Strip pieced landscapes

I was very taken with the photograph on the cover of Joen Wolfrom's Landscapes & Illusions, 1990 and resolved to try her technique. Why I didn't design a simple landscape is anybody's guess since Joen's technique involves tricky little angles. But no...I don't ever shrink from the nearly impossible. So I decided to make a quilt to give the then headmaster of Santa Barbara Middle School, Kent Ferguson in gratitude for his guidance of our children during their early adolescent years. The quilt features characters in the stories Kent used to tell around the campfire in the evenings on the school's long bicycle trips to the Four Corners area of the southwestern United States. Included are Spider Woman, Jumping Mouse and the Crow. The figure of Spider Woman is inspired by a pastel by RC Gorman which we have hanging on our living room wall. She is seated on a copy one of the Navajo rugs in our collection. The spider on the loom is beaded. I will freely admit that this was one of the most difficult projects I have ever tackled because I had not really mastered paper piecing which is the technique I used to construct the figures. These were then incorporated into the strip pieced background.

Southwest Legends

1998

36 x 28 inches

As if that wasn't enough self-abuse, I made the quilt double sided. On the back I used fabrics featuring Kokopelli, Kent's favorite legendary character, which I chanced to find that year. The bicycle wheel with the diamond inscribed in it is the logo of the SB Middle School.  

Diamond in the Wheel

1998

36 x 28 inches

What nearly killed me was a few years later I got a phone call saying that mice had nibbled on the quilt during the summer while it was in storage in Kent's office. Fortunately, I had enough scraps still lying around that I could applique them on. The damage was barely noticeable.