Pacific Piecemakers Quilt Guild

Bits & Pieces, July 2001, Volume 6, Issue 7

Claire McCarthy, Editor

“MEMBERS ONLY” ANNUAL PICNIC!

July 20, 12:00 p.m.

33601 S. Highway One

  Bring your appetites, your favorite salad fixin’s and your tastiest cookies and join the fun as    PPQG once again celebrates summer at the wooded estate of Naida Mauthe and Snap Binker!  Lettuce will be provided by the hosts, and each of us will bring two of our favorite salad toppings.  The possibilities are endless:  tomatoes, beans, beets, corn, grated cheese, croutons, nuts – whatever would hit the spot on a warm July day.  Bring only a moderate amount, as there will be lots!  Then we’ll top it off by sharing our favorite cookies.

     After this bounteous lunch, games and amusements are provided.  Golf, bocce ball, darts, badminton, horseshoes – something for everyone to help work off the salad and cookies.  So dress casually and wear comfortable shoes.

     For those of you who haven’t been there before, it’s directly opposite Amerigas north of Anchor Bay. 

     This is always a day to celebrate with companionship, conversation, and camaraderie.  Don’t miss out!

Membership

Email:  Bev Sloane’s address is: bevsloane@msn.com; 

Bonnie Toy is at bonnie@toyland.org

Welcome New Member: Nita Green; 884-3031;

 Box 1294, Gualala;  25-May; agreen@mcn.org

Old Member, New Address & Phone: Claire McCarthy,

  Box 433, Gualala; 884-3444.

Birthday Greetings

1—Betty Tresidder; 3—Naida Mauthe & Sue Lease; 

22—Renata Lopez;  24—Laura Berry;  28—Claire McCarthy

Machine Quilting Class

     Anita Kaplan will teach a machine quilting class on two Wednesdays, July 25th and August 1st, from 9:30 a.m.—2:30 p.m. at Gualala Arts. The class is for beginners and for those who want to review and brush up on this skill. It will cover the basic supplies and equipment needed, straight line quilting, free motion quilting, and all aspects of finishing your quilt. The class fee will be $40, which can be paid to Gualala Arts. The class will be limited to fifteen people. After registration, a materials list will be sent to you.

Opportunities for Showing Your Quilts— and Enjoying Others

Petaluma:  The 7th Annual Great Petaluma Quilt Show will take place on August 11,2001 from 10am—4:40pm. Over 400 quilts will be hung outside for viewing, and crafts will be sold in Walnut Park.  Registration forms for entering your quilt are available from Janet Sears.  The deadline for returning the form to the Quilted Angel is July 13.  Let's get some Pacific Piecemakers quilts in the show this year.

Ft. Bragg:  Fabric Indulgence "Quilters as Artists —Creating Inspiration for the Future“.  We would like to challenge you to put your inhibitions aside and create a masterpiece with fabric, thread, paint, embellishment, or whatever inspires the artist in you.  Any type of fabric is accepted, any style of quilting.  Be bold.  Be daring.  We want to see what you think will inspire future generations of quilters and non-quilters alike.  Quilts can often last through many generations; what do you want to tell the future about this very interesting time we live in?  Deadline is November 30th.

Website News From Reva    

  By the time you read this, the Guild website will have moved, to its own Internet domain: www.pacificpiecemakers.org. Yes, that's a mouthful, er, handful to type, but you'll bookmark it, of course, or add it to your Favorites list.

Art in the Redwoods Update

     We have heard from only 24 members so far as to what they are making for the booth.  If you haven't signed up yet there is still time to help with our

fundraising effort.  The deadline for receiving items is August 1.  We are very hopeful that more items will be donated.  Items received so far include small quilts, wall quilts, place mats and napkins, table runners, aprons, pot holders, bags of all sizes and shapes, small items like pincushions, matchboxes, note cards, etc.  PLEASE help your guild in this fundraising effort.  A lot of work goes into this effort so help make it all worthwhile.

     Any finished items can be turned in at the picnic at Naida's on July 20. Please call Linda Cotton, 785-2233, if you have any questions about items for the booth or, to notify her about what you are working on.

     Jenny Rexon will have the fanny pack fabrics at the picnic—or if anyone would like to go to her home to select fabric for a last-minute booth project, contact Jenny at 785– 2378.

Progressive Quilts Unveiled at June Meeting

Much to the delight of everyone involved, the Progressive Quilts displayed at the Guild meeting on June 15 once again yielded wonderful works of art.

     “My quilt was very much in line with what I was hoping for,” said Linda Cotton, whose original tree design had been embellished with appliqued apples.  “All the quilts showed wonderful creativity.  People really stretched themselves, and it showed in the results.”

    Member Launches Her Own Website

     Jackie Morse has recently launched her website and has invited you all in for a visit. Located at www.jackiemorse.com, the site will tell you “more than you ever wanted to know” (in Jackie’s words!) about this book artist, writer, and animal-lover.

     It features a gallery of her recent handmade books, a variety of her stories and poems, and information about her animal-oriented activities, highlighted with local photography and some interesting links. The site  was designed by artist Ruthie Petty of Portland, Oregon.

John Nash Ott—Quintessential Inventor, Renaissance Man

     Ask any quilter who uses an Ott-Lite and she’ll tell you she couldn’t get along with out it.  “I use mine all the time,” says Anita Kaplan, who has a table model next to her sewing machine.  “You turn it on and it’s like an explosion of light—concentrated, even light right where you need it—you could do surgery under it!” she says.   Its inventor, John Nash Ott, was a multi-talented fellow, a man totally outside the mainstream, whose innovative ideas touched such diverse disciplines as baseball, gardening, filmmaking—and quilting.  Yet when he died recently at the age of 90, few in the scientific community had acknowledged the value of his ideas.

     Born in  Winnetka in 1909, he worked briefly as a messenger for a stock brokerage firm after graduating from high school, but the 1929 crash sent him skittering to the First National Bank of Chicago, where his maternal grandfather has served as president and chairman and his father was an attorney.  This, however, was merely a day job.  Ott spent his free time alone in his Winnetka basement, consumed by experiments with time-lapse photography, something he started tinkering with in 1927 while still in high school.  He set up the necessary lights and cameras, devised timing mechanisms for the equipment, and proceeded to shoot the growth and flowering of various plants.  Through the 1930’s his hobby evolved into a side business, with Ott making short commercial, industrial, and educational films for schools, lawn-care companies, and other clients.  He also gave lectures and screened his movies for local garden clubs.

     After serving in the Navy during WW II, Ott quit the bank and plunged into commercial movie-making, expanding into microscopic time-lapse films.  He built backyard greenhouses to accommodate his projects, lectured across the nation, and hosted a local TV garden show.  Meanwhile his clientele mushroomed—railroads and universities wanted him to make films—and in 1951 he contributed time-lapse footage to Walt Disney’s Nature’s Half Acre, winner of an Oscar for best short subject, followed in 1956 by similar work (dancing flowers!) for Disney’s Secrets of Life, which made manifest a long-percolating personal transformation.  “The turning point,” notes his son, James, “that took him from just a photographer to a scientist, the lovely story about the sex life of a pumpkin.”

     Ott was stymied while filming time-lapse sequences of a pumpkin’s growth for Disney.  Pinkish fluorescent light wilted the female flowers, but when he replaced the lights with bluish fluorescent bulbs and raised a new pumpkin, the male flowers perished.  Based on these findings Ott decided that light wavelength could dramatically affect plant maturation and that full-spectrum light, the kind that streams from the sun, greatly enhanced growth.  He also found his greenhouses’ glass windowpanes, which absorbed ultraviolet wavelengths, were inferior to clear plastic sheeting, which transmits UV light. 

         Ott moved in 1966 to sunny Sarasota where he continued his experiments, establishing the Environmental Health and Light Research Institute.  His work led him to believe that different colors played an important role in animal and human behavior, theories he laid out in his 1973 book, Health and Light.  He convinced management at the Royals Baseball Academy in Sarasota to change the color of the underside of the brims of players’ caps from green to grey—players could see the ball better, batting averages improved, and by the end of the 70’s the change had been made on all professional teams.

     He adapted his own lifestyle, encasing his home in plastic windowpanes and illuminating interiors with full-spectrum Ott-Lite lamps.  He championed “healthy” lighting environments and developed a light box to treat seasonal affective disorder, eventually retiring in 1995.

     “He was totally outside mainstream academia, and had tremendous trouble gaining acceptance,” says James.  “He was convinced that his theories were going to have a monumental impact on people’s lives.  He thought he could change the way we live.”

     Ott-Lite quilters would certainly agree that at least he succeeded in changing the way they quilt.