Timberlock Wallhanging for Diane and Fritz Green
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| We've known Diane
and Fritz Green for more than 20 years after meeting every summer at
Camp Timberlock on Indian Lake in
the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. Several years ago, Bob and
I visited Diane and Fritz at their home in New Hampshire and I admired their
living room with a fieldstone fireplace and windows looking out at tall pine trees. Above
the fireplace hung a Hawaiian quilt that was very nice but did not match
the style nor any of the colors in the room. I suggested that they hang the
Hawaiian quilt somewhere else in their house and get another for this special
spot. Ever since then, I have been watching for a pattern that would be
appropriate for that setting.
At Camp Timberlock in August 2003, Fritz asked if he could commission me to make a quilt for Diane's Christmas gift. I told him I'd be happy to make it and would only ask to be paid for the materials. I said I could not promise to finish it by Christmas and my search for a pattern continued. In November 2002, Cindy Taylor Clark had been the guest speaker for the Concord Piecemaker's Quilting Guild and sold patterns after the meeting. One of the members bought a copy of "Woods & Water" but never used it. It was originally created as a bed-size raffle quilt . She later donated the pattern to the New England Quilt Museum library where I volunteer. I bought it from our continuous yard sale and used 4 of the blocks as the basis for this wallhanging for Diane and Fritz. I took all these photos with the Olympus C-750 Ultrazoom Digital Camera we gave ourselves for Chanukah in December 2003. |
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This block reminds me of swimming with Diane and playing in my big black truck tubes. The swimmer's bodies, hair and bathing suits are ultrasuede which is great for tiny pieces because it doesn't ravel and doesn't need to have the edges turned under. The sail boat in the original pattern was generic. I surfed the Web and found both line drawings and color photos of Sunfish sailboats so this one could look just like the boats at Timberlock. The striped sail is pieced of separate colors. |
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The canoe had to be red and the paddle had to be yellow, just like at camp. After dressing the man in the canoe in brown ultrasuede, I decided he looked boring so I embroidered yellow and red plaid onto his shirt. I couldn't find fabric that reminded me of birch bark so I used plain white cotton and embroidered the lines on the tree using photos of birch trees I found by surfing the web. |
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I wasn't able to find black and white print fabrics that were just right for the loon so I created it from solid fabrics and embroidered the details. |
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The cabin in the original pattern was a generic log cabin. To personalize the quilt, I e-mailed Bruce Catlin and received a line drawing of the tentlets he has built at camp. This is the one Diane and Fritz usually stay in. Once the block was finished, it looked a little empty so I again wrote to Bruce and he sent me a photo of Big Cheif, the camp's excursion boat. Here it is towing two red ultrasuede canoes up the Jessup River so the guests can paddle back from Dug Mountain Falls. The writing on the boat was printed on my computer printer. |
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I always create fabric labels for my quilts and stitch them on the back in the lower right hand corner. I print them on an old Epson high resolution dot matrix printer in the New England Quilt Museum library. The fabric is temporarily stabilized with freezer paper ironed on the back so it will feed smoothly into the printer. Since the ribbon has ink like a typewriter, it is quite washable and needs no further chemical treatment. The label always tells who made the quilt for who, when, where, what our relationship is, where the pattern originated, etc. This label is white cotton matching the fabric on the back of the quilt printed with brown ink. |