Category Archives: Art

Be sure to bring a quilt.

So I have these two friends.  And they are good friends.  And for the last couple years they’ve been living in Frankfurt, Germany.  I missed them. A lot. Last May, I guess it was, we got a call from Frankfurt that they were finally going to get married!  Hip, hip hooray! 

In September, they returned stateside for a short stint and began planning.  May would be the date, California would be the place; in a lavendar field not far from Davis.   My husband and I were asked to do a reading:

i carry your heart with me
by e. e. cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                                      i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Fast forward now to January when the bride requested that I make not one, not two, but THREE quilts for the wedding ceremony.  What could I do but oblige?  I mean, these are goooooood friends, after all.

We shopped for fabric, designed, cut and sewed together two lovely, traditional (in pattern only) table runners, but the pièce de résistance was left up to me – the altar decoration. 

I looked at tons and tons and tons of pictures of California and the rolling hills and lavender fields in California and even in France.  I printed out my favorites, cut them apart and pasted them back together again to make what I felt was an interesting, if not quite accurate, representation of the wedding venue.  And then I re-made it in fabric.  And the whole time I was sewing, I was singing … 

“If you’re going to san Francisco/Be sure the wear some flowers in your hair…”

I didn’t, by the way, wear flowers in my hair.  Feathers worked better with my dress.