A Tale of Two Quilts, Pt. 4: The Finished Quilt

Note: This blog post is the last in a series of four. Starting with the first post is recommended. You can find the links to the other posts here:
Part 1 (My Mother’s Quilt) / Part 2 (The Quilting Process) / Part 3 (Quilt Cleaning)

We’ve come to the end of this 40 year journey. The quilt was pieced by my grandmother, quilted and bound by me, and washed to remove the dye bleeding it collected along the way. The time had come to take photos of it, and I wanted them to be very special. I wanted perfect lighting in the perfect setting. Photographing quilts can be a huge hassle. You can get a person to hold up the quilt while you photograph, but you need a tall person with long arms (depending on the size of the quilt) and it’s hard not to end up with hands and feet in the photos. There’s certain tape you can get that makes it possible to tape the quilt to a wall, but I’m not really tall enough to make that feasible. You can hang it off a clothesline, but I didn’t have any clotheslines accessible to me that had a cute enough background to match my vision.

I borrowed a photo backdrop frame from a photographer friend of mine and bought some clips from a hardware store to use to hold the quilts on it. I wanted to photograph my mum’s quilt and my grandma’s quilt together, and the frame was just wide enough. I found a day that I was free, and planned out where I would go. I wanted to take golden hour photos because I thought that that quality of light would really bring out the colour and texture of the quilt. I’m not an early bird at all, but I woke up at 6:00am in order to drive out to the location and have time to set up before the sun actually rose. It was freezing. I had actually intended to go out the previous day but it was extremely icy and the wind was gusting up to 100km/h and it wasn’t even easy to get myself between a building and a car, let alone trying to set up a frame and hang quilts on it. But I was running out of days before Christmas and I needed to just make it happen. So that morning I bundled up in tights, longjohns, and fleece pants. I wore a turtleneck base layer between my t-shirt and another sweater, and tucked a hot water bottle inside my winter coat. I wore my ski socks, a toque, a scarf, and warm gloves. I drove out to York Redoubt, a National Historic Site constructed in 1793 that has lots of walls that I thought could be good wind protection (because it was still very windy). The walls also have rusty tones in them that I thought would really suit my grandma’s quilt. I got there and lugged my stuff from the gate to the main cluster of buildings.

I set up the frame but the wind was so strong that it kept blowing over onto me. No matter what I did, it kept falling over. Even directly against a building, it didn’t help at all. And I was running out of time because the sun was about to rise and then the countdown on that special golden light was going to start. I abandoned the frame and decided that I’d just photograph the quilts laid flat on the frozen ground, but I hadn’t planned for this so I didn’t have anything good to use to stop the quilts from getting folded by the wind. I ended up using the parts of the backdrop frame to hold down the long edges of the quilts, and then when it felt like the wind was dying down a bit, I’d lift them off the quilts very speedily and then take photos as quickly as possible. Until a gust would fold up the quilts and I’d have to flatten them and weigh them down all over again. If you’re thinking this was very haphazard and frantic, you are correct. I ended up giving up on photos of my mum’s quilt because it was so worn and soft and had so little structure that it wasn’t just folding a corner when the wind caught it, it was becoming a full quilt ball and rolling away like a tumbleweed. This stage of things was when a few people started arriving to walk their dogs, and I’m sure I really disrupted their normally peaceful walks with my frantic quilt flapping and scurrying. Close to the end of my photography session, my camera battery died. Not because it didn’t actually have any charge left (it had 60% when I got back to my house). No, it died because it was so cold out that the battery couldn’t function anymore. So I took the last few photos I wanted with my phone, packed everything up, and then hustled to my car where I blasted the heat. I couldn’t even look at any of the photos I’d taken because of the whole battery situation! But all of the chaos was worth it because the light was MAGICAL and the photos turned out exactly as I’d hoped.

I could not have asked for better light! I didn’t get many photos of the two quilts together on that day, but I had photographed them together at my friend’s house pre-wash so I’ll show you those photos. When I first saw the two quilts side by side, it made me teary and quite emotional. There’s something so affecting about seeing these two quilts next to each other, so similar and having started at the same point in time. They had such different paths, and I think it’s so interesting and lovely to see the effect that time has had on my mother’s quilt, that got finished and used for 40 years, compared to the quilt that my grandma and I sewed “together” that didn’t experience any use. I really wanted to have a photo of myself between the two quilts, sitting on a bench. It felt like I was sitting on the bench with my mum and my grandma on either side of me, representing the three generations of my family involved in this quilty story. I appreciate the man walking his dog who was willing to take that photo for me. I also got a few photos of the two quilts together on the bench without me, and let me tell you that they are HEAVILY clamped down to that bench in the back, lest you think that the wind died down at all.

It feels very strange to be at the end of this story, having had this quilt in my possession for a decade and spending so much hours with it over the majority of 2023. But I’m also happy that it’s finished on behalf of my grandma, and that my mum has it now. It feels like it ended up exactly where it belongs. Thanks for reading and coming along on this journey with me!