coming in from the cold quilt

studio notes to the tune of goose song

first, a note on these letters: with the dawn of spring and the house-cleaning and the fresh start of it all, I am giving Warmly a little refresh, too. I am so grateful for the support I receive for this substack, and I want to pour more energy and time into that. Instead of once or twice a month, I am going to come to this space every week, rotating through four themes so there’s an update for each, each month. One week will be a letter from Vermont with the comings and goings of life at home and on our scrappy homestead called Noisy Village (see the first post from three weeks ago), a week for recipes called Common Kitchen (read April’s here), a week for craft titled Busy Hands (last week we made wool flower patches), and this last week in my new series is for updates from my studio. I’m calling it Goose Song, and you’ll read more about why today in my first note.

From where I sit at my old wooden table at 6:30 in the morning on a Tuesday I can look straight ahead and see the front of my coop. A small barn really, with an old door I’ve fixed twice, tulips pushing up on the south side and my clothesline running to the north. I can hear the chickens and ducks and geese squawking themselves awake for the day, at times almost melodic and at others a true and earnest CLANGING of honks and quacks and clucks. It’s the soundtrack to my studio, whether they are out pecking and pulling up grass in the field or staying close to home, the honks of geese are ever in my company. Sometimes when I get a few hours to work I can watch them come and go from the coop, look up and meet the blue eye of one of the mated pairs sitting on her nest. Today the Canada goose who remains in our flock is outside first waiting for the boys to come out and open the coop door and fill the food troughs, honking intermittently in a just-slightly different tone. From my small studio at the back of the house I have sewn, stitched, written, folded, painted, and mended to the sound of goose song.

I’ve got a tall glass of cold tulsi tea I brewed yesterday thinking I’d have time for it to cool and tote it to baseball practice but as I frittered about at 2:10 knowing I needed to be pulling out of the driveway at 2:15 I realized the tea wouldn’t be joining me, and thanks to yesterday Jessica’s hurried state this morning’s me gets a cold glass of iced tea while I write. The sunrise was nearly red for a fleeting moment around 5:15 this morning and I suspect it's telling us there’s a rain pattern on the way. This week has been beautifully sunny and warm with many hours spent in the garden and a few spent tying and binding a quilt in the grass. Last night we nearly had a golden hour, the sunset lasting longer than it has all season casting a glow over the daffodils and the fork stuck in the garden where I quit for the day. I watched the sun sink behind the mountain from my studio table, visible just beyond the coop, and put the last stitches into a quilt I’ve been working on here and there for months. It felt euphoric really – to say you’re all finished to a big project that’s been waiting to hear it for so long.

I gathered it up and took it right outside to take some photos in the warm, breezy, springy light and the spring peepers cheered for me from their stream and the violets held their petals out in celebration. To finish a quilt is truly a celebratory moment, all the parts of the process from imagination to arithmetic on paper to washing, picking, dyeing, cutting, piecing, ironing, trimming, adding, taking away, rearranging, doubting, rethinking, scrap-gathering, measuring, improvising, pressing, sandwiching, smoothing, basting, tying, attaching, stitching all come together into a useful, beautiful object ready to live on as greater than the sum of its parts. But a quilt is something human as they say, and just as we are never finished growing, learning, becoming, unraveling, rebuilding, transforming, a quilt isn’t really finished either. It will go on to hold stories, keep toes warm, soothe and soften, brighten and be beheld. So this quilt, with its long becoming and its stories of mine already sewn in, is really just beginning.

I’m calling this one the Coming in from the Cold Quilt. The background is a delicate blue calico printed cotton called Dauphine by French General, and the squares are made up of a rainbow of scraps from my linen collection – mostly naturally dyed and too precious to let go of even a 3” square. So here they all are together, creating a kaleidoscope of color inside the soft vintage blue. When I started piecing this quilt I was watching the 90s television show Northern Exposure. If you’re not familiar with it, a young New York City doctor moves to Alaska to serve a term of rural service to pay off medical school debt furnished by the state, and small-town antics, romances, and mischief ensue all wrapped up in inspiring 90s wardrobe with a sprinkle of magical realism. John Corbett plays a philosophical radio DJ inventor named Chris Stevens and I think I’ll tell my sons they get their last name from him (I kid! But boy is he a dreamboat). It was good company while I put together all these little scraps into something, and once it was something – I put it away. An easy project to move to the proverbial back burner, I didn’t pick this quilt back up for months. The next time I did I happened to be listening to an audiobook by Eowyn Ivey called Black Woods Blue Sky, coincidentally also set in Alaska with a hearty dose of magical realism. I crafted a quilt back from patchwork experiments that didn’t make the front of the quilt, and knew it needed warm red ties to add a little fire to the sea of blue. It sat again, for months again, paused and moving week to week back to the to-do list. Until last week, perhaps moved by the growing sun and the growing grass and the seas of yellow flowers I took the quilt off ice and pulled it out to finish. The work was quick now as it often is at the very end of the work on a big project, and after waffling between red and blue and brown I selected a perfectly buttery, maizey, daff-o-down-dilly yellow to bind it up and call it done. The final result is one part scrap quilt, one part soft rainbow, one part vintage palette charm, warm and sweet all the way through. The quilt is available now should you want to be the one to write the next chapter of its story.

In May I’m turning my attention to picnic quilts – with all that sun and flowers and every reason to be outside, they’re the ones we need right now. I’ll make two or three to put in my shop for the end of them month. First to settle on colors – I’m thinking blue and white, I’m seeing apricot and stripes, I’m imagining the sweetness of lilac above and below my head while I rest under the tree. It’s our last full month of school for the year and soon we’ll be toting our own picnic quilt to the lake and the river as often as we can. The way these hold up cannot be oversold – I’m always surprised at the way I can truly use them and they stay resilient and soft and delightful. More on that next time we meet here, at the end of May, accompanied by goose song.

Speaking of songs, here’s a little love song playlist I put together and I’ve been enjoying lately. Call it spring fever or maybe just my love for love, maybe something more, but it’s a vibe I’m into for May.

warmly,

Jessica