Special Report

Claire Powers Presentation at the January 2012 Meeting

by Diana Hunt

Claire Powers, from Rockton (formerly from Rockford) provided a show of her appliqué quilts to the Scrapbag Quilt Club at the January 2012 meeting. Not only an excellent artistic quilter, Claire has lots of stories to share about how the quilts were conceived and/or executed. Claire said that showing her quilts and telling her stories are not about personal glory, which she richly deserves, but about sharing techniques and life lessons from herself to her audience and from the audience back to her. Claire has sewn clothes all her life. She had eight children and sewed for need as well as pleasure. Shortly after the country's Bi-centennial, when quilting was being revived as an art form, Claire decided to make a sampler quilt. Without any training, she laid out scraps of fabric and began to stitch them down. She used one large fabric as the background, not knowing about making smaller, easier to handle blocks.

Working around the children and mostly at night, Claire took two years to complete the top. She found the thickest batting she could find -- quilts were supposed to be fluffy, right? -- she stitched the layers together using a machine and by hand. After that quilt, she attended a quilt show and began to see how much more there was to quilting. She decided to take some classes and learned a lot more about putting a quilt together. She said that after about five of the children grew and left the house, she could devote more time to quilting.
She believes that she cannot do piecing of fabric to make blocks. Sewing for kids' clothing uses a wider, more forgiving 5/8th seam, but the quarter inch seam in quilting was her nemesis. She stuck to appliqué. Even today, after more than 35 years of quilting, Claire will opt to hand-stitch a corner block onto a quilt, rather than attempt to seam it by machine.

The first quilt Claire showed the Club was a house quilt. Claire had found a schoolhouse that she loved and made a block to replicate the schoolhouse. She was so satisfied with that block, she decided to make more. She had her husband drive her around the county, so she could take pictures of interesting architecture. She said he got a bit disgusted with her for stopping so much, but she had lots of designs for more blocks.

The house quilt uses pink, cranberry, and slate blue as background colors, popular colors at the time; however my sensibility did not get stopped by having each building on a different color. Indeed, each block used more and more detail to make roofs, fascia, chimneys, porches, window dressing, fences, landscape, and even some animals. There are bits of lace to dress a porch railing. Even a pink barn against a cranberry sky fits believably in the mix.

One of the delights in this presentation was that Claire, assisted by her daughter, Patti Holm, showed the quilts and then laid them out on tables. After the lecture, she invited the audience to come up and really look at the quilts. The details in a quilt might have been missed if we hadn't looked closely.

Claire says she loves to garden and lots of her quilts have exquisite flowers and leaves. She also enjoys putting birds on the quilts.

She showed two quilts that featured trees. Both quilts were smaller wall hangings. One showed a tree in white against a black background. The intricate tree branches astounded us. A lot of the branches were an eighth inch across. How in the world did she get the edges of the fabric turned under in such small pieces?

Claire explained that she sketches out the tree on the fabric, and places the uncut tree fabric onto the background as a whole, basting down the center of each branch. As she begins to appliqué the tree, she cuts about two inches ahead of where she will stitch and turns under the edges, following the basting and the sketch. OK, go get out a ruler and really look at an eighth inch. Then remember that an eighth inch branch has a raw edge on each side that must be turned under as you stitch. Where do you stuff those raw edges?

The second tree wall hanging used a more colorful background and cream and gray trees. A few wolves can be seen howling at the tiny branches. They know it is not really possible to stitch those. Narrow bands of the colorful background fabric where added to the black borders for another excellent enhancement.

While not much of a music buff, Claire said she was inspired one Sunday by a hymn and a beautiful spring morning. She made a wall hanging with some flower buds, the song's words, and some fat black birds sitting on a musical staff. The fat black birds had tails up or down, as if they were the notes of the song. It wasn't until after the quilt was completed that someone told Claire that the uprights on the notes were on the wrong side. The birds should have been flipped. Cute story.

This birdie quilt shows two more design tricks. Each black bird sports a pink wing. Claire carefully cut the wing fabric so that the coloration augmented the idea of a wing. Also, the lettering was appliquéd, then a white line was embroidered on the tops and left of each letter. At the right sides and bottoms, Claire used a darker pink line of stitches. The end result makes the lettering appear embossed from a distance. Very clever.

Another bird wall hanging was shown to me by Arletta Helms. She had found the quilt's name on the label -- Gossips. There were three blue birds on leaves and flowers. Arletta explained that two of the birds, who were facing each other, were gossiping, and the third bird walking below was trying hard to hear and was stamping his feet in frustration. Of course, none of that was on the label. Arletta made it up. I'm sorry that Claire had not heard Arletta's imaginative story about the scene.

Claire said she wanted to try other subjects than flowers and birds. So she completed an underwater scene, Neptune's Garden. Very fanciful fish were swimming in eyelash yarn seaweeds. Sheer iridescent lace twisted back on itself as kelp. The scene was beautiful from a distance, but when we got close to it, we could see fish and sea horses quilted into the borders in tiny even stitches. There were beads on the fish for eyes and bubbles in the water. It was fascinating to see how Claire used her materials to further the design elements of rocks, kelp, and water.

Another instance of non-fabric used in a scene was on the Japanese theme quilt. One of the designs was a dragon, swimming in waves. Claire had used an iridescent black fabric -- yikes! I even have some of that! -- for the dragon and outlined his tail with black rick rack for scales. Claire told me that sewing down all the points of the rick rack was tedious to her. She can love stitching down eighth inch dragon eyeball slits but rick rack is tedious? I'm just sorry I did not stretch out the quilt to get a full photo of the dragon. This picture was created by combining two pictures, so isn't completely accurate.

Another photographic failure was not getting a full picture of the quilt depicting "a shepherd lifting the curtain of the sky." Claire explained that for the 25th anniversary of walking on the moon, she created a scene of a shepherd on a mountain attempting to pull back the night sky to see what was under it. Talk about an imaginative story. The small photo shows some of the quilting in the borders. Claire said that, yes, there was some piecing on this quilt in the borders and corner stones, and she had a devil of a time trying to get the quilt to lay flat.

Claire reminded me that artists work in themes, learning more and more about the medium and the theme as they go. Then artists try something new, maybe the result of a quilt club challenge or a life change and make art for the new thing, learning more and stretching as they go.

What is your current theme?

by Diana Hunt
dianahunt@me.com