I have always wanted to make a wholecloth quilt, but I also wanted to deviate from the norm so that my quilt would be unique to me. Instead of using white on white quilting, I chose a pale mint green Moda Marble fabric and decided to use threads of white, pale green, yellow and light lavender. The batting is wool, which, as advertised, quilts like butter! To jazz the quilt up, I chose a backing also of Moda Marble, but in much richer colors:
The book “Wholecloth Linen Quilts” by Cindy Needham inspired the initial layout for this quilt, which I sewed from the center out by hand. Such a project is long term and as I worked and gained experience, I felt free to deviate from Cindy's patterns and to develop my own patterns, symbols that remind me of the members of my immediate family.
I began with a center spider web, my signature symbol of the eternal connections that weave in and out of family interaction over the course of a lifetime. From there I added butterflies for my mother's mother surrounded with the dogwood blossoms so loved by my mother, her daughter. Next to the dogwood, I threw in a few hummingbirds like the ones CHB loves to constantly feed on our patio. Next come symbols of clouds, sunshine and waves representing the child-lives my brother and I lived along the shores of coastal California. These symbols also seemed appropriate in weaving in my mother's memories of her father who died when she was 11 as her favorite memory was tye story she told of the vacation the family took in the early 1930's to California beaches. My father's father, who died when I was 16 months old, came to California for the 1916 Panama-Pacific International Exposition with his own father. Both men were inveterate fisherman who gave their fishing fevers to my father and both of his brothers. They used to brag they had fished about every hole from the East Fork of the Eel River on down into the Sacromento Delta then into the San Francisco Bay ... this reminded me I could not complete the quilt without some trout swimming in the waves since we always had frozen trout at the ready for any night my mother did not feel like going to the store ... "frozen trout agaaaiiiinnn???? aaawwwwww!" The circle of my father's family could not be complete without the clusters of lilies and roses representing my father's mother - anyone who knew her knows why! I finished out the quilt with a small border of forget-me-nots and fence rails because planting gardens were the next typical thing our family did besides fishing.... here are detail photos:
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 dogwood and hummingbirds |
 trout and more trout |
 and lilies and roses |
 bordered with forget-me-nots within fences of love |
I began this quilt in the Spring of 2008 and finished it at the end of March 2009
