Janet's Contrast Quilt - Thank You Dr. Ives

Janet's Contrast Quilt – Thank You Dr. Ives

     Here is how I started quilting five years ago.  We live in a fairly small town so if you need good quality fabric you drive to Dallas or Austin to get it and believe me it gets really old after awhile.  We passed the quilt shop in Waco one day and I told my husband their fabric could not be any worse than our one fabric store so in we went.  I had watched my grandmother quilt all my life but she only used scraps from clothing, tea towels, chicken feed sacks, whatever she had.  Here was a store with beautiful fabric and quilts like I had never seen before.  I started picking up patterns and was especially drawn to one that was paper pieced.  A clerk in the store asked me if I quilted and when I said no she informed me I could not do that pattern.  Wrong thing to say, she might as well have waved a red flag in front of my face.  So I bought a beginners book on paper piecing by Alex Anderson and started to teach myself.  This was the first time I learned about the Ives color chart where the primary colors are magenta, turquoise and golden yellow.  What I liked about it was I could make out a lot of the colors.  As some of you know I'm color blind.  My husband picks out my fabrics, puts them in order, numbers them and I write the number on the pattern.  He liked it so much he began to quilt, and then to win big blue ribbons.  I am so happy and proud (we are working it out in therapy).  Anyway, when Contrast was picked for this month I dug through my discard box because I knew I had a square that was a great example of contrast on the Ives color chart.  If you are looking for one I finally found one at an art supply store.  By the way, years later I did buy the pattern I fell in love with and 300 hours later I had a quilt top.   It is called Anesthesia because I had had day surgery and while still pretty sedated I ordered the pattern (the last one and they were not going to restock) and a lot of really expensive fabric from Batiks Plus.  I got an e-mail from them the next day telling me my order had shipped.  I called asking them what order.  The clerk said you ordered a pattern and fabric and they were sorry but they could not take it back as the fabric was cut and it really had already shipped.  The whole day I tried to figure out how to tell my husband I spent $360.00 in my sleep.  I finally decided it was his entire fault because they told him to keep an eye on me and he took a nap.  We are working it out in therapy.

 P.S.  We just had our twenty fifth wedding anniversary.  Talk about contrast.  When we got married David had hair, neither of us wore glasses, between us we were eighty pounds lighter, and really broke.  I wore a suit I already had, the wedding party wore their own clothes and the reception was chocolate cheesecake, regular cheesecake and punch.  David took me hiking for the weekend at the Boy Scout camp south of us.  So last weekend we got married.  David wore a tux and my present from him was a beautiful tea length fifties style Oleg Cassini blush satin dress with an ivory chiffon and lace overlay covered with tiny pearls and covered buttons all the way to the hem.  And yes he picked it out by himself.  It was perfect as it was boned all the way around which held the bust stiff and kept if off of my mastectomy incision which still has not healed. It also gave me the illusion that I still had a bust. Our original wedding party attended and a long time friend who decided at fifty to become a minister officiated. She is also a monster quilter and walked off with a bunch of ribbons from the fair this month. We also had our oldest and closest friends surrounding us while we took our new vows.   We only had twelve guests because we got married in the chapel at the hospital.  It is an oval room with one wall consisting entirely of a stain glass window from floor to ceiling depicting the Creation with a huge mariners compass in the middle, my favorite pattern and this month’s quilt.