I absolutely love my stain glass crazy quilt. I mean abso-lutely A-DORE. It makes me very so happy just to look at it. Maybe it’s because it took me so crazy long. Or because it turned out almost exactly how I was imagining.
This whole thing started when I was drawing in my journal. One winter afternoon I was sitting in my living room. Of course, there was three feet of snow outside the window and the smoke rising from my neighbors’ chimney was freezing as it rose. My picture windows opened up to a view filled with nuthatches pecking at oak trees, ornamental crab apples shiny red – frozen on the tree branches, and snow piled thick and soft through the neighborhood. My parents were over for a visit and we sat chatting while I sketched. When I finished drawing I wrote beside the picture of a stain glassed inspired sunset – “This would make a great quilt. It would be crazy to do!” Then my dad looked over my should and said “That’s beautiful! I would like that.” Well, what could I do? Two years later, two hundred squares not larger than two inches, and over two hundred hours of work it was finished. I started in the top left corner and just kept at it. Every piece was hand placed and hand stitched two different ways. Every once in a while, it would sit on my workspace while I tried to figure out a particular creative problem. “What colour should go here?” “How do I work a piece THIS SMALL without it tearing or fraying?” Once I got into the flow of things this quilt became so soothing to work on. It was a part of my life. An hour or two a day for so long. “Which stitch will I use here?” “How does this flow to the next?”
Most people look at the finished quilt and see a little picture. But there are a few rare ones who zoom in and see a hundred different little hidden gems.