Indoor Orcas

When you are a quilter exposed to the public, the public tends to give you things. As far as I can tell, every household in the world has a closet where it keeps bags of special fabric. Might be leftovers from a couch re-cover, scraps from a dance recital, or remnants from bridesmaid dresses. One way or another, it’s something that had enough meaning in its original use to make it not possible just to let it fall to the trash or the thrift store. And, eventually, much of it comes to quilters.

I have had virtual strangers arrive at my door with a small bag of black tulle with embossed flowers, suitable for some part of very fancy evening wear; with a bag filled with 2 tweed jackets and 2 fabric purses, including one that was entirely covered with gold sequins; with a carefully folded two-yard piece of batik the owner had bought on foreign travel and had never found a use for, but who was now filled with the conviction that I, somehow, will find for her fabric the higher purpose it deserves. And I try to fulfill those beliefs. It’s all great fun, a chance to talk to people about fabric and their attachment to it, and a chance to get some excellent fabric that I might never, otherwise, run into to. Sometimes it’s even more than that, discoveries of things I’m delighted to discover.


So it was two weeks ago at the Art Walk when a couple came up to me to tell me that they had a bag of fabric they thought I might be able to use for the quilts with people, specifically, for the skin parts of the people in those quilts. We talked, I took down their address, and got round to stopping by their house a few days later to see what they had.

They did have the fabric (leftover from pillows for the couch…and a lot of it: they must have planned for more pillows than they got around to having made), but they also had orcas. In fact, this house was all things orca. It's a 2-story house on the south-facing beach in Point Roberts and, as it turns out, there are two separate telescopes trained on the water to catch sight of any passing orca or orca pod. There are photographs of orcas, paintings of orcas, and stone collage/sculptures of orcas.

The photo at the top is of the orca outside the main door, about 6 feet tall. It is granite with naturally-colored beachstones and shells forming the background. The second photo is over the stove, and is a 'portrait' of J-pod, one of the orca pods that travel by us in the Georgia Strait, and whose members, I was told, tend to stick very close together. The third--heron--panel, made by the same method as the door orca (and the driveway orca, of which I don't have a photo) is a panel in the shower/bath, again, very large. All three were made by the householder whose wife was offering me the fabric. The householder's line of work was software, and these were definitely not part of that work.

Yet another example of knocking on a door in Point Roberts only to find things/people/events that you didn’t know were there, but are very happy to know are there. I try to imagine doing this in Los Angeles, e.g., and I’m sure that there are lots of unusual things behind those doors--some of which I definitely wouldn’t want to see--but I suspect there are a higher percentage of the delightful kind in Point Roberts, especially the kind that people have made themselves out of a need to create. Or at least it pleases me to think so.