An Elm Creek Quilts Sampler

by Jennier Chiaverini

  After a moment, Julia Merchaud gave her a nervous sidelong glance, and Donna quickly snatched her gaze away and pretended she had been studying the pattern sheets. Julia Merchaud was not only at Donna’s quilt camp but at her very table. How could Donna hope to concentrate on Agnes’s instructions with a celebrity of Julia Merchaud’s stature sitting not three feet away?

  Using all her willpower, she forced herself to focus on the front of the classroom, where Agnes was listing the items they would need for the first activity. As Donna withdrew her supplies from her bag, she stole a peek at the other woman, eager to see what fabric a television star used. Expecting to see Hoffman prints with gold-stamped ink or exotic Indonesian batiks packed in a Gucci tote, she was astonished when Julia Merchaud removed a mismatched stack of ordinary calicoes from a paper grocery bag. She placed them on the table, then carefully arranged a pack of needles, a pencil, a small pair of blue-handled scissors, and a spool of thread beside them. Then, in a gesture that seemed both protective and formal, she folded her hands in her lap and turned her attention to the teacher.

  Donna couldn’t help studying Julia’s hands. A ring on her left hand, a large diamond set with pearls, caught the light. A ruby-and-gold tennis bracelet encircled her thin right wrist. The hands themselves seemed strangely out of place, with protruding veins and knobby knuckles. They seemed much older than the rest of her, especially compared to the smooth, faintly lined skin of her face.

  At the front of the room, Agnes announced that someone from each table needed to come to the front of the room for a roll of freezer paper. Since she was on the aisle, Donna jumped up. “I’ll get it,” she said, smiling. Julia gave the barest of nods without looking her way.

  The brief errand gave Donna enough time to collect her scattered thoughts. She remembered what she and Megan had promised the previous evening: If they saw Julia Merchaud, they would treat her like any other quilter. She’s just a quilter like any other, Donna told herself as she returned to her seat, but she couldn’t quite believe it. “Here we go,” she said brightly, placing the box on the table between them. Julia murmured something that might have been thanks.

  Donna had used the freezer paper method for appliqué before; she had tried almost every quilting technique at least once, although she rarely stuck with any one style long enough to truly master it. She had signed up for this course hoping it would help her improve her weakest skill. Following Agnes’s instructions, she tore off a sheet of freezer paper, placed it on top of the pattern, and began tracing the first design. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched as Julia imitated her, step by step. Deliberately, Donna slowed her movements and made sure not to block Julia’s view of her work. Sure enough, Julia’s scrutiny continued as the class went on.

  When it came time to sew the appliqué to the background fabric, Donna sensed her neighbor’s growing frustration. Summoning up her courage, she whispered, “Do you need some help?” When Julia nodded, Donna went over the steps again, demonstrating each one. When Julia tried again, she managed to complete a shaky but perfectly respectable appliqué stitch. For the first time, Donna saw her smile.

  Donna picked up her own needle again, surreptitiously watching Julia’s progress. Assured that Julia was doing fine, Donna soon became engrossed in her own work. She had never made an appliqué block as elaborate as a Whig Rose before, but Agnes’s instructions were so clear that the pieces seemed to fall into place almost effortlessly.

  Class was nearing the end when Julia spoke again. “Excuse me,” she murmured. “I don’t mean to interrupt you, but you seem to know more about this than I.”

  “Just a little, maybe,” Donna said diplomatically.

  “I wondered …” Julia hesitated. “Is this the same method as needle-turned appliqué, just using different name?”

  “No, they’re two different styles. Agnes probably picked freezer paper because many people think it’s easier.”

  “I see.” She seemed troubled. “But this technique has been around just as long, I suppose?”

  “I don’t think so. As far as I know, freezer paper appliqué is fairly modern.”

  “Oh, dear.” Julia set down her needle and sank back into her chair.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I have to learn needle-turned appliqué.”

  “Your Whig Rose block will look exactly the same,” Donna assured her. “It doesn’t matter what technique you use.”

  “It does matter. I can’t believe this. I’m wasting my time. I never should have come.”

  “Don’t say that.” Instinctively Donna placed a hand on Julia’s shoulder. “I know it can be frustrating sometimes, but you can learn. You just need practice.”

  “You don’t understand.” Julia removed a notebook from her paper bag and opened it to the first page. “I have to learn certain quilting techniques for a movie role. But this morning I found out I was in the wrong piecing class, and now I’m in the wrong appliqué class…. ”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.” Donna patted Julia’s shoulder and picked up the notebook. “Let’s take a look at this list. Okay. All of these terms have to do with piecing. Are you taking Beginning Piecing?”

  “I’m transferring to it tomorrow.”

  “Then you’ll definitely cover the first half of the list. These steps here”—she pointed to the page—“have to do with the actual quilting process itself. Did you sign up for a class on quilting?”

  Julia nodded.

  “Hand or machine?”

  “Hand.”

  “Then you’re all set there, too. The only problem seems to be needle-turned appliqué.” As Donna returned the notebook, inspiration struck her. “If you like, I could teach you during free time.”

  The famous hazel eyes looked guarded. “You would do that for me?”

  “Sure. I’ve never won any blue ribbons for my appliqué, but I can at least give you a crash course in the basics.”

  “I’d be grateful,” Julia said. “Are you sure it’s no trouble?”

  “Not at all. We can start today after class if you’d like.” Then she remembered her plans with Megan. “I’ll need to leave a message for one of my friends first, but after that, we can work until supper.”

  Julia agreed with such gratitude that Donna felt taken aback. Of course she wanted to help a beginning quilter; wouldn’t anyone? Julia must not realize how quilters treated each other. Where would Donna have been if no one had been willing to teach her more than twenty years before, when she was pregnant with Lindsay and nearly driven insane by a hormone-induced compulsion to sew a baby quilt?

  Then Julia looked hesitant. “I wonder if you would be willing to do something else for me. This might sound foolish, but I don’t want anyone to know I’m not already an experienced quilter.”

  It did sound foolish. Every quilter had to start somewhere. “Why not?”

  “It’s rather difficult to explain. Would you promise not to tell anyone?”

  Donna shrugged. “Sure, okay.”

  “Would you be willing to sign a confidentiality agreement?”

  Donna stared at her. “A what?”

  “A confidentiality agreement.” Julia smiled and looked apologetic, but also wary. “It’s for the lawyers. You know how they are. Everything has to be formal. You’ll sign a document promising you won’t reveal my, shall we say, inexperience, to anyone.”

  Donna wondered if most celebrities made a habit of carrying around a folder of confidentiality agreements in their purses. “Don’t you think anyone who sees you in class will realize you’re a beginner?”

  “That would be mere speculation. You have firsthand knowledge.” Julia’s smile was disarming. “I’d be very grateful.”

  Resigned but still baffled, Donna nodded. “I’ll have to tell my friends something. They’ll want to know what we’re doing together.”

  “Tell them you’re helping me brush up on my skills. Skills I already have,” she added.

  Donna d
idn’t know what else to do without rudely revoking her offer, so she agreed.

  After class, Julia remained behind while Donna raced upstairs to her room. She hastily scrawled a note: “I’m sorry I’m going to miss Vinnie’s show-and-tell session. Please tell her I’m sorry. Something came up. I’ll explain when I see you at supper.” Then she added, “The presence of the Loch Ness Quilter has been officially confirmed.”

  She slipped the note under Megan’s door and hurried back downstairs to help the famous Julia Merchaud prepare for her movie role.

  After supper, Grace returned to her room, intending to go to bed early. Instead, she lay on top of the covers, fully clothed, her fingers interlaced over her abdomen, her eyes closed. She felt a strange sensation of peace settling over her as she listened to the sounds of the old house: the creak of a floor-board, a door closing in the distance. Other noises, soft but distinct, she could not name. An old house like this one probably sheltered its share of ghosts, but if any spirits haunted Elm Creek Manor, Grace was certain they were benevolent.

  Her hopes had risen tremendously since that bleak morning in the garden. The forced intimacy she had feared had not surfaced, and she had been allowed to spend the day with a minimum of intrusion upon her solitude. Solitude seemed an inappropriate word for it, since she had attended classes and meals surrounded by dozens of other quilters, and yet that was how it had felt, as if she were a stone fixed in a creek bottom, with the water dancing over her and around her and yet leaving her in peace, to move downstream at her own pace. That, she suddenly realized, was what she had been so desperately seeking: a respite from the sense that time was rushing her along too fast, forcing her to break into a stumbling run to keep up.

  The creative breakthrough she longed for had not arrived with the suddenness of a thunderclap; she had predicted as much. Even so, she could feel the first stirrings of inspiration within her imagination, like the movement of water beneath the frozen surface of a lake. If she were patient and allowed the stirrings to build, eventually something would surely shatter the ice and allow her to create again. In the meantime, it felt good to be working with fabric, even if she was examining the colors and textures with an unfamiliar detachment, as if regarding them from a great distance or through a blurred lens.

  Her mind wandered as she rested. She was picturing herself back in her studio arranging crayons in a three-tiered box when a knock sounded on the door. “Come in,” she called, sitting up on the edge of the bed.

  Sylvia peered inside. “Did I wake you?”

  “No, I was just daydreaming.” Grace stood, and as she did, she realized that sometime during the day, the pins and needles sensation in her hand had faded. She had not even noticed.

  “The evening activities are about to begin. Would you care to join me?”

  “Thanks, but not tonight.”

  “Are you sure? We’re going to play games. It’ll be fun.”

  “I think I’ll turn in early instead.”

  “Then I’ll see you in the morning.” Sylvia withdrew, but before the door closed completely, she uttered something, not quite under her breath.

  “What did you say?” Grace asked.

  Sylvia swung the door open again, her expression innocent. “Who, me?”

  “Yes, you. What did you call me?”

  “I called you a party-pooper. Good night. See you at breakfast.”

  Grace crossed the room and grabbed the knob before Sylvia could close the door again. “I am not a party-pooper.”

  “You look like one from here. It must be a trick of the light.”

  “Is that so?” Grace picked up a light sweater and threw it over her shoulders. “I’ve forgotten more about having fun than you’ll ever know.” She marched past Sylvia into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind them.

  As they went downstairs, Grace heard laughter and conversation coming from the banquet hall. Inside, the campers had gathered near a long table by the windows and were helping themselves to dessert and coffee. Grace felt a hand squeeze her shoulder, and when she looked over, Sylvia gave her an encouraging wink and left her there on her own.

  Seeing that the other quilters were seating themselves, Grace quickly pulled up a chair at a table near the back and watched as Sylvia climbed onto a small riser at the end of the room. She clapped her hands for attention. “If you’ll take your seats, we’ll get started,” she called out. “Four campers to a table, please.” She signaled to two staff members, who began distributing sheets of paper and pencils to each table.

  “Are you saving these for anyone?” a slender woman in her early thirties asked, placing a hand on the chair at Grace’s left. Behind her, the plump woman Grace had seen in the garden that morning smiled tentatively.

  “No,” Grace said, startled. “Please, go ahead.”

  “Thanks.”

  They introduced themselves—Megan from Ohio and Donna from Minnesota. Grace was just about to give them her own name, when a voice sang out, “Save a place for me.” A thin, white-haired woman wearing a red straw hat with a plastic daisy in the band hurried to their table. She seated herself and looked over at the dessert table longingly. “Why do they have to start on time? I didn’t even get to check out the snacks, and now it’s too late.”

  “Here, Vinnie,” Donna said, sliding a plate of brownies and frosted sugar cookies toward her. “I shouldn’t be eating this stuff anyway.”

  Vinnie brightened and raised her eyebrows at Grace. “Do you want anything, honey?” When Grace declined, Vinnie took a bite of a brownie and rolled her eyes to heaven with pleasure.

  Party-pooper, Grace could almost hear Sylvia say. “Maybe just one,” she said, reaching for the plate.

  Donna passed out the pencils the staff member had left on their table. “Please tell me this isn’t a quiz.”

  Grace scanned the list of numbered items. “‘How many UFOs do you have?’” she read aloud. “I think it’s just a questionnaire.”

  “‘How many paper bags would your stash fill?’” Vinnie read. “That depends. How big are the bags?”

  “Do we have to know exactly?” Donna said, her brow creased in worry. “Can we estimate?”

  Megan grinned. “I think they expect us to.”

  “Besides, what are they going to do, go to our houses and check?” Vinnie added.

  “What’s a UFO?” Grace wondered aloud. Sylvia couldn’t possibly mean a flying saucer.

  “An Un-Finished Object,” Megan said. “Or an Unfinished Fabric Object, whichever you prefer. It’s a quilt you’ve begun but haven’t completed yet.”

  “I thought that was a WIP,” Donna said.

  “A whip?” Grace asked.

  “A Work In Progress.”

  “When does something shift from being a WIP to a UFO?”

  “When you’ve given up all hope of ever finishing it,” Vinnie said.

  “By that definition, I don’t have any UFOs,” Donna said. “I intend to finish every project I’ve ever started.”

  “Oh, come on,” Megan said. “You don’t have any projects you’ve abandoned? Not even one?”

  Donna looked hesitant. “Well … ”

  From the front of the room, Sylvia interrupted by announcing the rules of their first game, which was to fill out the questionnaire “as honestly and completely as you can.” There would be prizes for the correct answer to each question. “But I’m not telling you what the correct answers are, so you can’t cheat.”

  The quilters laughed, and Donna raised her hand. “What about WIPs?” she asked. “Should we include those in our UFO count?”

  Sylvia considered. “Yes, go ahead and include any project begun but not yet completed.”

  “Oh, no,” Donna murmured gloomily. “This is going to be embarrassing.”

  Then Vinnie raised her hand. “For question number two, how big a paper bag are we talking about? Do you mean a grocery or a department store shopping bag?”

  Sylvia cast her eyes to heaven. “I
see I’m going to have to revise my questionnaire for table number six. A paper grocery sack will do, Vinnie.”

  Satisfied, Vinnie began filling in her questionnaire with dramatic strokes of her pencil. More cautiously, Grace started hers. How many UFOs? None. Grace preferred to finish one project before beginning another, and she hadn’t started anything new in ages. How vast was her fabric stash? That question was more difficult. She pictured the shelves lining her studio wall and the bundles of folded cloth, sorted by color and fiber content, stacked neatly upon them. At least fifty, she decided, and wrote that down. She proceeded through the rest of the questions, from “How many quilts have you finished?” to “How long have you been quilting?” She was filling in the last blank when Sylvia announced that time was up.

  “I didn’t know there was a time limit,” Donna said, dismayed, as a staff member came to their table to collect the papers. “I didn’t finish the last three questions.”

  “Then the best you can hope for is a C-plus,” Vinnie said. “So much for the Quilters’ Honor Roll.”

  Donna’s eyes widened in alarm before she realized Vinnie was only teasing her.

  Next, the staff members placed a sheet of paper facedown on the table in front of each camper. Vinnie gingerly picked up the corner of hers. “No peeking until I say so,” Sylvia commanded, and Vinnie quickly snatched her hand back to her lap.

  Sylvia went on to describe the rules of the next game. The front side of the papers provided a list of quilt block anagrams, and the quilters at each table would work together to unscramble the design names. The first team to get all the correct answers would win a prize.

  “I’m going to be good at this,” Vinnie declared. “I do the jumble in the Dayton Daily News every day.”

  Grace was relieved to hear that, because she knew she would be a liability for her team. She hadn’t pieced a traditional quilt block since she first learned to quilt. Unless Sylvia had chosen blocks from the eighteen hundreds, in which case Grace’s historical textile studies would aid her, she wouldn’t be able to contribute much.