Dye Job

One of the pleasures of quilting is dyeing one’s own fabric, but it’s not so much a pleasure up here in the Pacific Northwest because it’s not hot enough most of the time.  Well, one could do it indoors, but it’s a messy activity in my hands and the thing about spreading dye around absent-mindedly is that it tends toward permanency: that’s why it’s called dye and not color.

But this summer has had day after day when the outdoor conditions were perfect for dyeing.  Contrarily, I managed to take advantage of not one of those days.  Now that we are having the summer extended period, I figured I had better try for at least one day and today was the day.  Also, since I am making some efforts to get a handle on all the stuff we have up here so that it will not be quite so much stuff comes the time when we have to move ourselves entirely back to the U.S., it was a nice way to clean up all the dye materials and make them smaller.

First I decided simply to use up all the dye I had stored in the refrigerator.  Well brought up in the depression, I am inclined to parsimony.  If the dye book says use 1 teaspoon dye for a yard of fabric, I’m inclined to think that a half-teaspoon will probably work just as well, and a quarter teaspoon won’t be entirely out of line.  But having as an object to use up the dye, I was obliged to throw parsimony to the winds.  As a result, I was just pouring concentrated dye straight from the bottle onto wet cloth. 

And what did I learn from this?  If you use more concentrated dye, you get more color.  And since more color is a good thing when one is dyeing (nothing so disappointing as going to the effort and having a bunch of pastel production), I may have to do away with the parsimony principle entirely should we ever have another summer as warm as this one.

Life's Mysteries

I’m supposed to be hard at work getting ready for an exhibit that opens next Friday.  I am the ‘guest quilt artist’ at the Sunshine Coast Quilt Guild biennial (if that means every two years) Quilt Show.  Which means that I have a small, enclosed on three sides section of the hall where I will hang about a dozen wall quilts.  One of them isn’t finished yet, all of them need precisely cut dowels from which to hang, all of them need specific wall labels, all of them need a single 'exhibit book' whose pages describe them and me.  None of those things are done, though all are more or less in the process.  

Yesterday, I was told that the irregularly-shaped (19.5x8.5x12 feet, with the fourth side the entry way), semi-enclosed space was losing maybe two feet on one side.  This means that instead of being a semi-enclosed room, it is now more like a 6 or 6.5 foot-wide corridor.  Sigh.  Well, the Guild is not the owner of the room, and they cannot demand that furnishings be removed, but I am the sort of unhappy recipient of the effects of that fact.  Doing those last minute/days details suddenly dropped lower on my priority list.

And thus, this morning, instead of setting to the quilting work, I found myself vacuuming the insides of our Subaru Forester.  Last week, Ed washed it (just in time for all the alder pollen to fall and attach itself to the shiny surface: alder pollen is something of a menace in more than one way: allergies and stick-to-surfaces).  Although we’re responsible about maintenance of house and car, we are neither of us reliable house/car keepers with respect to constant attention to dust and the like, so it’s a kind of entertaining activity when I do get around to doing it.  

In the process of removing all the mats and vacuuming under them and cleaning all the vinyl surfaces, I did something which caused the car lights to turn on.  I checked all the switches, but nothing I did caused the tail light, hatch light, or front yellow light (running light?) to turn off.  We actually turned the motor on and off and nothing resulted in those lights turning off (this was like doing a reboot, I think).  

Finally, Ed decided to remove the fuse from that circuit so the battery didn’t run down.  Reading the car manual to find the fuse box (amazingly, tightly hidden behind something the manual refers to as a ‘coin holder,’ I eventually discovered a page about something called ‘safety lights,’ which appear to be the very ones that were problematically on and that, says the manual, run independently of the ignition.  Their switch is hidden behind the steering wheel, in the center at the top.  This is not the switch that turns on the flashing safety lights; this is some different set of safety lights that neither of us had ever known were there.  We’ve only had the car for 10 years.  

It may be the mark of having too much if after ten years you still don’t know what you have.

Scraps

This past week, I was thinking of cleaning up the top of my quilting cutting table and decided to do so by gathering up all the blue scraps (random choice of color), cutting them into squares, strips, and rectangles as indicated by size, and then sewing them all together into a nice little lap/nap quilt.  It didn’t really get the table top cleared up, but it was nevertheless a very satisfying project.  It took about three days to get all of those newly-cut shapes sewn together, and I’m now halfway through the hand-quilting.  Nothing really so comforting--indeed so virtuous--as gathering up scraps of fabric and turning them into a new wholeness.

I was thinking about this today while at the monthly quilt guild meeting.  I was actually doing the hand sewing on my blue scrap quilt while watching two ‘trunk shows’ (a showing of a variety of quilts a person has made).  At some point in each presentation, both quilters commented how much they liked scrap quilts, how drawn they were to making them.  That’s not unusual, of course: the notion of scrap quilts is what initially draws most quilters to this joyful craft and art.  But why?

Quilting is, in part, built on nostalgia, an unreal yearning for the time when we made things with our hands out on the frontier or some such place, even the very blankets that kept us warm.  Hardly anyone in my circles actually yearns for the opportunity to make their own shoes and blankets and clothes, or even their own bread and butter, but the nostalgia for the time continues.  Just watch the use of quilts in Hollywood movies: no respectable hero/heroine owns a bed that is unquilted, testifying to their downhome authenticity.

 There is also a secondary nostalgia that quilts hold: they are made of pieces of one’s life.  I am not of the generation that used old, worn-out clothes as the material for quilts (very green!).  As a kid, I made small quilted pieces using leftovers from my mother’s sewing, but it was new fabric.  Nevertheless, those quilt pieces had a sentimental quality, even for an 8-year-old, because they were composed of leftover bits of  my clothes, of my sisters’ and mothers’ clothes and, occasionally, even of my brothers’ clothes, all of which my mother made herself.  So, that is a third thing about scrap quilts’ attraction and maybe its most important nostalgic quality.  In some way or another, we are sewing together bits of our lives to make them new and fresh and whole in perhaps a more interesting way than they seemed to have when we were living through those parts of that life.  This may also account for the enormous growth of interest in scrapbooking, as well: bits and pieces--scraps, after all--that show us our lives in a way that definitely makes us feel good about them.

So we like cloth scraps, but strangely uninterested in most other kinds of scraps.  We don’t particularly care about wood scraps: we just burn them in the fireplace, useful but no big deal.  And we definitely don’t like food scraps.  They are leftovers, grudgingly to be used or, more likely, to be left to develop a green covering in the back of the refrigerator.  At best, they are adapted to another meal, less honorable because made of leftovers, or made into compost, a useful but not an aesthetic or otherwise particularly meaningful product: merely back to from whence it came.  Scrap dealers are generally seen as people dealing in the unwanted.  Those kinds of scraps may well be what we call garbage or trash.  

But all that may change now that everything has changed:  scraps may be all that we are left with and the challenge will be how to turn them into something larger and meaningful and whole, once again, because the parts themselves remind us of something.  At least, that is, if quilts are a guide.

Christmas Coming

The holiday festivities are moving in. Two days ago, as a December opener, the Point Roberts quilt group had its annual Christmas potluck dinner. We always have it at the same house: the person who has the biggest house AND who decorates a lot for Christmas. This year, we invited the husbands, as well, in order to make sure all the food gets eaten up, but also because we like them, as individuals and as a group. We did, however, make them sit all together at one table while the quilters sat all together at a different (but equal) table. It really was pretty much equal, anyway. Word comes back to me that they discussed gardening and, briefly, the unfortunate situation in the stock market (Least said, soonest mended?).

After dinner, the quilters traded little four-inch squares called ‘fat book pages.’ We all ended up with eleven pages, each one made by a different member of the group (except for Natalie, who is away for the winter). Next, we will take the pages back to our own workspaces and make an exquisite cover for them: a book of and for a 2008 Christmas. I have known and worked with these 12 quilters for about 14 years and they are wonderful women, every one, so I am especially pleased to have this memento gift.

This is about my most Christmas experience of the year, as I quit having trees and buying gifts (except for grandchildren) and all the accompanying foofara when the children stopped being around for Christmas…maybe twenty years ago? And we don’t go anywhere for Christmas; well, we go to B.C., but that doesn’t count as anywhere in the sense of going somewhere for Christmas. Up there, our neighbors usually invite us for Boxing Day dinner (the day when the peasants are traditionally offered the leftovers from the Christmas dinner—and very grateful to be the peasant of choice.).

But Point Roberts is not short on the Christmas stuff. There was the Christmas Craft Fair in mid-November, and today is the Christmas Seniors Tea at the Community Center, where the Woodwind Ensemble will perform. Also, at the grocery store today, there were two women dressed in Santa hats who rang excellent bells to encourage us to donate to PAWS, a group that deals with animal welfare here on the Point. Mr. Drew of Drewhenge has severely trimmed his cedar hedge and left lovely-smelling stacks of cedar boughs with a written invitation to all who might need a little cedar bough Christmas addition to make free with them. The Blue Heron is having an opening exhibit today of gorgeous glass work which, by its very glitteriness, speaks of the season at hand. There will be a Christmas Musical Offering next week and the children’s art exhibit, to be held at the Marina, and the First Lutheran Church has, of course, a series of programs and services for everyone.

Even the weather is cooperating, as it has been getting very close to freezing at night. Often we get a little snow by Christmas Day, but that is actually a Christmas tradition I can do without. Today, the parking lot at the post office was absolutely full at noon, which is another traditional Christmas experience. The post office is barely open today (only to pick up packages for 90 minutes). But there’s a lot of Christmas packages that appear here, and clearly the P.O. rush is well underway. With Christmas advancing this fast, I really should get the garden to bed, a fall tradition in which I participate only reluctantly. Here I am: an Autumn and Christmas slacker.

Capitalism and Traditional Values

Ah, Capitalism! That which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Surely the past month has demonstrated the falsity of that because now capitalism appears to know neither the price NOR the value of anything. I have a friend who was a nun for 25 years but then left the convent, at which point her worldly friends discovered that she was the opposite of old-time capitalism, for she knew the value of everything and the price of nothing. I suppose the job of the rational person is to keep track of both the value AND the price of things.

Quilting is something that, at least when I learned how to do it in the 1940’s, was largely outside the purview of capitalism. It was women’s stuff. For the piecing part, you used old clothes, made patterns with cereal box cardboard, and sewed them by hand. For the quilting part (where you put the three layers together), you might have to buy a commercial batting, but it was also common to use an old worn blanket or flannel sheet for the middle layer. It was an activity that kept you busy, didn’t cost anything, and produced something useful. (There was some commercial development through ‘ladies' magazines’ and newspapers which sold patterns.)

Around the 1970’s, technology changed all that. Rotary cutters, acrylic rulers, quilt historians and books about the history of quilting appeared first, followed by ever-more-evolved sewing machines, specialized cutters, threads, fabrics, and battings. By the 1990’s, the art quilt had spun off from mainstream quilting, which meant that quilters were accumulating dyes and paints and metallic stuffs, while the traditional quilters had an endless array of expensive fabrics specially designed for quilters and even for specific quilt patterns, as well as specialized sewing machines whose prices reached into the thousands. By now, here we are: ‘In 2006, money spent on quilting supplies increased 45.4 percent. That year, quilters spent $3.3 billion in the United States alone. Statistics further show that the average quilter spent just over $2,300 for supplies in 2006.’ And there are now perhaps 25 million quilters in the U.S. alone. And capitalism is just all over those numbers.

Capitalism now requires quilting to keep growing in order to reward the companies/people that have invested in it as a product. But as a growth industry, it has some limits: in particular, fewer and fewer younger people actually know how to sew. They certainly don’t know how to sew by hand, and their abilities on a sewing machine are pretty minimal. They didn’t learn at home, they didn’t learn at school. So it’s a little difficult to figure out exactly how they’re going to take up quilting as a serious hobby.

However, I’m spending the weekend with a brand-new borrowed item: something called a ‘threadless sewing machine.’ It’s also called a felting machine, an embellisher, a needlepunch machine, or just a punching machine. This very simple and portable version of a commercial needlepunch machine is made specifically for quilters on the off chance they haven’t got their $2,300+ spent this year. It looks pretty much like a sewing machine, but it doesn’t have any of the mechanical complexity of a good sewing machine: no tension adjustment, no threading mechanism, no bobbin or bobbin case; just an up and down movement. It has an inverted cup with from 3-12 small barbed needles (each maybe 1-1.5 inches long). The cup moves up and down, and on the down stroke the needles go through two layers of fabric and the barbs cause the fibers of the two fabrics to grab on to one another. The more times you go over a specific area, the stronger the fiber grab is. Works best on wool (because of the way wool fibers entangle), but it works on most fabrics to some extent. This may be it: quilting goes from hand sewing to machine sewing to no sewing. Amazing what you see if you just live long enough.

This is all being sold to quilters as effortless creativity. Not clear whether it’s the quilter or the machine that is being creative. Not clear here who knows the value, but we all know the price.

Pie and Coffee from the Sky

With everything in the financial world going down, I thought I might spend the day hiding under the bed. On the other hand, perhaps a perfect day for going up. That was Ed’s thinking, so he went helicopter flying today. To fly the helicopter, he must cross two borders each way plus about 100 miles of driving each way. Unfortunately, Canada has no tradition of renting helicopters to licensed pilots. In Canada, if you want to fly a helicopter, you have to either own your own, fly one for your employer, or be a student. Not in any of those categories, Ed takes the long drive down to Skagit County, in Washington, to find an available helicopter. It’s about the size of a large dragonfly, but it holds two people, as long as his passenger doesn’t weigh more than 240 pounds.

He left early this morning with a long list of other things to do (Home Depot, Trader Joe’s, etc.) after the flight; during the flight, he was going to visit a friend up on the Washington border who actually does own a helicopter. But his friend’s helicopter has been in Los Angeles for about six months having itself rebuilt. This rebuild has to be done every 2200 hours and it is a very pricey activity; definitely enough to make you think very carefully about actually owning one of these machines. But apparently it is not a very rapid activity. Obviously, it doesn’t take six months, but I guess there are some people who get priority in the line to have one’s helicopter rebuilt and our friend is not one of those people.

When I realized that a futon bed frame actually doesn’t have enough room for me to hide under, I went to the quilt workshop to entertain myself, to detract myself, and to get something done—primarily making fabric portraits of financial titans of our time for a spring show (portrait 1 above). Around 2:00, there was a knock on the door. Almost nobody comes knocking on the door of my workshop except the quilting students and it wasn’t time for one of them. To my surprise upon opening the door, there was Ed--who had landed in our neighbor’s field--asking whether I’d like to join him in a cup of coffee. Not even Valentine’s Day, but a pretty lovely day when one’s spouse flies up to have a cup of coffee. Not really possible to land a helicopter in your neighbor’s yard in Los Angeles, unless you have a neighbor with a very impressive estate. But here in Point Roberts? Easy as pie. Also, it almost made up for that additional 500 point drop.

Mine, All Mine

Another tourist festival here on the sometimes sunny Sunshine Coast. Rain welcomed the 5-day long, Gibson’s Landing Fibre Arts Festival, which has been an August feature in Gibsons for the past eight or so years. It includes classes, an exhibit, a merchant mall, a film evening, a reception evening, and a variety of demonstrations. It focuses on all the ordinary fibre arts (knitting, lacemaking, rug hooking, quilting, ornamental clothing, weaving, felting, crocheting, embroidery, paper-making, fabric jewelry, and wood-working, because wood, too, is a fibre, as the promotional materials inform us.

The exhibit is the part I’m mostly interested in, but it has a checkered record. The goal of the exhibit is to attract high-quality stuff from off the coast, but that has not been easy to achieve. There are no significant prizes, no significant publicity, and no significant ease for getting your work to and from the festival. It is a juried exhibit, but some years the jurying appears to be non-existent with plaintive letters going out to various fibre groups on the coast begging for submissions. Other years, the quality is very good. I’m just one of the tourists they’re attracting so I don’t know much about what’s behind it all, but this year, things took another turn downhill from my perspective.

The exhibit was excellent. I took my camera with me because I have lots of friends who would like to see what was on display, friends who don’t live on the Sunshine Coast, but who might try to get here if they saw the quality of the display. ‘No Photographs,’ I was told. ‘Copyright issues,’ was added vaguely, as if that explained everything, as if there were no such concept as ‘fair use.’ One of the attendants went on to explain that I, personally, could give the Festival permission to use a photograph of my quilt (I had one quilt in the exhibit), and that a professional photographer would take such picture. Hardly a response to my request, I thought. In any case, since I had just sold that quilt, I suppose the ‘copyright’ (whatever that might mean in this situation) would be going to the person who bought the quilt.

Intellectual property is what we were dealing with here. Thoughts, images, ideas: all mine, or all somebody’s, never to be touched, seen, thought, or even imagined without giving that unknown ‘ME’ credit or getting ME’s permission or providing ME with money. I heard that the festival had run into some difficulty earlier when they had used a photograph of a quilt from a previous year’s exhibit in their publicity materials. Apparently, the quilt was made from a copyrighted design (dear lord, you can copyright almost anything, including the simplest quilt design), and the brochure had not given credit to the copyright holder nor, I guess, had anyone asked the copyright holder's permission to use a photograph of a quilt made by somebody else in the festival’s brochure: I mean, why would they? TOO bizarre for me. I take a picture of a deer in someone’s yard. Does the image belong to the person who owns the front yard? Surely not. Maybe we should be getting the deer’s permission to take the photo in the first place, and then pay or give credit to the deer when I put the photo on my blog, in the second? Does the image belong to the deer? Have I captured its soul? Should Dorothea Lange’s estate have ensured payments to the woman whose photograph Lange made famous throughout the world?

I know there’s another side to all this, but I’m not persuaded much by that side, at least not when it's exercised in unreasonable ways. I’m happy to think that images (and information), as the phrasing goes, would like to be free. That’s what is destroying newspapers, I am assured, but it seems to me that newspapers, e.g., have done a very good job of destroying themselves by their mediocre display of journalism. I hope the Fibre Arts Festival doesn’t go the same route. Images are what is on view at an exhibit. Surely, the purpose of an image is to be seen?

Fewer Choices, More Order

I remember the how, back when I had a job, my world was largely organized by external forces. I drove to Orange on Monday to meet with a hospital group, went to the UCLA campus on Tuesday and Thursday to teach a class, attended a Bar Association meeting on Wednesday night, and so on. All events that were largely a function of others’ needs, availability or arrangements. I had a day planner; I looked at it all the time. Then, I would be off for a two-week vacation and when I came back, I couldn’t exactly remember how to do my job until the day planner told me what to do.

In retirement, the external world does very little to arrange your days (other than, say, raining when you were hoping to garden). In fact, the single most important skill of retirement may be in learning how to organize your day yourself. Even when you’ve learned to do it, however, something comes along now and then from the external world that interrupts that organization, something like family visits. After a while, the visitors leave and, although you never got the hang of a new schedule when they were here, you have now lost the old one as well. And unlike the days when you could look at that day planner and get it back, there is no longer anything to look at in order to inform one’s self about what you are supposed to be doing. Oh, the dishes always need to be done, there’s always some laundry and ironing and watering of plants, but I’m talking about a more purpose-driven sense of one’s day, one's life.

Quilting offers me my best hope, but even that doesn’t exactly work for me at the moment. Because much of the quilting that I do is of the ‘art quilt’ variety, I can't seem to just slide into it easily once I've put it aside for awhile. You can't just wait for inspiration, of course (that could be a long time coming), but you have to have some kind of starting place and I’m not finding it. So, today, I went backwards to the tradition of quilting, to lots of labor-intensive cutting of strips and squares and making of blocks, all of which will result in some version of a traditional quilt based upon one of the two basic quilting designs (the nine-patch and the log cabin: for this quilt, it's the nine-patch).


I have narrowed the task by limiting myself pretty much to two colors (different values of orange and of blue-green) and to two basic forms of 9-patch (a 5-4 checkerboard and a cross), and a symmetric arrangement of the blocks. That means the initial constraints of construction are considerable, although the arrangement of blocks has a lot of possibilities.

In the photo, there are about 100 five-inch square blocks, but nothing is sewn together or even in a final arrangement. I may move each piece somewhere else this evening or tomorrow morning to see whether some other arrangement is more appealing, thereby creating some different quilt. The cutting, the sewing, the ironing are all occupying my time and energy very nicely at the moment, filling my day and, because of the constraints, not leaving me with too many choices.

That’s the problem with having your day planner empty: the choices with which you could fill it when you have no schedule appear to be unlimited. Less choice, less choice: that is what we need. What more un-American sentence could there be?

Sedentary Art

Today, B.C. Day, marks the 150th anniversary of British Columbia. Considerable fireworks last night, followed by a very hot day that provided much beach celebration. Also, this is the Monday of the Art Meander (previously called the Art Walk, but people got a lot slower, I guess). Last year, it was organized by one of the local glass workers (there are a higher percentage of artists in Point Roberts than in most places, I suspect). This year, the glass worker who did such a good job of publicity and enthusiasm generating was elsewhere, so this year’s Meander seemed to have a smaller turnout. Could this possibly be caused by global warming? Or election fatigue? Or the fact that the temperature in mild P.R. was about 85 degrees?

The Point Roberts Quilters--a hardy group of about 11--take part in this escapade. The idea is that the local artists/artisans set up shop somewhere (in their own studios or in available public spaces) and do their thing while the local non-artists/artisans walk around and look at what the artists do. It’s a kind of artist/artisan zoo experience. But, it has the added feature of allowing the spectators to do some art zoo things themselves. So each place has some activity that kids and adults can participate in. Down at the Maple Studio, people were painting rocks in aboriginal dot painting formats; at The Blue Heron, they made artists’ trading cards, which can be traded at a later date. The quilters provided lots of fabric and lots of scissors and glues so that people could do fabric collage.

It surprises me how enthusiastic people get about doing this kind of thing. It is as if no one but the artists/artisans were allowed to have paints or markers or glue or fabric scraps. Of course, the explanation is that few people think to include in their schedule that kind of laid-back activity, and many adults would be hesitant to put themselves in that position because, as they are always telling me at shows and exhibits: ‘You’re so creative; I’m not like that at all.’ I always want to pummel them with timbits when they say that. Because it’s all untrue. Creativity is largely a matter of focus and on having a problem. You find a problem (or a problem finds you), you focus on it, you find a solution that wasn’t in your mind before. That’s creativity.

Sometimes the problem is ‘How can I pay my kid’s college tuition?’ Sometimes, it’s ‘What can we have for dinner tonight that I haven’t cooked ninety times already?’ And sometimes the question is ‘How can I make a really leafy-looking tree using this green fabric that’s in my hand?’ The willingness to focus on the problem and think up an answer is all creativity. If you are lucky, somebody else gets to see and to appreciate the results of your creativity. And having our quilts at the Art Meander is one of those lucky parts.

We quilters set up shop with 20 or 30 quilts around and the quilters themselves working on projects. I took my 11-year-old granddaughter and taught her how to make crazy quilt squares: she was my project. And people came by to look and to talk with us.

Some people looked quickly at the quilts and moved on and out as if they had just checked us off some list. Others looked long and if they did, one of us would go over to them and tell them something about the piece they were looking at. They have terrific questions, reminding me how little people know about the process of quilting. Everyone knows the objects, but that knowledge is pretty much limited to straightforward traditional bed quilts. It’s fun to see their eyes opened to things beyond that, and I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to talk with them this afternoon, as we meandered around the room together while the art stayed very, very still.

Recycling Remnants

There are a lot of small and large pieces of fabric sitting around in Canadian and U.S. houses. Not just the fabric that is in dresses and sheets and upholstery, but loose pieces. Some eyelet that someone bought once to make a baby bonnet but never got around to actually making and now the baby for whom it was intended is graduating from college; some remnants from a beach cover-up that was made of fabric too cute to throw away, and even though the cover-up was eventually cast off, the remnants remain in a drawer. A fancy fabric piece from a South Pacific vacation. That kind of thing. If you are a quilter, people eventually give you this fabric. And if you are a quilter, you accept it because it’s absolutely possible that someday you will need it, even if that day is far in the future.

If you are a quilter known to use unusual bits and pieces of fabric in a quilt (as I am), then even other quilters give you fabric. It is the fabric that they can’t imagine ever using themselves, so it tends toward the unusual and the exotic and the not-cotton or not dress-weight anyway. And you accept it because you are doing them a favor taking it off of their hands and it is always possible that some day…etc.

In just that way, I have acquired left-over stretch bathing suit fabric, fiber-glass screen, indigo blue landscaping/shade cloth, many and varied pieces of silk and satin and lace and velvet and velveteen, and an entire large paper sack full of excess prom dress or fairy costume materials (not obvious which). Costumers for theatre companies send me small boxes of fancy costume stuff. There is no end to it and I have many boxes of it in my workshop, nicely labeled as ‘Exotics’ or ‘SILK/SATIN’ or ‘Miscellaneous.’

One of the largest caches of such fabric comes from interior decorators or friends of interior decorators. Apparently, the decorator fabric companies put out new lines regularly and send sample books to two or three million interior decorator stores or free-lancers. Then, when their next line comes out, they send out another two or three million, and the previous sample books get given to me. Sometimes, especially if they are elaborate prints, the samples can be quite large and in that case, they can be quite useful. Mostly, however, they are small, emphasizing texture more than design, and then a sample book may be around 6”x10”, and not so useful. A sample book can contain 20-30 different pieces or, more likely, slight variants of the same piece. Each sample has a heavy and permanently-glued paper label that covers about one-fifth of its surface, further rendering this fabric not so useful.

Nevertheless, I and many of my quilter friends have entire boxes of these things. Beautiful fabric, beautifully designed. Must be useful for something.

Today, I spent about five minutes looking at them, trying to figure out some better, higher use. I had actually been using them to make disposable booklets for an Art Walk in which we are participating in Point Roberts next week. In my five minutes of thinking, however, I figured that if I doubled the samples, used rag bond for the inside paper, and ribbons to protect the central paper seam, I would have a very classy little blank book. Which would take me about ten minutes to make.

So now I’ve found a super use for all these small fabric samples. If only I had a super use for large numbers of very classy little fabric covered books with high-quality, blank paper pages.

The Younger Generations

Once you get past a certain age, I think, you really lose track of kids and what they’re like. Babies and toddlers seem more familiar to me than older ones, probably because there’s not quite so much variation among them. But the rest seem to merge into a single person: kids. It isn’t exactly stereotyping, but it is certainly some kind of over-generalizing tendency. When I see teenagers, for example, on a bus, or flooding the mall at lunchtime, or at the movie theatre, they all seem sort of the same to me. They all seem to be wearing the same outfit, the same hairdo, the same kind of shoes, listening to the same kind of music, reading the same books if they read at all, talking with the same limited vocabulary. They don’t differentiate well for me. And I begin to think that they are indeed all the same. They are teenagers (and not nearly as admirable as teenagers were when my generational colleagues and I were teenagers).

I was brought up by this today because I had a new quilting student in for her first two-hour lesson. I don’t have a lot of students (only two at a time, in fact), but what struck me by this new one was how absolutely different she was from the others I’ve had. I expected this lesson to be pretty much like a first lesson for any of the others, given that they are all beginning sewers first and foremost. But it wasn’t and she wasn’t. Although the process is the same for all of them, and the project they start with is the same, yet each one comes to it with a different attitude, different knowledge, a different physical approach, and different physical aptitudes.

Some of them are quick to see how the machine works, others slower; some are almost afraid of the machine, others indifferent to its speed and motion; some pick fabrics very carefully, while others move more spontaneously. For every movement needed by the task, there is variation among the students. That this is true and indeed a truism, of course, accounts for the real joy of teaching. But when you have 30 kids in a class (as I have had in university teaching), you very often, perhaps daily, or even every minute, are wishing that there was just a little less variation. The luxury of one student is remembering that the kind of teaching that feels just plain good involves looking at that one child to see how she or he is responding each moment to each action or idea that arises, and finding, as a teacher, the words or action that will effectively move that moment on to the next one.

We are a culture that tends to believe that teaching is not a particularly valuable skill. The sadly common aphorism, Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach, attests to that. Rather, we believe that anyone can do it. That might even have some truth to it since we are all called upon to teach throughout our adult lives, although not always in a classroom setting. And a willing teacher requires a willing student. But probably no one can teach very well if they do not have the opportunity, at least some of the time, to teach just one student at a time, an opportunity to see each student as a genuinely individual person. That it is a luxury (or an absolute omission) and not a necessity in our classrooms speaks volumes about our culture, I’d say. But it is a luxury that is given to me by me. Good choice on my part.

Here Today, Here Tomorrow

I was having coffee with some locals today and someone commented upon how quickly groups on the Point disappear. There are always a lot of high hopes for one leader with one good idea: raising money for a lighthouse for Lighthouse Park, rebuilding the pier, restoring the cannery, whatever. Followed by a brief plateau and a quick decline. It may have to do with the fact that people know each other here in a way that makes them feel awfully free to criticize one another in a way that wouldn't happen in a more urban environment where you see less of one another. It isn’t like a family, really, but the criticism sometimes can feel as if it were. Or it may be that the leaders never want to give up their leadership. I don’t know.

The quilters group has been in existence here for over ten years, with a string of accomplishments, more still on their plates, and a large amount of good will toward one another and from the community. The group started by making a large ‘Community Quilt’ that is now in the entry way of the Community Center (which houses the library and several large meeting rooms). That quilt, which is based upon photos of old buildings in Point Roberts (some still here, but most, not), hangs behind Plexiglas and everyone who lives here has seen it, I'd guess. It has 12 large blocks plus a large center medallion, and each one of the quilters made one of the blocks, while three or four of them also worked on different parts of the medallion. The original group included a few people who knew how to sew but had never made a quilt, so starting with a large pictorial block was something of a challenge. It was impressive, however, the way everyone rose to the challenge and, even at the end, spirits were pretty high.

Nevertheless, it has to be said that 3 or 4 people washed out pretty soon after that experience and if it had not been for a few new people coming in, the quilting group might have stopped right there, despite all the success of finishing the Community Quilt. The group at the beginning had 12 members and a decade later still has about 12 members, but only eight of them were in that original group. People are a little fluid in their lives, as some people go away for the winter or the spring or the summer, but we keep on meeting, more or less the 12 apostlettes of quilting, sans leader.

Since that initial quilt was hung, we have made a large lighthouse-themed quilt that was raffled for the now-lost project to get a lighthouse in Lighthouse Park; we have made a large, traditional, geometric-patterned raffle quilt to raise money for the food bank; we have made a smaller ‘Boat Quilt’ that hangs in the local health clinic (open 3 days a week and staffed by a nurse practitioner); we contributed an outdoor quilt made of colored tarp pieces to the transfer station (where the recycles and other trash are transferred to somewhere else); we made a bird quilt for the elementary school, grades k-3; we made four large quilts of each of the Seasons in Pt. Roberts, all of which hang in the Lutheran Church’s great hall; and we are currently working on two quilts for the local library’s walls. We’ve had several shows here of our work, including one in conjunction with the Historical Society, one at a local art gallery, and one as part of a summer Art Walk. The Historical Socety took the images of the Community Quilt and had notecards made which, for a number of years, were sold at a local gift/craft store. We’ve made our mark here, but it hasn’t always been easy just because of our ease with one another, I think.

In the beginning, the two of us with the most experience were generally allowed to make serious decisions about what quilts would get made and how they were to be constructed. But over time, everybody else has developed the skills and experience that make us all peers in that respect. In this small place, when there is no obvious task before a newly formed group, it’s not really enough to have leaders and a good idea; there have to be enough followers to make the group work. For long-term survival, though, the followers have to stay with the work. Then one day you look around and it’s a group of leaders. And you’ve been doing whatever you’ve been doing for a decade and are the best of friends and are perhaps a little too free with your criticism.

The Community Marches On...Or Not

There’s some stirring on the community level here in Point Roberts. That is to say, there is, once again, some group of folks who think we need more community than we’ve already got. Every time there’s a new batch of newcomers, a small number peel themselves off to join in an effort to reinvigorate the Point. Or perhaps to invigorate it for the first time in their sense of community politics. Their usual conclusion is that they need to pump up some old organization that has gone derelict. A year later, the effort is largely abandoned and the group in question returns to its semi-dormant state, with regular meetings attended by a couple of people. I myself have attended a few meetings of several of these organizations during such an invigorating process. Hasn’t worked yet as far as I can see. Largely this is because, I think, that such groups as do exist are largely at cross purposes with one another or are entirely indifferent to one another. It's like a chess game where either nobody wants to take a turn or two people want to move simultaneously, each to block the other.

This time, it is the organizations themselves that are taking the lead, or at least some of them. And therein lies the rub. There are a million organizations on the Point, depending upon how you define ‘organization.’ There’s the Chamber of Commerce, which requires only a very small chamber to meet since there is so little variety of commerce, and there is the Voters’ Association (people who can vote and may or may not own property), and the Property Owners’ Association (the reverse), and the Contractors’ Association, and the Parks and Recreation Board (which may or may not be an organization, depending...). And there’s the Wellness Clinic Board (not to mention the patients of the clinic), and the Volunteer Fire Department; the Quilters Group, the Book Club, the Library employees, the Walking Group, the owners/riders of Icelandic Ponies, Members of the Lutheran Church, a small dance band, the Historical Society, the golf course employees, the Food Bank, the Emergency Preparedness Committee, the group that reads to small children at the library on Tuesday evenings, the arts group that puts on an arts weekend in the summer, and six neighborhood associations, for starters. Well, you can see how this notion of community groups as representative members of the community could pretty easily get out of hand if you are thinking of them as a group.

But the ‘key organizations’ (as their presidents tend to refer to themselves) are thinking of getting together a little council that will meet to (and I quote) ‘prioritize problems in Point Roberts.’ They want to have action: this is not a group to just sit around and talk, they say; this is a group to produce solutions and to have deadlines. And who is to be on this council, I ask? Well, each group in the community can send a representative, they respond. I like to imagine this ‘democratically’ appointed group sitting around the table doing this prioritizing. Since I was at this meeting (largely as an interested observer), I continued to press a role for the quilters’ group as a community organization entitled to representation on this prioritizing group. Eventually, I think, they began to see that a representative from every community group might be something of a handful and might lead to more talk than action.

But, with no way to discern who should have a representative on this mythical council, the meeting was adjourned with a plan to invite anyone who thinks they represent a community group to the next meeting, a month from now. Such a plan certainly offers a strange possibility of legitimacy, but I’m not sure of the direction that this legitimacy would take. In any case, the Point Roberts Quilters Group, with 12 active members, will be represented by me.

Roots and Rootlessness

I don’t think that I really know what it means to live in a community where the word actually means something that is different from, say, living in a small town. The people who move to Point Roberts often long to live in a community, but they mostly don’t seem to have any more idea than I do about how to make that happen. Point Roberts is a community for some people: they were born here, their parents were born here, they grew up and maybe went away to school, but then came back and got jobs and houses and spouses and children. They remember it for what it was and is as an aspect of their daily lives, not as an interesting study.

Two of my quilting students come from such a family. Their grandparents were both born here on the Point and I can point to the houses they grew up in. Their grandfather was the minister in the local and only church, a Lutheran Church, but because everyone here was not a Lutheran, he officiated at the church in such a way that everyone felt welcome, and he did so for many years until he retired. The new minister is from away, however.

The minister’s children grew up here and at least two of them have come back to make their lives on the Point. These two daughters are also the mothers of my two quilting students. The girls are remarkable, both in their willingness to work at something month after month and in their sensibleness. When they began, they were 12 and 13; now the older is 16. Both are bright and unusually cheerful considering that they are teenagers, and willing to spend two hours each Sunday working indoors on what is in many ways a very repetitive and slow-moving task, although I try to structure it so that there are frequent opportunities for creativity. They work well and they do good work.

They are happy to have this opportunity, but I suspect I am the real beneficiary of it. Through them, I get to see something of what it might be like to live in one place, and to have that place be the same place your parents and grandparents lived. They have deep roots and long knowledge and a calmness I don’t associate with teenage years.

Here is a list of the places I have lived since I was born: Pocatello, ID; Bozeman, MT; Canton, NY; Morley, NY; San Diego, CA; Brentwood, CA; West Hollywood, CA; Westwood, CA; Beverly Hills, CA; Culver City, CA; Lakeville, MA; Yap, Micronesia; Beverly Hills, CA (again); Venice, CA; Westwood, CA (again); Brentwood, CA (again); Roberts Creek, BC; and Point Roberts, CA.

I suspect my life is as alien to my students as theirs is to me, but I am living perhaps the more typical life of an American in the 20th and 21st Centuries. We all three come from immigrant stock, but some immigrant families stayed put and some learned the lesson of motion and kept on moving, even when there was no more West to move on to. I can’t really quite imagine that I will be here for the rest of my years, unless those years are fairly small in number. But I also can’t really imagine what it is to have a historical memory of a place that is shared with generations. No wonder we never know anything about history, I suppose. The girls offer me some idea of what an awareness of lived history in a community might be like. And they learn to sew and to make quilts.