A Christmas quilt done in time for Halloween Posted by Virginia "Ginnie" Leiner on October 31, 2016 at 12:30am View Blog

I know I have been incommunicato for awhile but I have been busy quilting! Here is the most recent quilt I finished just tonight, a few scant hours before Halloween. No, you are not crazy, this is a Christmas quilt. Sometimes, we just don't get to choose the timing of when things get accomplished. The pattern is your basic log cabin with cross stitched Christmas motifs in the center. The left side and upper borders are also log cabin, arranged in the lightening strike pattern while the right side and lower borders are plain strips of fabric with buttons, enameled coconut buttons to be exact which click and clack like castenets. All the buttons are sewn on but the largest buttons are also tied with 1/8 inch satin double ribbons.

As you may know, I like to say that every quilt tells a story. This story is four generations in the making. When I was a child, my father's mother, my Gramma Long, made the most wonderful gingersnap cookies. My grandparents had a lake home in The Lake of the Ozarks region in Missouri near Camdenton and I remember my granddad spreading real butter on them and eating them by the dozen in the summer time. Yes, his physique resembled Santa's and no one was really worried about heart failure back then (we should have been though). My mother, Marian Long was a great baker and she took up the tradition, making the gingersnaps every Christmas. She would make a gazillion cookies of many different kinds and freeze them in Folgers coffee cans until a day that only she knew when we could start eating the Christmas cookies. I made the gingersnaps for and with my daughters, Jamie and Becky, when they were young and they are now making them for their children and husbands. The beat (and the batter) goes on! I actually made a batch today!

So the back of the quilt tells the story as usual. I have put the only picture I could find of my gramma and I in the kitchen together with a bunch of other folks, and pictures of my three grands, Wyatt, Ruby and Sylvia. Check out the other photos of this quilt in my albums if you like.

There is a certain high I always get when I finish a quilt and this one is no different. It is 12:30 now and the hubby has been asleep two hours. I should join him I guess but I am wired. Probably too many cookies... And here is the Halloween quilt, just so you are assured I am not totally loony. Happy haunting (and quilting)!

By popular demand, the Cross Stitch Halloween quilt reprised. Posted by Virginia "Ginnie" Leiner on November 1, 2016 at 11:30pm View Blog My quilting friend, Riana Noyes asked me to do a post on the Halloween cross stitch quilt which is #108 in my albums. The following are pictures and some explanations/descriptions of how that quilt came to be. First the back story. I have been quilting since I was 18 years old. I had my first child, Jamie at 23 and my second, Becky at 27. All through their childhood, I was making quilts and once upon a time, cross stitching as well. in 1984 or 85 I decided to do a Christmas quilt in an attic window pattern. I cross stitched away for 16 years and with primarily Becky's help, finished it in 2002. When I took it home to Illinois to show to the girls (I was living in Pennsylvania by this time) they admired it a great deal and eventually someone got around to asking who would inherit it. I remember laughing and telling them that was their problem. I would be long gone. So just before George and I got in the car to drive home after the weekend visit was over, my daughters inform me that I can solve the dilemna by making another cross stitch quilt. I laughed all the way home through eight hours of driving from Illinois to Pennsylvania. I was still laughing a few days later when I agreed to the crazy plan to make another cross stitch quilt, provided they would help out. Little did we know how the whole scheme would carry us on a quilting journey that spanned 12 years and would mushroom into four quilts. So here is the Christmas quilt (#103 in my albums) that started the entire rigamarole!

and here is the Halloween quilt that was the result of two sisters who wanted quilt parity after mother dear, the quilter, was gone.

Most of these pictures were taken at a quilt show in a local church. I was so pleased they allowed the viewers to touch if they wore gloves, since my quilts are often two sided. Here it is hanging in the church. Now some close up pictures.

The close up of the center shows the variety of cross stitched blocks made by my daughters and I. The Christmas cross stitch quilt had been very regular and regimented, evenly laid out. We wanted to be more irregular with Halloween since it is a holiday that is prone to craziness! We made the cross stitch squares over a period of five years. By the time we were ready to start the quilt, we had enough squares to make three quilts and we DID eventually make three quilts: Halloween, School and Apples, and Thanksgiving. There are three cross stitched borders, candy corn, words (Eek! Boo! Yikes!) and cats and pumpkins, all mostly done by my youngest daughter, Becky Newcomer. She did the majority of the cross stitched blocks as well with me contributing maybe a dozen and her sister less than that. She is fantastic. A word about the sheep button in the lower right corner. When Becky and I were shopping for the 200 buttons we put on this quilt, we ran across this very cute sheep button and one of us said something like, "Oh look, it is the Halloween sheep" and we laughed and bought it and ever since then we have put a sheep button on every quilt that we have made that has cross stitching on it. My girls and I have always liked poetry as well as quilting and cross stitch. On a quilt for my husband I made in 2000 (Benny's quilt #100 in my albums), I wrote a poem about a dog, Benny who had died in 1998. When we gave away the 15 Christmas quilts in 2013, we did it with poetry. And on the back of this quilt, you will find Becky's poetry that tells the story of the quilt. Gotta get those stories and quilts permanently together. We aren't going to be here forever, you know.

As you can see, the quilt was finished in 2008, 6 years after the Christmas quilt. Both Becky and my names are on it. It is a very special quilt to me because it was the vehicle by which Becky and I mended our estranged relationship but that is a story for another time.

Check out my albums for the other two quilts from the cross stitching extravaganza. Becky owns the Apple and School quilt (#110 in my albums) as she is a 5th grade science teacher in the Dallas Texas school district

and as I write this tonight, November 1, I am sitting on a couch draped with the Thanksgiving quilt (#117 in my albums), which I finished just days before having both of my knees replaced on November 17, 2014. It's hard to keep a good quilter down!

Enjoy! Ginnie

Making Progress, Making Pillows Posted by Virginia "Ginnie" Leiner on November 28, 2016 at 10:44pm View Blog Hello fellow quilting fanatics. This has been a very busy month around the Leiner household. We sold one rental house and bought two more so I have been kept from my quilting by landlady duties. But I am happy to report that I am making progress on the quilt for Beck and Todd, the quilt that has stymied me all year, and am to the point of putting the border on the black side. I say "black side" because color distinction is how I have solved my conundrum over this quilt. In my pointy little quilting head, black and brown DO NOT go together, they do not belong in the same quilt but this is what the daughter has chosen, so this is what she shall have!

Side one picture here is made up of all the cool black and grey fabrics with the peach accents. There are fifteen 12 inch blocks on the top half of the quilt. The bottom half is plain fabric of a black, gray and brown (cringe!) print. Around the entire quilt will be the border picture below. I have finished the first six squares of the border and attached them to the top of the quilt. This border block will also go around the bottom half of the quilt that is a continuous piece of fabric, no blockwork. I will show you that after I get some more done.

On the reverse side will be the brown and golden tone fabrics in the same 12 inch block pattern, fifteen of them but they will be positioned on the bottom half of the quilt and a solid piece of coordinating brown fabric will make up the top half. A striped border of browns will serve as border; it will be the same width as this black and grey border block, but on the brown side. Here is a sample of the brown fabrics: Now the tricky part: the quilting. I will line up the front and the back such that the pieced black half is backed by the brown one piece back and the brown pieced half is lined up with the black one piece front. Make sense? When I get it quilted, on the black side you will see the pieced half quilted (stitch in the ditch) and see the piecing but on the lower solid one piece of the black side, you will see the quilting of the blocks only, no piecing. Make sense? In other words, the black side is half front and half back and the brown side is likewise, half front and half back. Can she pull it off? Time will tell. In the meantime, when the pressure gets to be too, too much (I want you to know this is REALLY outside the box for me!), make a Christmas pillow.

Happy quilting! Ginnie

A Wedding Quilt finished on Mother's Day Posted by Virginia "Ginnie" Leiner on May 14, 2017 at 6:30pm View Blog "There is no remedy for love but to love more." (Thoreau); "A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short." (Andre Maurois); "Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backwards." (e.e. cummings)'; "All, everything that I understand, I understand because I love." (Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace); "No one has ever measured, not even poets, how much the human heart can hold." (Zelda Fitzgerald). These are the five quotes about love and marriage I have monogrammed on the back of my daughter, Becky and her husband, Todd's wedding quilt. There should be one there about the long and winding road because this quilt has been a two year exodus. It began sometime in 2015 when Becky and I picked out fabric for her wedding quilt at the now defunct Hancock Fabric store in Plano, Texas where Becky and Todd live. As the main fabric, Becky chose a marbled gray, black and brown. We selected coordinating fabrics, some of them really wild and I took it all home with me to start the project.

Soon enough though, I discovered I had a problem: the coordinating fabrics did not look well together. How could I have missed this? Certainly I have been selecting fabrics and quilting for some time (40 plus years). I made a few blocks of each color scheme, the black and white and the brown and creams and had it verified that these block were not going to live together on the front of any quilt I made in this life time. I just could not do it. Somewhat discouraged, I put the quilt away and decided I would make Becky and Todd a different quilt and attempt this one for them at a later date. I had just discovered digital fabric and I was dying to make a window quilt with them. Significant time has passed by now and it is March 2016. I am making good progress on the quilt top of the window quilt before we head to California for Easter 2016 and our grandson’s fifth birthday. We rented a house near Yosemite National Park and on the Saturday before Easter, the entire family took a 4 hour hike through the park with thousands of other tourists. It was a great day and as we were walking along, I was telling my oldest daughter Jamie about the challenges with her sister’s wedding quilt and my digital fabric solution. I remember telling her that the fabric reminded me very much of this beautiful park we were enjoying. She looked a bit puzzled and then said, “Mom, I just can’t imagine Becky taking a hike in a National Park. It’s not her thing.” In that instant, I realized I was making the wrong quilt for the wrong daughter. Back to the drawing board. So when we arrived home after the trip, I pulled out the original fabric and the completed quilt blocks and told myself this had to work somehow. My solution was easy once I discovered it: I would make one side black and one side brown. Piece of cake with one small hitch; I did not have enough quilt fabric to make an entire black quilt top and an entire brown quilt top but I had plenty of the marbled backing material. What to do? My solution was to make each side both the front and the back of the quilt. One half would be blockwork in each color way and the other half would be “plain” like the back of the quilt so that you would see piecing in the blockwork half and quilting in the plain half on each side, hence the name “Both Sides Now.” A simple, elegant solution, I thought, until you came to the pinning where you would have to make sure the blank half was perfectly lined up with the blockwork half on the other side. Oy vey!

Well, it all worked out, sort of. The line up is perfect on the horizontal line that divides blockwork from plain but I was about 3 inches off side to side. I managed to make it work by quilting stitch in the ditch on the black side, following the pattern of the square blocks and stitch in the ditch on the brown side, following the pattern of the diamonds that are made when the square blocks come together (an optical illusion). The quilt is finished with buttons of peachy pink (the color from her wedding) flowers, black and silver, and gray embossed between the sayings. The dedication reads, “In celebration of their marriage, this quilt was made for Becky and Todd Newcomer with love, Mom and George.” It is signed at the bottom “V.B. Allmendinger Leiner, May 7, 2017, Greensburg, Pennsylvania.” Over all I am very pleased with it. I am still not 100% sure the “front and back” on both sides works from an aesthetics point of view but it is what it is. Definitely outside the box for me. As always, I am so glad it is done!

Gramma Gigi's pumpkin quilt which became a story about Uncle Jack Posted by Virginia "Ginnie" Leiner on September 10, 2017 at 12:30pm View Blog

My family was blended long before that became a fashionable term. My parents divorced in 1958 (I was 3) and my dad, who had custody of my sister Bev and I remarried a wonderful woman in 1959 who became Mom to us and gave us our sister, Denise. Mom was a 26 year old secretary with her own car and the family lore is that Dad married her for that car! Not true I am sure because it was a love match that lasted 56 years, the last 34 of them in a harder circumstance when my Dad lost his eyesight and some brain function due to strokes at 49 years old. Mom was and is a trooper. She hung in there with him, loving him and us all those years. My mom had three brothers, Don, who was a milkman, Bill who was an electrician and sign painter, and Jack who was a carpenter. Jack always had the most beautiful warm and welcoming smile and a great sense of humor. He lived next door to my Gramma (Mom's mom) so we always saw him as well when we visited Gramma and Grampa Taylor. When I made the quilt, I was not thinking of Uncle Jack but when it was time to put the cross stitch of Mr. Jack O'Lantern and the quote on the back, "I never met a pumpkin I didn't like," it came naturally to me to add "and Jack (implied jack-o-lantern) was always my favorite uncle." This sparked many happy childhood memories of my uncle and the family I was NOT born into that made me so welcomed. As a side bonus, Jack's daughter Chris, contacted me on facebook and she had immediately made the connection between her dad, my uncle, and the quilt. Happiness all around!

We are a family of snappy dressers for sure! Posted by Virginia "Ginnie" Leiner on December 25, 2017 at 11:00am View Blog Merry Christmas morning to you all! As I sit here this snowy morning, alternately sipping my Christmas tea and Diet Coke, I am contemplating the year soon to end and another about to begin. I once told someone a good year was three quilts completed and by that definition, this was a good year. I finished Becky's wedding quilt (finally!), made a new Halloween pumpkin quilt for myself and made a memorial quilt for my mom from my dad's shirts. Here it is.

Not wanting to make the usual memorial shirt quilt (is there such a thing?), I decided to change it up a bit. I asked all the surviving male members of my dad's tribe to send me a shirt they could afford to recycle and made the quilt with Dad's shirts and the shirts of his brother, his brother-in-law, his son-in-laws, his grandson, his grandsons-in-law, and his great grandsons, one of whom he never met. I called the quilt, "The Men in His Family." Dad has been gone two years now but I still miss him everyday. I wish I could say we had a close, fantastic relationship but other than my early childhood, when we might have been close but I cannot remember, our relationship was loving but distant, the ghost of my parents' painful divorce always getting in the way. My parents were good people who raised me well and gave me a safe, stable childhood. I felt I knew my dad best for about 30 minutes one April morning the year before he died. I was in Naperville, Illinois visiting my family and it was one of those rare times when Dad and I were alone together. My dad was living in a senior care home adjacent to my mom's senior living condo, a great set up that made it possible for her to be with him everyday. But it was just me and Dad that morning and I was helping him get dressed and shaved for the day when I noticed he was crying. I asked him, "Did I hurt your, Dad? what's wrong?" and he responded that he did not think he had been a good father to me and my sister (from the first disastrous marriage). Here it was, the moment I had been wishing for for all of my adult life, the chance to talk honestly about the past, clear some things up, get some questions asked and answered. But instead of the that man who had all the answers to my questions, I saw sitting in the chair, another human being hurting, regretting, reassessing his life. A man handicapped physically and blind, needing love and reassurance, not questions. A man who knew his race was almost all run and that the next stop was on the not too distant horizon. "I wish I could have done some things better," he went on to tell me. "If I could do them over, I would do them differently. I don't know why you girls want to have anything to do with me." I knew then that no questions would get asked or answered. What was needed was love. Life and circumstance, even God, had given me the opportunity to help put his mind to rest, to lighten his heart. To tell him what a good dad he had been. That we all make mistakes and have times when we wish we had done things differently. That none of us are perfect. I took his face between my two hands. I remember the feeling of the whiskers I had not managed to shave well off his cheeks against my palm. I told him, "you were the best dad and I do not want you to ever forget it. You were and are the best." By this time we are both crying. It was the most genuine moment I have ever had with my dad and I am so grateful for it. No one was mentioned by name, no particular sins were recounted and forgiven. Love was like a blanket of snow falling over us both and wiping out all wrongs. Before I left that weekend, as I was visiting Dad at his bedtime, I wanted to say goodbye as he would not see me in the morning, I would be on the road driving home. My Mom and sister Denise, his most constant caregivers, were helping him get ready for bed and when he was all settled in, I leaned over to tell him goodbye. Dad started crying again and said, "I don't want you to leave." I told him I loved him and asked him to remember what I had said earlier. He responded and we said together, "you are the best dad ever." I told him I would be back and I wanted him to remember that until I returned. That was 2014. Dad died December 23, 2015. I miss him everyday though I feel I only really knew him for less than an hour on a random day. Mom keeps this quilt on her bed at home. I talked to her on Dad's death anniversary this year and she told me she had a hard time sleeping the night before, but on the whole, things get easier everyday. I hope the quilt was a little bit of Dad there with her.

Made the local paper with a piece about Ruby's Christmas Quilt Posted by Virginia "Ginnie" Leiner on January 13, 2018 at 9:34pm View Blog It's January and apparently a slow news week. I made the newspaper (print and online version) with a short video and print interview about quilting. The reporter, Shirley, is a museum friend and called asking me if I would like to talk about quilting. Can you imagine me saying no??? She asked me to bring my latest project so I brought in Ruby's Christmas quilt. The top is finished and I think I will wait until I have Sylvia's done as well before I pin and quilt them both. Maybe by then, the attic office for my sweet hubby will be finished, we will have moved him upstairs to it and I will have his old office as the expansion of my quilt studio. Then I can set my table extension up and leave it up permanently. At any rate, here is the link. Me talking quilt trash. https://archive.triblive.com/lifestyles/more-lifestyles/quilting-is-a-labor-of-love-for-the-westmorelands-ginnie-leiner/