Monday, December 12, 2011

Show and Tell for non-quiting friends


The flying leaves quilt which is in the header here, has led to spreading my reputation as a quilter to a group of people who are not quilters -- firstly to poets because the quilt illustrates the poem that is on it, but as of yesterday to a whole party of people, half of whom I did not know and many of whom know little about quilting. It's a pleasure for me to inform the uninformed that quilts are no longer just your grandmother's Dresden plates and the cheap reproduction quilts found in decorating catalogs.

I showed a number of my small pieces (in the series of which the small ones a couple posts ago were examples) and some larger quilty-quilts. The favorite was the one above, which is also one of my favorites but which I had put away and not looked at for many months. This is my Five Generations of First Daughters quilt, subtitled Mitochondrial DNA. The square old photo shows me as a barely visible newborn in my mother's lap, plus there's her mother and her grandmother. The color picture is my mother, myself and my first daughter. A double helix is embroidered in the print and, of course, the generations are tied together as you can see.

My modest attempts at art quilting opened the door to their awareness that we quilters have more facets and modes of expression than they knew previously. The host of the party would like one of my quilts to hang in a prominent space in the living room. There is no false modesty when I say I'm a quilter of modest gifts, but I am very happy to be a messenger about what is being accomplished by quilters throughout the world.

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