Pacific Piecemakers Quilt Guild
Bits and Pieces
December 2001, Volume 6 Issue 12
Anita Kaplan, Editor
Our annual Holiday Luncheon, the original No-Fuss-Just-Fun Party will be Friday, December 14th. Please note this is a change from our usual third Friday.
This
year’s luncheon will be a special tribute to Gayle Stewart
who taught many of us to quilt. Her patience, humor and expertise
have expanded and enriched our quilting community and our coastal
community. In addition to her very motivating classes, Gayle was
the co-founder of Pacific Piecemakers Quilt Guild, planning the
programs for over a year while we were getting off the ground.
Last year she again served as President and guided our guild with
enthusiasm and sensitivity. Gayle is leaving the coast for warmer
climes and we will miss her.
As a special
treat we will hang quilts (and/or unfinished tops) made with the
blocks we created in Gayle’s classes. So dig them out and
please deliver them to Anita, 785-3671, between December 7th
-13th, or call to arrange pick-up. If you are working
to the last moment, your quilt can be brought to the luncheon. We
are very flexible. As a gift to Gayle we are preparing a
“List of Books for Inspiration” for her. This list will
include quilting and non quilting books. If you have a special
favorite please email it to Iris Lorenz-Fife, irisilk@mcn.org,
who is gathering the titles.
Come and say
farewell to Gayle and enjoy a delicious lunch, and relax and chat
with your comrades-in-quilting. For our self-catered Holiday
Luncheon we are asking members to bring a dish according to the
first letter of your last name. A-J bring a salad, K-M bring an
appetizer or bread, N-Z
bring a main dish. The Guild will provide dessert, coffee and
tea. You are welcome to leave copies of your recipes or to change
categories if you like.
We will also
have our annual Holiday Fabric Swap. Participants are asked to
bring 1/4 yard of predominantly green unwrapped
fabric, either a fat or skinny quarter, (preferably not holiday
related) for a grab bag. Since Angie Woolman is coming to the
Guild in February to teach a class called “Color Me
GREEN” this will be good practice in choosing that color.
Festivities
will begin at noon at Gualala Arts Center. Come and take a break
from the holiday frenzy. What could be more refreshing than a
couple of hours of good food and quilt talk? If your houseguests
are arriving early just bring them along. Make the table setting
committee’s job easier by emailing or calling to say you
will attend, ak@netget.com
(Anita). Reservations not required, if you decide you can make it
at the last minute please come.
It’s not
news that Judith Jones is a Guild Treasure. But members who took her Hand
Applique class, the Guild’s November meeting, were reminded
first hand of the scope and level of her talents.
Judith opened
the class with a stunning display of her own hand appliquéd
quilts, most full size, all unqualifiedly excellent in design and
execution. Those who had the
heart to continue after that were then treated to instruction
rich in a variety of techniques and rewarding in outcome, thanks
to it’s rigor and clarity and the generous kits Judith
provided, which included a lovely ‘Judith original’
nest and eggs design with fabrics, special pins and a variety of
needles.
The Judith
Jones school of appliqué (or quilting or anything else, for that
matter), is not for the Hamlets or the weak of will. She “just does
it” and made sure we did too.
It was a class that strengthened confidence as well as skill.
It is never too early to send in your PPQG membership renewal. Treat yourself to the special gift of belonging to the best Quilt Guild in America. Membership checks for $35 can be sent to Pam Wilson, P.O. Box 53, TSR, 95497. Such a bargain!
Upcoming
Programs
Our January Guild meeting is a comfort quilt workshop. Bring your lunch and plan to spend the day starting at 9:30 helping to replenish our quilt stash for the community.
Our February program and workshop will be with Angie Woolman and she will show us how to work with the color Green using the Snails Trail block. More details and samples later. Angie was here a year ago teaching her very popular “Color Me Orange” class. Don’t miss her return engagement. Sign up by calling Connie Seale, 785-3545.
2002 Challenge
“The Nature of Things: Quilts Inspired by the Natural World”
The dates have been set!
Ladies start sewing…or at least thinking about your entry!
• March 21quilts due
• March 23 opening reception.
More details next month.
Member Info
New email address for
Virginia
Trautman elvatra@mcn.org
A better phone number
for Reva Basch is 785-2980.
Coming Events
Take a brief break from working on your challenge quilt and make a quilt for the Black, White and Red show at Gualala Arts in January. Articles for the show need to be delivered on January 10, Thursday, between 9am and noon. The opening reception is Saturday, Jan. 12 from 5 to 7pm. Show remains up until February 5. Black and white quilts can be stunning. Add a little red and wow!! Try it.
From the
President by Janet Sears
We’ve been congratulating ourselves for several weeks about the fantastic success of the PPQG Art-in-the-Redwoods booth. The booth was attractive. The merchandise was of good quality, and therefore it sold well. Folks had a good time looking and buying. We made a lot of money, and it was good publicity for the guild. The booth was a huge success because everyone pitched in and did what she could. However, as willing as we all were to help, it wouldn’t have been successful without Linda Cotton and her committee guiding us and seeing that we did what needed to be done. Linda has done a fantastic job and has earned a rest. Now we need someone, or a committee of someones who enjoy working together, to take over her job.
Also, the raffle quilt
has become an important feature of Art in the Redwoods. Again, it’s a way of
doing what we love while sharing with the community and gaining
good publicity for the Guild.
Marge Tarp, Elizabeth Beckett, and Linda Warnock did a
fantastic job on this year’s quilt. Thanks to each of them for
chairing this important project. Everyone is pleased to help with
the quilt. There’s
never a problem with finding willing hands to work on it. But, the quilt wouldn’t
get made without someone, or a committee of someones, to chair
the project, choose a pattern and fabric and get it started. Now is time for someone(s) to volunteer
to chair the 2002 quilt.
Nothing needs to be done on either of these jobs until after the holidays. But we do need to know now who is going to take them on. If you’re thinking of taking either of these jobs but want to know more about what’s involved, speak with those who have done it before. Then phone or email me and tell me you’ll do it. You don’t have to take it on alone; enlist a couple friends to help you. I can promise you the support of the guild members. But we do need leaders to guide us. Thanks for your help.
Birthday
Wishes December
2
Barbara McNulty
8 Lola DeLongoria
14
Carol Tackett
18
Mary Austin
24
Donna Blum
29
Susan Prukop
Hospice Hearts
by Diane Cunningham
Thanks to the generosity of the PPQG quilters, this year we have created and donated 348 memory heart ornaments to Hospice for their tree. Last year 151 hearts were given. This brings our total to 499 felt heart ornaments. Connie Chapman, Hospice coordinator, had a waiting list of 400 names so it seems that we have covered their needs for years to come. These ornaments are all unique and greatly appreciated by Hospice and the families of the people whose names are inscribed on the memory hearts. They will be hung in a ceremony on December 14th at Sundstrom Mall. You are invited to this program and to view the tree throughout the holiday season. Many thanks to all who contributed to this community effort.
Nominating
Committee
In January the nominating committee will meet to begin the process of finding people to serve on the PPQG steering committee. We already have several positions filled. Please consider doing your part in keeping our guild vital. The committee consists of Joyce Gaudet, Miriam Littlejohn, Jeri Taylor, Jenny Rexon and Anita Kaplan. If you are interested in joining this committee or volunteering for a position, please contact Anita, ak@netget.com.
PPQG Email
Service
If you have an email address and aren't yet a member of the guild's email service, please let Reva know and she'll add you to the list.
Reprinted from House Beautiful, April, 2001 by Martin Filler
These exquisitely patterned textiles, the great-granddaddies of India print bedspreads, are now considered the ultimate in exotic wall hangings.
Four centuries ago, long before cotton became the universal fabric of everyday life, the rare and exquisitely printed cotton panels called palampores became an international craze, coveted all the way from Java to the colonies of North America. The word “palampore” is thought to derive either from the name of the northwest Indian trading town of Palanpur, or, more likely, from a compound of the Hindi word palang, meaning bed, and the Persian posh, meaning cover. Although palampores were indeed used as luxurious counterpanes, they were also fashioned into bed hangings and window curtains, or hung as decorative wall panels, much like tapestries. With their vivid dyed and painted colors and vigorous IndoPersian patterns, they brought an intriguing touch of Eastern exoticism and faraway fantasy to prosperous households around the world in the days when trade for the first time was becoming truly global.
Though 17th-century China had its lustrous silks, Italy its rich velvets, and Flanders its fine linens, only India at that time knew how to produce dyed cotton fabrics of exceptional quality, a fact that made them as rare and sought-after as any textiles in the world. Furthermore, Europeans had not yet mastered colorfast dyeing techniques, making it impossible for their fabrics to be washed without fading. But the Indians devised permanent blue and red dyes-from alizarin-bearing vegetables-which they augmented with alum and iron mordant fixatives, typically overpainting the blue with yellow pigments to achieve more stable greens and using yellow on the red to create orange.
From the very beginning, palampores were expensive. Made for the most part in the southeast Indian coastal sultanate of Golconda (the present day Andhra Pradesh) and shipped from the port of Masulipatam, they became a precious export commodity. In Indonesia, where fabrics constituted an important part of a family’s residual wealth, palampores were especially prized as sacred heirloom textiles to be passed on from generation to generation.
India’s southern neighbor, the island of Sri Lanka, was another major Asian outlet for palampores. Last fall, a spectacular palampore measuring more than eight feet high and four feet wide, made for the Sri Lankan market c. 1820, was exhibited at Spink in London, where it quickly sold. Emblazoned with a stunning tree-of-life motif bursting with blossoms and buds and teeming with birds and animals, it is surrounded by European-style flower swags, deftly balancing the mixed metaphors deemed necessary by Indian artisans for pieces manufactured for sale abroad. This boldly colored, fresh-as-the-day-it-was made example came, appropriately enough, from a private Sri Lankan collection.
When palampores reached Holland or America, they were often quilted by their new owners, with the cotton panel laid down against a more durable cloth backing, the main motifs outlined in stitching, and the interstices filled with cotton batting to create a puffed three- dimensional effect. For whatever reason, this gilding of the lily was not practiced in England, where-as a result of the domination of India by the British Empire in the mid-18th century-a majority of palampores found their ultimate homes. (England remains the mother lode of palampores for serious collectors.) Throughout the long Georgian and Victorian periods, palampores remained fashionable accessories that spoke of colonial wealth and glamour.
Palampores enjoyed renewed interest from the Aesthetic Movement in the late 19th century, which gave Orientalism a new lease on life. During the 1890s in the United States, the American Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase decorated the main room of his summer house in the Shinnecock Hills of Southampton, New York, with a series of identical deep-blue tree-of-life palampores. They remain set in place on wall panels there to this day, somewhat decayed but still alluringly exotic.
Because of the fragile nature of any fabric, and of light
cotton in particular, few old palampores have survived, and the
prices of those that have are correspondingly high. According to
Titi Halle of the Cora Ginsburg antique textile gallery in New
York, 17th-century palampores are virtually impossible to find on
the market today, while 18thand 19th-century pieces can range in
price from $15,000 to $60,000. These great-granddaddies of the
India print bedspreads that were staples of 1960s dorm-room
decorating work equally well with traditional and contemporary
furnishings. Furthermore, despite their considerable cost they
look far less pretentious than European tapestries of comparable
age and value, and given their often considerable size-palampores
could be woven up to ten feet wide-a single piece can be the
making of a room.