Every Quilt Tells a Story by Helen Kelley

Author:Helen Kelley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Voyageur Press
Published: 2010-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Workshop Is a Trying Experience

Whenever an exciting quilting teacher comes to town and I feel the need for inspiration, I sign up for a class. Let me tell you here and now, that in a workshop, I am an unequivocal dud. I find the lighting unrelenting, the lack of my favorite tools frustrating, the cacophony of other students around me distracting, and the forced creativity painful. Everyone else seems to throw herself into the learning challenge with boundless energy, but not me.

I took a class last fall from a talented, famous teacher. The object of the workshop was to create a color “experience” using a single, repetitive, simple shape cut from an enormous variety of tints and shades and textures. The teacher was really good. As he spoke, he spread out an enormous trove of colored stationery, construction paper, wallpaper, transparent colored film, and metallics on the classroom tables and invited us to help ourselves, to immerse ourselves in the excitement and emotion of color.

The room was filled with creative and clever people. They seemed to know exactly where they were going and what they were doing. Even one small, nine-year-old boy snipped and glued with enthusiasm. Excitement permeated everything as collages began to grow and spread across the walls.

Let me tell you how I coped—I hid. In the classroom was a closet with a sink in it that was meant as a place for making coffee. It was quiet and isolated. I staked out my “claim” in that closet. I sorted colored shapes on the drainboard of the sink. I cut and glued my paper quilt, tearing off scraps that “felt” wrong, re-cutting, re-gluing, and re-working. I struggled, finding myself near tears of frustration. I wrestled with making my colors blend together, my pieces fit and match. Outside my closet, the delirium went on.

The teacher found me. He brought me out and set me to work in the middle of all those high achievers. He thought that I should work in better light and a freer atmosphere. The tiny closet had been my refuge. My struggle was an embarrassment.

At the end of the day, we studied our paper quilts as they hung on the walls, and we talked about them. Some of the other collages were quite wonderful. My own quilt was mediocre, but acceptable. Oh, how I had wanted to do something spectacular!

We swept the cut-aways into the trash bin and picked up our tools. The teacher neatened up his spectrum of delicious colors for another day and another class. We went out into the icy twilight. I passed a flower bed of white roses that were frozen into a delicate blush by the early freeze. They were crowned with tufts of new white snow and backed with the deep, rich green of evergreen shrubs pocketed with snowy mounds. I was suddenly overwhelmed with the richness, the subtleties of the hues and tints.

I drove out of the parking ramp and stopped at the traffic light at the corner.

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