November 20, 2020 Sheltering at Home Week 36

It was beautiful. It was valuable. But it was big.

It was a hand-stitched quilt. Vintage. Antique, possibly. Rust red and periwinkle  blue.

It was given to Jon and and me as a wedding gift 43 years ago, and it’s spent all 43 of those years shut up in a linen closet.

It deserved a place of honor somewhere in our house. But it was too valuable to be used as a bedspread. And too big to fit gracefully on any of our modest walls. Until . . .

. . . until this summer when the wall between our kitchen and dining room came down. And voila! A space emerged that was generous enough to show off our super-sized quilt. And the pandemic shutdown had given us time to take on the onerous task.

But How to Hang a Quilt That Measures 6 1/2 by 7 1/2 feet?

• A trip to the New Pieces quilt shop in Berkeley — masked and cautious — was the place to start. Our quilt was too heavy for clamps or a rod and rings, so I was passed along to a quilter who agreed to hand sew a series of sleeves across the top of the quilt.
• Next, a trip to the hardware store — also masked — for a flat piece of wood to slip through the sleeves. My plan was to nail the strip of wood directly to the wall. (Had I purchased a dowel and some screw eyes, my life — err, Jon’s life — would have been simpler. Just screw the screw eyes into the ends of the dowel and slip them over a nail in the wall. I recommend that method to you. It’s easier on the quilt, and easier on the guy with the hammer.)
• Next, enlist husband to slide the strip of wood through the sleeves and hammer the wood to the wall.

It worked. Our doughty old quilt is now located opposite our spanking new sliding glass doors. The view out those doors is an eye-grabber, but our aging quilt is holding its own just fine across the way.

We’ve Got the Quilt, but What’s Become of the Quilter?

Standing in the dining room and studying the thousands and thousands of stitches on this old quilt of ours, I can’t help wondering about the hands that made them. Each stitch had to pass through two layers of cotton and a thin layer of batting, and each stitch had to be tiny enough to blend into the surrounding fabric.

Those quilting hands have long since gone to dust, no doubt. But their handiwork lives on. After  forty-three years in a linen closet, all those thousands of stitches, in their orderly rows and circles, fairly leap from the quilt. The hands are gone, but the intention abides.

To see the remarkable work of some contemporary quilt artists, go to “Quilts, Dazzling Quilts.” To read about a quilter who couldn’t get her quilting act together, go to “The Quilt From Hell. Forty-Two Years Later, It’s Still Not Finished.”