Aging Capriciously

My wife Karen finished her first quilt about two weeks ago and entered it into a Quilt Show in Coolidge Arizona.  Karen had joined a Quilt Club in Coolidge about three months ago.  Every Thursday she drove to Coolidge to work on her quilt.  She learned a lot from women there who had been quilting for many years.

As it turned out, they have a yearly quilt show.  It is over two weekends in February and March of each year when Coolidge also celebrates Cotton Days.  I encouraged Karen to put her quilt in the show.  She needed encouragement as she did not feel that her quilt would stack up well against the others in the show.  The other problem she faced was whether she would be able to finish it in time for the show.  Karen can really focus when she needs to, and she spent the last month or so working almost full-time on the quilt.

Karen and I had volunteered to help take down some of the frames and other items used to hang the quilts.  We arrived there at the end of the show on Sunday at 4 PM.  As Karen walked into the club, several women took her excitedly by the arm and brought her over to “John’s Ties”, the name of her quilt.  You cannot imagine how surprised she was when they showed her that she had won the ribbon for “People’s Choice Award” for her quilt.  I simply said, “I knew it.”  It was beautiful and she had put a ton of time, (more than 500 hours I believe) into it.  Did I mention all the accessories and paraphernalia that she also bought for quilting.  Whoever invented this craft must have become a billionaire on the myriad accessories that you can buy.  At one point, I thought we might have to take out a mortgage on our house to help keep Karen quilting 😊.

But let’s back up a year or so.  Let’s begin at the beginning as they say.  How did Karen get into quilting?  How did my ties become a quilt?  Here is the sad but true story.

In 2021, we decided to sell one of our houses.  We had small homes in both Arizona and Wisconsin, and we were snow birding between each.  Six months in one and six months in the other.  We started out snow birding in 2010 when we sold our Minnesota home and bought homes in Arizona and Wisconsin.  The two homes reflected our disparate needs.  Mine was for cool weather, plenty of green and blue and out in the country far from traffic.  Karen’s preference was for sunny skies, warm days and somewhere she could lie in the sun for a good portion of the year.

We both shared a desire to be no closer than fifty miles to a large city and we wanted small homes with minimum upkeep.  With the idea of sharing time between two homes, we thought we would have the best of both worlds.  We would each get our preferences met at least six months of the year.  The strategy worked great for nearly 12 years.

Unfortunately, as they say time and tide waits for no man or woman.  We both got older.  We both quit working even part-time and the maintenance on both houses seemed to increase with each passing year.  Thus, we stood on the brink of a decision.  Which house should we sell.  Did we want to go sweltering heat or frigid cold?  No bugs and no water in Arizona or clean air and blue water everywhere you look albeit with bugs that could carry you away in Wisconsin.  An older house with more space and room or what Karen called her “happy home” with everything on one floor in Arizona?  Such decisions require the wisdom of Solomon.  We decided to toss a coin.  No actually, I decided to give into that old adage that “A happy wife makes a happy life.”  Thus, it was goodbye Wisconsin, here we come Arizona.

This of course meant that a great deal of accumulated STUFF would have to be gotten rid of.  If you want to know about stuff, be sure to watch George Carlin’s monologue on it.  If is available on YouTube and runs for about five minutes.  Well, the old house in Wisconsin was stuffed full of stuff.  It took us about a year to think about getting rid of the stuff and develop a viable strategy for doing so.  Thus, we finally started closing our eyes and tossing things into a bin for donations.  When it came to my closet, I donated boots, shoes, suits, jackets, and many other treasures.

One day while tossing things, I came to my tie rack.  I had been a management consultant for nearly twenty years before going back into education.  The needs of that job required that I looked like I could make money and even had some money.  My suits were better than average and several of my shirts were custom made.  However, it was with ties that I went crazy.  I only wanted ties that stood out and looked like I came from royalty or at least money.  All of my ties were made of silk and many if not most of them were designer ties.  No micky mouse ties or ties with golf clubs on them for me.  My ties were classy and artistic.  When I picked up the rack of ties and looked at some for the first time in ten years, I could hardly think of donating them to people who I knew would never appreciate them.  One of the ties I purchased while working with Chevron in San Francisco, I paid three hundred and fifty dollars for and that was in 1992 dollars.  That’s what happens when you are making too much money and lose your common sense.

I brought some of my ties out to show Karen who was busy throwing her stuff in a Goodwill basket.  I said “Karen, I don’t want to give these ties away.  I still could not bring myself to part with them.  Do you think you could make something out of them?”  I had in mind a giant Rubik’s cube or some type of Andy Warhol collage.  Karen took one look at them and exclaimed loudly “Quilt.”  She then bundled them up and went back to throwing stuff away.  The fact that she had never made a quilt before did not deter her.

A few days later she told me that she had an idea.  She had found a design for a kimono, and she thought she could slice and dice my ties into a number of what quilters call squares.  Each square would use a tie and each would be different.  Some would be female kimonos and some male kimonos.  She thought using silk was great and that I had enough ties for the job.  I wondered how long this would take but she was not sure.  She estimated that she would need 80 or more squares for the quilt.  I began to regret giving them to her.  I would be dead and buried before I ever saw my quilt.

As it turned out, the squares alone took between two to three hours each to make.  Add time for learning quilting techniques via YouTube, going to quilting shows, and attending quilting classes and this quilt took well over a year to make.  Don’t forget the money to buy the accessories that quilters seem to love.  I tried to calculate how much money I would need to sell the quilt for to break even on materials, accessories, and time that Karen put into it.  I figure $50,000 dollars or so would just about do it.

Well, that is the end of the story folks.  The quilt is now on our bed.  I have hired a Brinks guard to watch over it when we are not home.  Karen has a list of things that I can no longer do on the bed, like take naps on top of the quilt, fold my clothes on it, eat on it, etc.  I guess if I ever want to sell it, I will have to keep it pristine.  By the way, do any of you know anyone who might want to buy a “People’s Choice” quilt for $50,000 dollars?  Karen says that if we could sell it she could buy a Gammill Statler Long Arm Quilting Machine for $42,999.  I believe that is the sales price.  She says it is a bargain at that price.  😊

The picture below illustrates the paper piercing pattern that Karen used for each quilt square.  Some kimonos were male and some were female.  I am sure that I am leaving out much of the sewing and work that goes into quilting.  I am also sure that I would never have the patience for such an endeavor.