Saturday, October 4, 2014

30th Annual West Branch Quilt Walk

Yesterday I was finally able to see the West Branch Quilt Walk, established 30 years ago by quilters wanting to raise money for the area's first Hospice care. I learned that it will also be the last one. The founders are getting up in years, and there are not enough younger folk willing to take on the project. A story too often told.

West Branch, MI is near the Ogemaw hills, Up North by Troll standards but a mere two and a half hours from Metro Detroit. It calls itself a Victorian town, and there are some lovely Victorian homes and buildings.


The quilts are displayed in various venues throughout town, from the library and city hall to the antique malls and even the jewelry store and wine store.

Some of my favorites were the Redwork quilts. This was a pre-printed panel beautifully embroidered and hand quilted.

A Redwork Sampler included patterns of all vintages.


 Embroidered, Pieced and Quilted by the Rifle River Quilt Guild
Botanical Redwork, Owned, Pieced and Quilted by Barb MacDonald of Oscoda.

A cute bluework featured a tea theme.
 Tea Party Time by Barb MacDonald, Oscoda

There were some lovely applique quilts as well.

 Pieced and owned by Barb MacDonald and quilter by Nancy Webster

 I loved this Sunbonnet Sue Sampler Owned, Pieced and Quilted by Beverly Baumgart, Alger and the The Pink Ladies Group.






It was a nice surprise to see some art quilts as well; by Joan Berg-Rezmer of Gladwin.







A lovely portrait of her husband by Cindy HeitMuller was quilted and thread work embellished by Jan Berg-Rezmer.

Vintage quilt tops pieced in the 1970s by Anna Baylis were quilted by Kathy Curtis and owned by Karen Beyerlein of Lupton.

 



And of course pieced quilts abounded. This pattern was one I also made, a late 1990s pattern from a quilt magazine.
 I'm a sucker for pansies.

Pieced and quilted by Treva Meyers, Clarksville MI 
and bought in 1984 by Terry Boyce of Rose City.

Another Barb MacDonald quilt showing great fussing cutting. Hot Flashes was all hand sewn.





 An amazing paper pieced work by Gerald Brauer of Greenbush.

Some lucky quilts were displayed on beds in a furniture store, like this Edyta Sitar umbrella pattern by Barb MacDonald.
 A state star sampler was huge.


So glad I had a chance to see this show, even if it is the last one. There is hope that reorganization and new leadership will birth a new show in the future.

Friday, October 3, 2014

Rereading The Great Gatsby

So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why it Endures
Maureen Corrigan
Little, Brown and Company
Publication Sept 9, 2014
ISBN 9780316230070
$26.00

When the last Gatsby movie version came out I reread the novel, along with Tender is the Night and Flapper short stories by Fitzgerald that had appeared in magazines. Yet even before I had finished her book Corrigan had me reading Gatsby once again.

How many times have I read Gatsby? I read it in high school several times, first in the paperback used by high school English classes. It was not required reading for my classes, but in my teen years I was reading Modern fiction and spent my much of my precious allowance at the bookstore. Then I joined The Literary Guild and obtained cheaply bound sets of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Joyce, and of course Fitzgerald.

In those days Fitzgerald was not my favorite of the great Max Perkins discoveries, nor was Hemingway. I adored Thomas Wolfe – his language, his snippets of lovely insight. But Wolfe's writing was self-absorbed and emotional and I was a self-absorbed emotional teen, and neither of us had much control but spilled out like a roaring deluge. Some years later I found him unreadable. A year or so back I reread Look Homeward, Angel and appreciated Wolfe again. But I remembered Fitzgerald as a writer about romances and excesses, and his books had left my library many moves ago.

Corrigan maintains that we read Gatsby too young, that it is appropriated as a high school text based on it's diminutive length, before we understand regret and the powerful urge to revive the dead past. As a girl I did understand regret and nostalgia; moving at age 10 having set it's “deforming” foot on my soul. I was too young to appreciate the fine, honing work Fitzgerald accomplished in this beautifully faceted gem, and too young to truly 'get' Gatsby. My reading of a few years ago I was surprised by the mystery of Gatsby and the violence I had forgotten.

This reading I noticed the beauty of the language, how every scene is crystalline and sharp, how we are told just what we need to be told. How did I miss that before? I was labeled a “naive” reader in college, and I suppose even after all those critical classes I am still a naive reader. I am a speed reader, too, and too often forget to slow down and read words and sentences, not paragraphs. Somehow this reading I took my time.

Corrigan knows her subject. Fresh Air book critic and a professor who teaches Gatsby, she has read the novel fifty times. She writes about going to her New York City high school to discuss Gatsby, and like all teachers finds student's fresh perspectives bring up insights and readings she had not thought of. That is the mark of good literature: an ever freshening spring that revives each drinker whose thirst is slacked according to the needs they bring to it. How many readings can a book take? As many readings as we have years since we are never the same person each reading. Life jostles us around, marks it's losses like hash-tags, and we come at things with new wisdom even when looking at familiar scenery.

Never for a second is Corrigan boring. It's like having a great day at the amusement park while teacher surreptitiously pours knowledge into our ear. We venture into the nether regions of the Library of Congress on a last minute mission. We learn how the Armed Services Editions paperbacks spread literature through the ranks and helped revive Gatsby. We hear about Fitzgerald and Zelda's excesses which led them from the beautiful to the damned.

Corrigan reminds us that this is a Post-War novel. Nick goes East because he no longer feels at home in the Mid-West after service abroad. Gatsby and Tom were also in the service. The relationship between “buddies” Nick and Gatsby, Gatsby and his mentor Dan Cody, the rivalry between Tom and Gatsby and Tom and Wilson—this novel is about men. Fitzgerald bemoaned that sales were slow because the novel did not attract female readers. I get that: I don't get The Lord of the Rings mostly because it is about a war story about a bunch of guys. But I don't buy that excuse. Fitzgerald was typecast as the chronicler of the 1920s and people were so over the 20s.

From the perspective of fifty years reading Gatsby I resonate to lines I hardly took in as a girl. Such as Jordan's comment about liking large parties: “They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.” I recall life in Philadelphia, its teeming streets, where I could sit in a park and not have one person notice I existed. There is a privacy in crowds. Brilliant.

Gatsby is a love song to the city. Midwesterner Nick talks about New York City, watching people live their glamorous lives. “At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.” And later Nick writes, “I see now that this had been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern Life.” It is a failed love affair in the end, and Nick returns to his roots, still stunned, perhaps more affected by his sojourn East than by the War.

Nick tells us the story of Gatsby from two years perspective. He is compelled to tell the story, trying I suppose to put some form and meaning to the tragedy. Nick had a history of passively accepting the confidence man role. Near the end he tells Gatsby that he is “worth the whole damn bunch of them put together.” Later he tells us, “I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.”

“You can't repeat the past.”
“Can't repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

“I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly.

Nick is possessed by Gatsby and it is only by telling the story that he can begin to shrug off his burdon. Or is Nick trying to recreate the past, knowing it is futile? Either way, like Gatsby he is tangled in the web of memory and can't get free. Corrigan states that Nick loved Gatsby, no dispute. I wonder. Some things seen can't be unseen, and an eternal altercation arises as we endeavor to shake it off. We bury it, put out our eyes, stop our ears, but can't rid the ghost, so we try naming it.

So many questions are raised by Gatsby. About the role of class and money in America. About idol worship and dreams and cold reality. We weigh Gatsby's relation to bootleggers and larceny against Tom and Daisy's carelessness and selfishness. Nick's casual relationships to Gatsby's holding onto a youth's lovely imaginings. We each have to decide, after all, what was so “great” about Gatsby.

Corrigan's book is a pleasure and a revelation. 

I thank NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for access to the e-book for review.




Thursday, October 2, 2014

It's Not Over Yet...More Small Quilts

They just keep coming. I know you are weary of them, but I can't stop. Most are no longer with me, and this way I get to see them again!

I made this wall hanging for a minister's 14th wedding anniversary. The applique pattern was from "The Quilted Cross". Hand appliqued and quilted.
 I bought some images on fabric at a quilt show and made little hangings for my room.
 Then I got smart and printed images on fabric with my computer!
 I bought a book of Klee's art and was inspired to see what I could do. Fused fabrics, machine quilted.
 A class with Gwen Marston taught us to create our own applique patterns. This was my quilt from that class. Hand appliqued and quilted.
 This cute pattern using handkerchiefs called Saucy Senorita always gets attention. Hand embroidered,  hand appliqued, and hand quilted.
 This handkerchief quilt is simple but vibrant. Recently gifted to a friend. Machine quilted.

I found the vintage blocks in an antique shop and set them with vintage plaid fabric. Ain't they cute?
 My first quilt guild in Jackson, MI had a Christmas fabric exchange...and a challenge using a printed on fabric poem. I used a pattern from a quilt magazine. Hand appliqued and quilted.
Do you enjoy making small quilts?

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

More Small Quilts

As I have been quilting since 1991 I have made a lot of small quilts.

One year my husband and son bought me some Keepsake Quilt catalog quilt kits, including this fusible applique, machine quilted Blue Heron.
When I was preparing to make my Barbie Quilt I did this prototype to try the computer printing and the dressing the image.
 I loved the image from a 1920s valentine card and turned it into an embroidery pattern. The applique patterns are from Mountain Mist. Hand appliqued, hand embroidered, and hand quilted. Donated to a library fund raiser.
 "Brain Fog" was my donation to Ami Simm's Alzheimer's Quilt Initiative in it's early days. There is a sheer organza overlay with the dotted pattern. Machine quilter.

A favorite quilt which always hangs on my bedroom wall is this collage of printed textile, handkerchiefs, lace and trims, vintage buttons and pins.
 I had not yet learned embroidery. Didn't matter, I embroidered anyway! The crayon tinted image is from a 1920s Flower Fairy book. I used silk morning glory flowers, beads, and a sheer overlay.
 I was able to take a surface design course many years ago and created this textile which I hand quilted and beaded. Donated. Can't even remember where it went!
Early in my quilting life I was broke. Somehow the local quilt store thought I was up to teaching classes and this was a class sample I made. Hand quilted.
 My son was a dinosaur freak. What kid wasn't in the Jurassic Park days? This was from a pattern book which I can't recall the name of. Hand quilted.
My husband saw this quilt in a shop and wanted it. It is made of small squares of fabric fused together. Yikes. It hung in his office at Christmas.
 This sampler has a theme: Bachelor's Puzzle, Wedding Ring, Steps to the Altar, and a heart!Hand quilted.
Sometimes I just want to try a pattern and see if I like it, so I made this Trip Around the World. Loved the colors. Hated sewing the squares. Hand quilted. Donated.
I had to keep giving these small quilts away so I could make MORE!

Monday, September 29, 2014

Portrait Of The President As A Young Man

Education: Any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts may be considered educational. From Wikipedia

I have studied John Quincy Adams backwards: from reading books about his parents, to his wife's biography, to his later career as a senator, to this book of his early life and career. It is not logical, but I am so glad it happened this way.


The Remarkable Life of John Quincy Adams by Phyllis Lee Levin was made available to me through NetGalley; the book will be published in January 2015. I was familiar with the events and people. This book fleshed out the details but more importantly offered another view of John Quincy: a youth who suffered home sickness and depression while enduring long separations from his family; a teenager in the throes of first love; a young adult conflicted over career expectations; a man of passionate love but tied to parental expectations; a sentimental father whose wife miscarried five times and was devastated by the loss of an only daughter and suicide of a son. This is not the John Quincy that too many consider him to be: a dour, ram-rod straight, cold fish of a man.

The photographs of John Quincy as a state elder embattled with Congress show a bald man with piercing unflinching eyes that are quite unsettling, communicating all the battles and disappointments of a lifetime. He looks straight at you, hands clenched, his beloved books beside him.
John Quincy Adams - copy of 1843 Philip Haas DaguerreotypePublic Domain
Southworth & Hawes - The Metropolitan Museum of Art
But in his youth he was a different sort, tending to fatness and in personality like his father, but with his mother's dark eyes and good looks. Around the time of his marriage to Louisa Catherine Johnson he was enough of a heart throb that she was sincerely attached. in Copley's portrait he is looking straight at us, but a smile plays at the corner of his mouth. He is a man ready to start life in earnest, in love and about to become the minister to St. Petersburgh, Russia.
John Quincy in 1796 by Copley
John Quincy is rated among the most intelligent of our presidents. As a child he accompanied his father to Europe where he was exposed to other cultures and hobnobbed with the movers and shakers of his time. He enjoyed opera and theater. Formal education consisted of tutors, various universities, and self-education through reading and study. At age fourteen he became a translator for the minister to St. Petersburg. Later in life his hobby horse was the study of weights and measures and the need for standardization, and he wrote a definitive paper on the subject. He wrote poetry and enjoyed playing the flute. He was a little weak in Latin. But we will forgive him that lapse.

Abigail wrote that her son was passionate and emotional. Years in the diplomatic core required complete control and repression of personal feelings. He asked his wife Louisa to use faith and philosophy to conquer the depressions and sorrows that afflicted her. It worked for him. But the extroverted, sensitive and romantic Louisa's frail physical health and tentative self-esteem buckled again and again. Her memoirs written late in life make John Quincy out as cold and dismissive. His own letters and diary speak volumes about his inner emotional life, and he was anything but cold. The lovers often misunderstood each other, but their love never faltered.

I already had an admiration for John Quincy's resolute and independent mind that kept The Constitution as it's lodestar and his parent's example as his role mode. Levin's book opened up John Quincy's humanity.

How many public servants today are willing to give up financial security, family, health, and even the good opinion of our colleagues to"duty" and our country? Our Founding Fathers like George Washington, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams had that kind of commitment.



Phyllis Lee Levin
St, Martin's Press
Publication: January 6, 2015
$35.00
ISBN: 9781137279620