life, that was coming back, albeit slowly.
This quilt is one that I still display proudly as a piece of my past, and to remind me how far I had come from 1987 as a bedridden mother, with a 3 and 10 year old daughter, incapable of most things needed to survive, and now I had in 6 years begun to create again! I felt so excited, even if that quilt had tons of mistakes... I HAD MADE IT, and that was a new milestone for me! Even today in 2011 I display this quilt on my quilt rack, though in the back of it, as a testiment to my craft, to my TRYING to do something right, and LEARNING to accept that SOME THINGS OF BEAUTY ARE FLAWED. AND I learned that in those flaws, THAT IS WHERE THE BEAUTY LIES!

peace by piece I learn as I go

here is what I woke up with this morning.... for the direction my blog will now take. Its been swirling around in my head how to proceed, but I woke up suddenly at 430 this morning, and HAD to write this down I will add it to my blog after I swim in my PT class this morning, unless I can do a copy paste.: copy paste works... yay.. I LOVE easy buttons!
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Finding a great me in the forgotten sea... peace by piece.

Peace by piece I have traveled into a place of knowing myself, loving the new me that had to be and making peace with my brain damage, my illness (chronic Fatigue Syndrome), and my 'DIS- ability becoming instead 'differently abled', whatever that meant at the time. And while doing that I was still trying to be the great mom, wife, daughter, friend, girl scout leader I had been along with any other hat I had worn before. Quilting and DIS ability walked hand in hand stitch by stitch, in time piece-fully and peacefully. BUT like anything, it was a process that came to be, over time, trial and error, a great learning curve with great results.
This blog was to be only about the quilts I have made, but instead has become more now as I realize the role each quilt I have made since 1987 has truly been a part of both journeys - the journey recovering from the darkness of brain damage, and making peace with my CFS and Fibromyalgia and all the other things taken away from me. It is about those things given back to me in a jumbled mess of puzzle pieces as well. What 'life' picture would these pieces make when I was done? What would each quilt look like when I finished them? What had I learned about myself in the process? did any memories come back to the surface, when I had held so many years of blankness in the beginning and still do after more than 22 years? What short cuts had I learned in quilting techniques? When had I realized that as I pieced quilts, ripped out seams and made something whole and beautiful out of strips, scraps and torn pieces of fabric - that I gained peace in these pieces!!
Now I see in retrospect why quilting has been so rewarding for me! As I piece together quilts from scraps, I too am piecing together the broken parts of my brain, my 'dis' ability helped me make peace with my past and now I am merely differently-abled than I used to be. I am putting together a puzzle full of multitudes of pieces into something whole, beautiful and awesome in my new me. And it is the same with my quilting, all those pieces are becoming something new from what they used to be as well. As I quilt, I am finding a new me in the forgotten sea - each wave, each quilt, each piece finding its right place stitched in time, stitched in place... piece by piece I've made peace with myself and I find not only an awesome woman coming out of darkness but too I have found an almost Zen like inner state of peacefulness while quilting that carries over into my daily life away from my quilts..



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`Two roads diverged in a wood,
and I --I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~Robert Frost