7. Kaleidoscope

In 1983 my husband and I bought our first house and moved our young family to the community where we have lived ever since. It felt like the right time to set down some roots. Normally reserved—I would even say a bit shy—about joining groups, I knew I needed to make connections with new people. I took my first step in that direction when I joined a quilt guild, where I met people who would become close friends and who still continue to inspire me, challenge me, and inject humor and adventure into my quilting life. For many people, including me, the social thing isn't effortless, because even the friendliest and most welcoming groups include people who already know each other and have formed comfortable relationships. This can make a newcomer feel like an outsider. I made a conscious choice to ignore any natural tendency to feel excluded and just tried to imagine that people did in fact want to get to know new people. It turned out to be true.

Not too long afterwards, several members of the guild approached me about going to the Vermont Quilt Festival and staying overnight for several days so we could take classes. This seemed like a very big step to me at the time, since we were asking our husbands to assume both their own responsibilities and ours for a few days. Looking back, I don't remember a moment's hesitation on my husband's part, and when we talk about it now, neither of us can remember just how he handled the "child care" for a first- and fourth-grader during his work day. (If I were to ask my kids, I believe they would mostly remember lots of fun trips to fast food places while I was gone!) Planning for our trip took place at a house about 4 miles away from ours, and I remember riding my bicycle to the meeting, dressed in a blue-and-white striped dress. I think the reason that I remember such odd details while I scarcely know how my husband managed his work day plus child care is that going to the meeting changed my life. With people I hardly knew, I attended my first-ever quilt class and festival, where my brand-new friendships were strengthened to withstand the passing of years and where I was introduced to a whole new world of people for whom making quilts was an irresistible passion: not something they chose to do, but something they couldn't keep from doing.

I returned from Vermont energized to learn more and to create a quilt I had designed in a class with teacher Mary Golden, who taught me the particulars of piecing an eight-pointed center (finally!) and the design possibilities of the traditional kaleidoscope block. With the making of the "Kaleidoscope" quilt pictured here, I entered new territory. Now I understood that by changing the colors from one block to the next, I could create a design that flowed across the surface of the quilt; the underlying grid and the traditional block were still there but didn't have to be the primary emphasis of the design.

No one understood this idea better than local quilt teacher and artist Kathleen Weinheimer, who spoke at one of our guild meetings the next year. Several of us realized we had much to learn from someone who made quilts with an artist's eyes, and we took some classes with her. She emphasized the concept of “value” in her design process and taught us to order our fabrics from lightest to darkest as well as by color, causing us to regard our fabrics in a more painterly way. She looked at my quilt in progress, understood what I was trying to do, and told me what she was seeing.

In helping me to understand what she saw when she looked at my design, Kathleen gave me my first critique, and it is still the gold standard for me. Hearing whether or not someone likes my work can be rewarding or painful, and over the years there has been plenty of both kinds of feedback. But "constructive criticism" that is most useful to me occurs when someone tells me just what their eyes are seeing when they view my work. For the first time, someone was reminding me to keep looking at what was in front of me to see if the fabrics I was using were achieving the effect I wanted. Sounds so simple--like so many profound and wonderful lessons.

I entered “Kaleidoscope” into our guild's quilt show. In my hurry to complete the quilt on time, I hastily sewed on a purchased bias binding. The edge rippled in a sloppy way, but I overlooked that and hung it anyway. So this quilt, too, had flaws--that was nothing new. This time, however, I corrected at least one of the mistakes, and that was an unprecedented step. When "Kaleidoscope" was accepted into the very first “Quilter's Gathering”, a large regional show in Westboro, MA, I decided to fix the bad binding. Ripping out? Not yet, not for me. I sewed another, better binding over the first. The judge's form that accompanied the quilt on its return to me was designed to offer both an encouraging comment and a suggestion for improvement. I've never been sure which category my judge's comment fell into, as the note came back to me: “binding firmly applied.” If she only knew.

"Kaleidoscope” also inspired my first speaking engagement, a program presented to my guild in the mid-80's. I was no computer genius, but my husband had gotten interested in the overlap between computer programs and the geometry of quilting. Together we worked on a program to display multiple design possibilities of the kaleidoscope block. Into our guild meeting space I lugged a RadioShack TRS-80 and a color television set. This first speaking engagement was memorable at least partly because I was rattled enough that I appeared before my audience in mismatched shoes, a fact which I discovered partway through my talk. Fortunately I was among friends, and we had a good laugh. I may in fact be the only one who even remembers my shoe mistake, though others remember my dragging a tv set and computer keyboard to the meeting. The other thing I remember well is a strong impulse to share my excitement about this new world I was discovering with my fellow quilters. The teacher in me was beginning to surface again, though it would be a while before I understood that.