Each Stitch is a Prayer

Each Stitch is a Prayer  95" square

Hand dyed rayon, machine pieced and hand quilted in 2002 - 2003.

The first of the Protection Blankets I made in response to September 11, 2001. 

Embroidered spirals and the word peace interrupt the dense hand quilting. 

The traditional diamond in square design is an obvious reference to the Amish people, known to be pacifists.    I quilted it in my lap during the build up to the Iraq war.  The war about weapons of mass destruction that came after 9/11.  

This piece has shown three times in public.   The first time at three person exhibition Family Matters in 2003 in WKP Kennedy Gallery in North Bay, the curator Dennis Geden put three mother-artists together.   Lise Melhorn-Boe (who makes artist books and assemblages) and Cheryl Paguerk, a photographer.   Like me, these two continue to exhibit.

The second time was in a solo exhibition in Guelph at the Greenwood quiltery, a textile art and quilting supply store with an attached gallery.  I am sorry that this gallery is no longer.  I also used this large simple quilt during the trunk shows I presented to Ontario quilt guilds through the early 2000's. 

In 2006,  I was given a show with the Cambridge Library / Art gallery system, at the Preston branch.

I showed twelve quilts and called the exhibition Protection Blankets.  This was the last time that this beauty was shown in public. It's a large soft piece, really gentle.  

We began to use it as a bed quilt.  It is the perfect summer quilt, and in the winter, we layer two more quilts on top and feel like turtles in our shell. 

A couple of years ago, I began to have my early work professionally photographed with digital camera.

Most of my early pieces were documented with slide and then when I started this blog, I would pin up older pieces to my wall and photograph them myself.  

Nick Dubecki in Sudbury is helping me with this project and he photographs both front and back of each quilt for me.  These quilts are my legacy.

This past Christmas, I passed the quilt onto my oldest daughter and her husband to use as a bed quilt.

quilt number 46  2003

Bidwell

Bidwell
completed in 2017 for the solo exhibition at the David Kaye gallery in Toronto
I was so pleased to be asked to show at David's gallery.  He exhibits the most important of Canadian fine craft artists.  Dorothy Caldwell and Sandra Brownlee show in his gallery.  Barbara Klunder does too.

I made the murmuration of French knots without knowing how I would use it.
I saw blackbirds flying over me as I drove my gravel country road on Manitoulin.
They looked like moving cross stitches to me, in the sky.
The rest of the quilt came together from a reverse applique sampler I had made when my grandson was born in 2009, and some earth coloured linen, and some white space.

The white space is important in this piece.
It is emptiness.
I put loops and swirls of wind into the white space, but it is still emptiness.
cotton, hand embroidered, hand pieced, hand reverse applique, hand quilted, 66.5 x 63"  2017

number 106