On the Road: Kalispell, MT, June 2018

June has become the month for my annual trek to Kalispell, Montana. It’s a cute little town, nestled next to the Rockies, and the landing point for those visiting Glacier National Park on the border of the US and Canada. Once in a while I’ve had a chance for a day trip to Glacier, but this time it was a five-day “intensive” at the Quilt Gallery.

Last year I met brand-new-owner, Marianne Buller. She’s a very positive and energetic person, and this year after picking me up at the airport, we caught up over dinner. She has big plans for the Quilt Gallery, so stay tuned. I look forward to seeing the place next year!

Marianne was also soon to be off to a trade show, so she loaned me her extremely cute Volkswagen mini-pick-up truck so I wouldn’t have to rely on others to get me around town. Now, my first car was a VW Bug, my second car was a bright yellow VW Rabbit, both stick-shift, so I felt right at home with this one. Actually, I gave her a name: Canola “Cannie” Bloom—since every year when I come to Kalispell, the yellow flowers of the canola fields (not to be confused with the yellow roses, below, from in front of the shop) are in bloom. For photos of the canola (otherwise known as rapeseed) fields, see photo gallery in this post.

Upon arrival at the shop, I was greeted by the familiar staff, including Sammy Leonard—with her finished turtle quilt below—who I noted in a previous blog had adopted a hedgehog she’d named Tucker. Sammy’s due date for a real baby is in a month—a new person to meet next year! I also had four more familiar faces in class, repeat students, including Bea Englert (with David) from a Portland, ME retreat, and Marci Robman (with a roadrunner) from Kalispell in 2017. Both had these completed quilts to show me, which you will see in an upcoming Finish Line post.

Another previous Kalispell student, Sharon Steele, went nice and BIG with her Galapagos marine iguana, after working on a Galapagos giant turtle last year. So big she had to set up a “light box” on the workroom window, by placing a lamp on the inside of the glass, to trace her drawing onto the fabric foundation (below).

Ever since my blog posts concerning copyright issues over the use of photos for class images, students have been much more conscientious about their subject choices. Barbara Barrett found a beautiful photo for her great horned owl by Peter K. Burian off the internet site commons.wikimedia.org. The wikimedia commons is a site for posting and finding images online. Each creator can set his or her own copyright restrictions. In this case, Burian has made the image free to use, but only if the resulting image is also free for anyone else to use.

That’s Barbara working on her owl below center—photo taken toward the end of week.

Each day I present a different aspect of the fabric collage process to a rapt and down-to-business audience. (We may all be a bit serious looking, but thanks to Bea, for adding to my collection of class photos!)

In no time, the fabrics start flying and the tables and floor get wonderfully messy. I do believe that creative chaos is a good thing.

I talk about and warn students of what I call “the messy scary stage,” and they hit it by the end of the first day, or maybe the next, or maybe every so often. My own work goes through messy scary times. A good example of that stage can be seen in Antoinette Hettinga’s portrait of her husband (above). As she’s a teacher herself, she understood that you just have to carry on and trust the process. She was mostly smiles all week, with just a few grumbles, and you can see how the portrait pulled together in the foreground of the photo below.

See everyone’s progress photos in this slideshow.

Student Work Slideshow

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Kay Huffman and Carolyn Klassy (above) were a mother and daughter pair who attended the class with their owl-making friend, Barbara. Having class at a fabric store is always handy when the pounds and pounds of fabric you brought with you is actually not what you needed anyway. It happens quite often—but you just have to go with what the collage tells you. Such was the case when Carolyn’s cat told her she wanted to be yellow, and not pink.

Friends Bev Penny and Arlene Dahl (above) were two of many who took advantage of the late hours the staff at the Quilt Gallery was willing to stay open for them. This enabled my students to make even better progress on their collages by the end of the week. Bev’s grandson got not only his hat, but a hand to tip it with.

I know that students come to my classes with all sorts of skills and accomplishments behind them, but I rarely get a chance to see what they are. In the photo below, Laura Peterson explains her panoramic quilt, “The Quilt Show,” encompassing a dozen mini quilts of different styles, displayed compete with ribbons and very quilty-looking spectators—some of which are women she knows—at a quilt show of her own making.

Aside from Laura’s attention to detail in the mini-show quilts themselves, I liked how the one and only gentleman spectator was the only one with a watch, and he was looking at it. Everyone else was oblivious to the time—how true. However, I’m now wondering if there will ever be a “late-entry” addition of a mini-collage quilt…?

If you’d like to see and read more about this gem of a quilt, here’s a link to the website Laura set up to answer questions about it. Thank you, Laura, for sharing!

About half-way through the week, former Quilt Gallery owner and past student Joan Hodgeboom, stopped by to show me the buzzard quilt she began last year. There’s a lucky-for-her story about it, which you can read in last year’s Kalispell post.

Even though I wasn’t staying at Joan’s home this year, I had a chance to spend a couple evenings visiting with her, making our annual drive to the town of Whitefish for their Tuesday night Farmer’s Market, complete with food to eat for a picnic table dinner and goodies to bring home from local artists and craftspeople. Between the fabric, used books, crafts, polished stones from our other annual stop—Kehoe’s Agate Shop, plus more rocks gifted from rock-collector Joan, I had two of those one-price USPS boxes to ship home ahead of me. Something Tom now expects and accepts with rolling eyes.

This year I had the new experience of being housed in downtown historic Kalispell. My nice and comfy Airbnb apartment was located above the Camas Creek Cottage yarn shop—my two sets of windows were on both sides of the giant ball of yarn mercantile sign.

Either early in the morning, or after class in the long mid-summer daylight hours, I’d stroll around town for some window-shopping. Soon I discovered display figures tucked here and there, climbing on the walls of the old brick buildings. See them and other Kalispell street photos in slide show below.

Scenic Kalispell Slideshow

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This was a multi-destination trip. After five class days in Kalispell, I packed my bags and headed off to California to teach for the Seven Sisters Quilt Show—the subject of next week’s post. On my original flight into Kalispell—with a layover in Seattle—I had caught sight of Mt. Rainier (below left). Then as I was on my way from Kalispell to California via Seattle, I was once again on the correct side of the plane to catch Mt. Rainier in the distance (below right).

Take-off from Seattle to San Luis Obispo was a bit delayed due to line-up of planes. I am so used to flying now that just boarding and sitting in a plane produces the Pavlovian response of falling asleep before the plane takes off. This time I wanted to stay awake for any good views from my window seat, so I occupied myself by taking pictures as we moved along the queue of planes. I didn’t really plan it, but I ended up with enough photos to make into a stop motion video, with a surprise ending, as I didn’t realize I’d be on the correct side of the plane once again! See the video below.

Video: Takeoff from Seattle, finally.