{"id":20592,"date":"2015-02-05T00:01:16","date_gmt":"2015-02-05T08:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=20592"},"modified":"2015-02-05T00:01:16","modified_gmt":"2015-02-05T08:01:16","slug":"the-quilt-from-hell-forty-two-years-later-its-still-not-finished","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/the-quilt-from-hell-forty-two-years-later-its-still-not-finished\/","title":{"rendered":"The Quilt From Hell — Forty-Two Years Later, It’s Still Not Finished"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/a>
A\u00a0section of the crazy quilt from hell. The calico I used is now considered vintage. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Barbara Falconer Newhall<\/em><\/p>\n

It had been staring at me from that drawer for decades, guilting me. The quilt from hell. My wedding present to my brother and his wife. Never finished, never presented.<\/p>\n

Their marriage had done just fine over the years\u2013all 43 of them. It hadn\u2019t needed the validation of a splashy gift from the big sister.<\/p>\n

But every time I opened up that drawer, there it was again\u2013the awful evidence of a gift never<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a>
Hidden\u00a0away in a drawer behind a door for thirty-plus years. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

given, a promise never kept: a half-made quilt tousled in a pile of calico scraps.<\/p>\n

I was young and broke back in 1971, the year my brother and his wife got married. I was scraping by on a freelance writer\u2019s income, a few hundred dollars a month.<\/p>\n

I drank cheap Alamaden chablis from the jug, and when I had to go someplace I used San Francisco\u2019s public transportation; if a bus, trolley or cable car couldn\u2019t get me there, I didn\u2019t go.<\/p>\n

No way could I afford to slip into Macy\u2019s or Gump\u2019s and buy my brother and his bride something memorable. A Waterford crystal vase? A Dansk teapot? A set of trendy Marimekko sheets<\/a>? Not a chance.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A friend gave me this vintage black and gold Singer sewing machine still in its cabinet. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But I was hip and artsy, a veritable earth mother. I could make things. I could sew. I was sewing clothes for myself at the time with the help of a cast-off vintage Singer still in its original cabinet. I made corduroys that actually fit me and a striped bikini that I could swim in.<\/p>\n

Since I could sew, why not sew\u00a0my brother and his fianc\u00e9e a wedding gift\u2014a quilt?<\/p>\n

It would have to be a crazy quilt, of course. That would be so much simpler than trying to follow a pattern\u2014the Dresden Plate pattern, for example, that my grandmother had used to make a quilt for my mother from\u00a0patterned grain sacks back in the 1940s.<\/p>\n

My sewing skills were pretty darned good, I told myself. If I could sew a bathing suit, I could sew a quilt. A quilt is flat, for heaven\u2019s sake. No need to make allowances for a dinky bustline or bulging thighs. How hard could it be?<\/p>\n

And too, this would be an opportunity to show off my renegade creativity. I\u2019d buy calico in bright colors, cut it into odd shapes and stitch it all together. It would fit a full sized bed. Nothing too ambitious. Quick and easy, no problem.<\/p>\n

And crazy making.<\/p>\n

No one was there to counsel me back then, not my Grandma Falconer<\/a>, not my Aunt Ferne, my Aunt Lois, my\u00a0Aunt Ruth, my cousins Nell and Mary Helen<\/a>, nor any of my knitting, tatting, embroidering, crocheting female relatives back in Scottville and Pentwater<\/a>, Michigan. No one was there to warn me off my\u2014crazy\u2014quilt idea.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
My grandmother made<\/a> this quilt from\u00a0patterned grain sacks. She followed the Dresden plate pattern, but I knew I wouldn’t have the patience to cut and sew all those precisely shaped pieces, so I opted for what I thought would be easier– a crazy quilt. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How could I know that this little sewing project would take months, more time than I realistically had between now and the wedding date?<\/p>\n

Nor did anyone show up to tell me it was a truly bad idea to sew a bunch of odd-shaped pieces together without first pinning them to something flat; if I sewed them freehand, I\u2019d end up with a rippling, disjointed mess.<\/p>\n

But I was hip and artsy and confident. And besides, I couldn\u2019t afford a bed-sized piece of fabric large enough to pin my scraps to. So I plunged in and stitched away.<\/p>\n

The days passed. A few weeks before the wedding, all I had to show for my time was a wavy, odd-shaped chunk of piecing\u2014colorful, but nowhere near big enough to cover a bed. Desperate to speed things up, I began cutting the pieces bigger and bigger.<\/p>\n

That didn\u2019t help. The wedding day arrived and I had a half-finished quilt on my hands. Reluctantly, I wrapped it up and presented it to the bridal couple, promising to finish it before they returned from their honeymoon.<\/p>\n

That didn\u2019t happen either.<\/p>\n

\"Vintage<\/a>
Just a few of the calico scraps waiting to become part of that crazy quilt. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019m not sure what got in the way. Maybe I fell in love. Maybe I got a real job. The half-finished quilt ended up in a drawer, then another drawer, and then in a drawer at the bottom of a built-in chest in the house Jon and I bought after we were married. There it stayed for three-and-a-half decades.<\/p>\n

Children were born. Children grew up. Children went off to college. And when I opened that drawer last summer, sure enough, the quilt from hell was still there, guilting me from its hideaway.<\/p>\n

It was time to finish the darned thing.<\/p>\n

That is, it was time to hire somebody to finish the darned thing.<\/p>\n

I headed over to Berkeley, where the ladies at Stonemountain and Daughter Fabrics<\/a> knew what to do next.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s one thing to do the piecing on a quilt, they told me. It\u2019s quite another to do the stitching\u2014the quilting\u2014that holds the front, back and stuffing in place. What I needed, they said, was a quilter with a long arm sewing machine.<\/p>\n

Coming soon: Sue Mary Fox <\/a>and her quilting\u00a0machine to the rescue — at “A Crazy Making Crazy Quilt — Finished at Last.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
I spread the quilt out on the floor, but it would not lie flat no matter what I did. It was originally intended to fit a full sized bed, but, given the ripples, I could see no way this piece could become\u00a0a bedspread. Maybe those danged ripples are the reason I gave up on this project 43 years ago. Photo by Barbara Falconer Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"An<\/a><\/p>\n

It had been staring at me from that drawer for decades. The quilt from hell. My wedding present to my brother and his wife. Never finished, never presented. Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20663,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[1384,34,1284,1357,55,82,1385,536,1386],"class_list":["post-20592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a-case-of-the-human-condition","tag-crazy-quilt","tag-dont-miss","tag-falconers","tag-grandma-falconer","tag-family-stories","tag-on-the-funny-side","tag-quilt","tag-scottville","tag-sewing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}