Pamela Thiele Art Quilts

“How would you like to donate a quilt??” NOT!

For years a former friend of mine tried to get me to donate a quilt to a group she was active in. She wanted to use my donated quilt as a fundraiser. I always refused. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why we’re no longer friends.

My thinking was this: my quilts aren’t exactly typical. So I suspected there would not be a huge amount of raffle tickets sold. Which I would hear about for a loooooong time.

And it takes me a long time, in fact, generally several years, to complete a quilt. Which my friend didn’t seem to understand. She “just” wanted me to “whip one up” for her. I don’t do that. The fastest I’ve ever made a quilt was for granddaughter Adela and that was a very simple quilt to make.

Also I don’t want a “whipped up” version of my work on display anywhere. It would lessen my other quilts, all of which I spend a lot of time on. It would diminish them and people would say, “ah yes, she can whip them out in a day.” So why would anyone want a quilt that I’d “whipped out” in a day? The workmanship alone would be suspect, I’d think. But the point is, I spend endless (and happy) hours picking out the fabric before I even get to a quilt. I DON’T want to make them in a day. I can’t even choose the fabrics in a day.

I was irked that my friend refused to understand what it takes me to make a quilt. In fact, once I started creating quilts in earnest, she started indeed “whipping out” one-patch quilts for her godchildren. She timed how long it took her and she’d report the time to me. It always was a rebuke for how I was taking way too long to create something.

She quickly got bored by her quilt-making and stopped, but it apparently sealed her conviction that quilts are something we quilters just do in our sleep. I would have loved to have worked with her and shared my enthusiasm for this incredible art with her but she didn’t want to. I’d start to explain the process that goes into one of my quilts, and her eyes would gaze over. She was happier feeling that I shouldn’t be taking the time I was, “simply to make a quilt.”

So I was really peeved by her lack of respect for what I’m trying to do. (No kidding!) And eventually our friendship went away.

I know my quilts cause raised eyebrows among some viewers. And some people love them. Which is delicious. So I think I need to continue to make sure they are displayed only where they would be respected. They’re not for everyone. Unlike raffle quilts which need to appeal to a broad audience. That’s fine with me. I will continue to practice saying no, I don’t “whip up” quilts.

Shoo Fly Top Finished

I finished piecing the top of my big fat shoo fly quilt. As yet unnamed. I had a lot of fun with this quilt…the colors just make me smile and I used a variety of big prints—overwhelming florals, silhouetted florals, a vintage handkerchief, and some super bright dots. The  shoo fly variation block allowed me to use large pieces of the prints and to do a lot of fussy cutting, which is what I LOVE to do.

The handkerchief is the reason for the quilt – I found it, I fell in love with it, and I chose the other fabrics to complement it. Since it was always going to be the center square, I chose bold prints for the others, so that no one square dominated, at least to my eyes.

The other print I have wanted to use in a quilt but couldn’t figure out how is the one to the left of the center, with the figures outlined in black. I love this print but I was concerned that the figures were too insistent. Too demanding of notice. I therefore cut  them so that a part of each figure was missing, to make them less dominant. Hope that works.

The border is a piano keys variation that I think works pretty well. Doesn’t detract from the main body of the quilt. Adds a frame sort of. There is a little surprise in it, in that the strip that runs through the piano keys doesn’t form a second frame but instead runs only from top to bottom and from side to side. I didn’t want to overdo the frame thing, so I thought this would be just a wee bit jarring.

I have the perfect back picked out. And now I need to quilt the three, no wait, four quilt tops I have waiting. Before I start another quilt. I swear I will do this. Honest. Soon.

The Widow Iliff and the Widow Sage

My grandmother could not wait to belong to her friends’ Widow Club. She sighed and moaned about not being able to be a member, which drove my mom nuts. Mostly, I imagine, because Mom loved her father and didn’t wish him dead. Grandmother, on the other hand, saw him as an impediment to her membership. Once he was gone, she joined, and gleefully enjoyed all the trips and events the Widows went on.

A lot of women come into their own as widows.  But their stories are often erased or minimalized by male historians. This makes ME nuts. So here are the stories of two I’ve discovered. No Widows Club for them – they instead took over the financial empires their husbands had created and made them even more successful. Although I’d like to think that maybe in their spare time, they did hang out with a few widows and tell tales and even maybe play cards. We’ll never know.

Elizabeth Sarah Fraser Iliff I discovered because I live on Iliff Avenue here in Lakewood. The local paper had a long biography of her husband, after whom the street is named, with a brief mention of her. Although he was a man of means in Denver and even founded the Iliff School of Theology, it’s Elizabeth, I’ve since discovered, who had the rule-breaking life.

She left her native Ohio and came west to Chicago to make her living. Since women were supposed to marry, I wonder  how she managed to pull this off. She became a sales representative for Singer Sewing machines in the 1880s. Imagine. She had to travel by train to get to her sales territory and then travel around it by horse and buckboard with a Singer treadle machine in the back of the buckboard.

She must have gone from farmstead to ranch, demonstrating the machine and letting the wives and women on the spread try it out. If there was enough money, they would have ordered one from her and it, in turn, would have been shipped out on the railroad to them. And when the train arrived, I can just see the womenfolk and the men coming into town, a major trek, and everyone exclaiming over the new fanagled device.

Elizabeth Sarah apparently got stuck in the mud somewhere east of Denver on one of her sales rounds and John Wesley Iliff helped her. And eventually married her. She was his second wife.

That marriage rescued her from having to drive around selling sewing machine in the heat of the southwest summer sun, dodging tornados and fending off untoward advances by ranch hands. Probably was a relief. But I bet there were days when she missed it. Or at least the freedom to be so fully herself.

Iliff died and Elizabeth Sarah took over the reigns of his vast commercial empire and made even more money. No fool she. A woman who can demonstrate a sewing machine sitting on the back of a buckboard in 100 degree+ heat can definitely handle a few corporations and the men who work in them.

Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage was Russell Sage’s second wife. It’s said he remarried because his reputation as a womanizer was so bad, he needed to legitimatize himself. He was apparently a miserable, hateful man who enjoyed embarrassing and demeaning her in public.

Her family however was poor and her marriage to Sage rescued them. So Olivia (as she was known) took the cruelty. Sage took his time checking out and she was an older woman when he finally died. However she too knew how to run a business and added to the Sage wealth. She also started giving away his money in a series of philanthropic gestures that really impacted on my former home, the village of Sag Harbor on eastern Long Island.

Olivia Slocum Sage gave the village its library, named for her father, John Jermain. It still is privately run, although it receives tax money. She founded the local park, which she named for a native American local chief, Mashashamuet. Her concept for the park was to provide a space for the young women and men who worked in the village’s various industries to be able to go and get some air and some healthy recreation on their Sundays off. After church, of course.

She donated the school, too. And she offered to found a college in the village, but the village turned that one down. I like to think that was okay with Olivia because apparently she felt she had to name the college for her late husband and perhaps she was just a happy not to have his name immortalized in her home village. It’s thought that she named the school for him in part because he was so against the idea of women being educated. It would have distressed him to have provided the funds for a school that let women get a higher education.

It’s also said the Elizabeth Sarah opposed the vote for women. Perhaps she just said that to keep the peace. If Olivia Slocum had an opinion, I haven’t found it but my guess is that she approved—if she funded advanced education for women, she had to believe in the ability of women to make decisions.

The Haircut

This Monday it dawned on me that I had to start pulling my look together because Friday is the opening of the museum exhibit my quilt “The Cabbages Practice Their Do-Sa-Do” is in.

YIPES! So I arranged to get my haircut Tuesday. We all know this was a BAD idea. No matter how disheveled my hair was looking, I should know you NEVER get your hair cut the week something is happening. I missed the wave.

But undeterred, I went ahead anyway and now I have the world’s WORST haircut. It is unbelievable. I am still in shock.

The show opens tomorrow. What do I do? Find a large hat and go as a mysterious quilter? Afraid this isn’t in my nature. A wig? At this late stage? The only one I’d be able to get would probably be all blue or that wonderful mix of primary colors that is so popular on Halloween.

I should have monitored the hair cutter, I know I KNOW. She was, after all, about 12 years old (okay so maybe that’s a slight exaggeration). And she obviously thought I was an antique. Because she assumed I was retired. And she REALLY must have HATED how I was wearing my hair because her cut is going to mean it will be months, maybe YEARS, before I can wear my hair the way it was.

I am all for change, but within limits. Like looking good. That’s a big one for me. I will never be thin but I can still want to look okay.

Anyway I was in my hair salon zone – the one where I am trying to ignore the fact that I am the only person over the age of 25 in the place. I also have to insist on how I really don’t want to dye or tint my precious locks, which throws me off kilter and keeps me from paying attention to other things. I figure my hair has enough problems without my adding to them. And anyway I am going grey the way my Mom did which not only looked nice to me but also gives me a rare pleasant sense of her.

SOOOOO I was zoning out and not paying attention to what Ms deFarge was doing. (Madame deFarge was the character in Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities who sat knitting during the daily guillotine sessions of the French Revolution.)

NEVER ignore what your hair dresser is doing. NEVER.

I used to have a wonderful hair stylist. Back East, before we moved out here. It was harder to leave her than it was to leave most of my friends. THEY couldn’t cut hair. SHE always made me look okay.

I am considering staying inside for a couple of months. Not an option really. The weather has been gorgeous. I don’t want to miss it. But ARGH!!

Tomorrow is the opening night reception. I will certainly look different. Memorable, even. Perhaps I will match my wild and crazy quilt. Maybe I can decide that THAT was the plan all along. It’s intentional. One wild and crazy quilter with weird hair. I hope I can get this to work for me.