Peg Cerutti could not let go.
She didn’t even realize it, really. She had made the quilt with every intention of giving it away. But when the moment arrived that she had to hand it over, she hedged. Instead of stretching out her hands, she held the quilt close.
`It took me 10 years not to have separation issues,` Cerutti says now with a laugh. `I used to hug the quilts and not want to give them up.`
Stitched into those quilts was a lot more than squares of fabric. They held pieces of family history. Memories of getting together with friends to quilt. Laughter, and sometimes tears. The satisfaction that comes with doing something creative.
`A lot of quilting is emotional,` said Pat Coleman, who, like Cerutti, belongs to QUILT Inc., a Delmar-based group of some 200 quilters who meet monthly. The name stands for Quilters United in Learning Together, a concept that might seem strange given that many members have been quilting for decades. But this is a group that sees value not just in trading ideas and feedback about quilting, but about life in general.
`There’s a community of support that goes way outside of quilting,` Cerutti said. `You share things. You laugh and you cry. You come away stronger and not alone.`
Once a year, the public gets a peek into that close-knit world when QUILT Inc. holds it annual show. The 2011 quilt show is Saturday and Sunday, April 16 and 17, at Ravena-Coeymans-Selkirk High School on Route 9W in Ravena. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday.
Visitors can bid on items in a silent auction, watch demonstrations, buy tickets for a raffle quilt and listen to featured quilter and speaker K. Velis Turin. And of course, they will have the chance to see dozens of quilts, creations that are rarely put together quickly.
Quilting is a multi-step process. To put the wheels in motion, quilters first need to pick a pattern, fabrics and the stuffing, or batting, that makes up the middle of the quilt. They have to measure and cut the fabrics into blocks. They have to sew, by hand or by machine, the blocks together to create the top layer of the quilt. They have to attach the batting to the top layer, making sure it doesn’t spill over the edges. They have to bind the back layer to the front.
`I have never met a quilter who had time to be bored,` Cerutti said.
Ardyce Elmore grew up watching her mother quilt. The process fascinated her, and she long dreamed of being a quilter herself. But as a math teacher, she figured she didn’t have the time to dedicate to the hobby. Instead, she told herself, one of the first things she would do when she retired was take up quilting.
The time commitment isn’t daunting to people who are passionate about quilting. Joe Wilson remembers seeing that in his two friends who were quilters before he was. The three of them used to go on road trips. The women were always stopping at quilting shops to look at fabric, to talk to the shop owners, to buy things they could incorporate into their next creations.
For Wilson, it wasn’t fun. It got to the point that when the women called him to go somewhere, he’d ask, `Is this really just a quilt run?` If it was, he said, count him out.
Then one of the women told him that he could probably make a quilt if he tried. It was a challenge. Wilson accepted. He sat down and made his first quilt, and he was surprised.
He liked it.
Wilson has a background in stained glass, a craft that he says is similar in many ways to quilting. There’s a lot of cutting pieces and fitting them together, of taking something old and turning it into something new.
That’s a hallmark of quilting. The hobby’s roots stretch back to times when there weren’t fabric shops in every town. Pat Coleman grew up sewing and wanted to try making a quilt. She used anything she could get her hands on: corduroy, cotton, denim.
`Talk about rudimentary,` she said.
`That’s where a lot of people’s history is,` Bauer said. Especially before the proliferation of fabric stores, she said, people would make quilts from scraps around their houses, scraps that each had their own story.
That spirit has prevailed even as quilting material has changed. When Bauer’s grandson was born, he had to spend time in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. A quilt someone had donated to the NICU kept him warm.
Seeing her grandson bundled in the blanket that a stranger had put such care into creating warmed Bauer, too.
`You know that other people are there,` she said.
QUILT Inc. meets on the second Friday of each month at Delmar Reformed Church, 386 Delaware Ave. Quilters of all abilities are welcome. For more information, visit www.quiltinc.org.
