Well Travelled Pears

Well Traveled Pears

 

This quilt hangs in the entry of my home, and always gets lots of attention from visiting friends, and  I love to tell the story about it!

Back when we lived in Ohio, I belonged to a large quilt guild, and we had what were called “splinter groups”, in our case it was a 12 person group we called the “Stress Knots”. We met once a month in a meeting house (so no one had to clean!) and once a year, it was your turn to prepare some sort of quilt like activity. In previous years I had showed the rest of my group how to dye fabric, or paper piece. My last turn to host was right before we moved to California, which was going to be quite a long car trip. I brought 20 pieces of hand dyed fabric and a pear block I had designed and printed off a bunch of copies onto freezer paper. I handed out the packets to my wonderful friends, and we all spent the next hour cutting out a pear, an accent and a leaf from freezer paper, ironed them onto the fabric and prepped them for freezer paper applique (wonderful explanation of that here).

well travelled pears 007

Then we had a blast arranging the pears on the backgrounds and putting together 20 wonderful combinations. Once the block color distributions were figured out, each got it’s own ziplock bag. They all went into a bag with needles thread and scissors, and stayed in the front seat of my car as we drove the whole  family west to Redlands, CA. I only managed to get about 7 blocks done during the drive, it took me another year and a ha lf of “free time” to hand applique the rest of them, but it was finished in October of 2005 (thanks goodness I quilted this into the quilt or I never would have remembered that!)well travelled pears 008

This was my 1st (and LAST) large hand applique project, and is a wonderful memory of “the Quilter Ladies” (as my husband and kids called them) – dear friends back in Newark, Ohio!

41 Responses

  11. Gorgeous hand-dyed fabrics! Pears are the best art fruit ever … such a nice shape. But what’s even better is that this is a reminder of your Quilter Ladies and a road trip towards a new home. Fantastic!

  21. Beautiful use of hand dyes; the pears absolutely POP off the background, and the close ups provide even more of the depth of the fabrics.
    This must be absolutely amazing in person!

  23. I loved the looks of the quilt when I saw it, but I truly love the significance of the quilt aftetr reading the story behind it.

  26. I love your quilt! The story behind it is really special too 🙂 Those sort of friends are hard to come by. I love the solids and the color variations – beautiful!!

  27. Beautiful quilt and I have to keep your link your hand dyed scarves etc are just amazing. I love the silk charmeuse.

  29. Fantastic piece! Clearly there was no rule about not eating during the group’s quilting session…..I see that some could not resist a bite

  31. Quite astonishing. I love all of it. Thank you for posting a pic of it. I think it’s just marvelous, outstanding, (I could go on but you get the picture.)

  32. I love how such a simple motif makes such a great visually graphic quilt. The quilting is absolutely awesome!

  34. This is a such a beauty and what a wonderful story to go with the quilt. Very unique. I can certainly see why this gets lots of attention.

  37. This is wonderful and I love the colors. One of my favorite things are pears in art and you have 20 of them. Enjoy, Thank you for sharing

  40. Beautiful and full of wonderful memories. Great blog. I love your style, every thing is so cute. I’ve just started as a quilt artist, so far it is definitely not paying for itself! It’s wonderful to see that you’ve had such success after persevering for two years. Congratulations and I wish you continued good luck.

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