Ellen encourages me to try new things
While Ellen and I have taken a vacation from traveling for a few weeks, I have taken the opportunity to complete a quilt block for the Clothing and Textiles Community. Each year, they cooperatively make a quilt that is raffled at the annual meeting. This year, the theme is “Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.” My experience with quilting is quite limited, but I volunteered for this one, so I had to forge ahead.
My goal was to print some Ellen photos on fabric and make them all a part of the quilt square and the theme. Since I had never attempted this technique before, I engaged my good friend and “fabric guru”, Toni, to help me. We worked in her studio all one afternoon selecting the right photos and then printing on special fabric designed just for this purpose. She had all the right fabrics to meet our blue theme as well as had the pigment ink printer to print the photos. Once we selected the photos and printed them, we had to mount each with something that would attach with heat to the backing. Once this was done, we were set—at least as to where each photo was positioned. She then gave me carte blanche with her thread stash as I selected those I thought would look the best on the fabrics we selected.
I headed home to work with my machine as I outlined each of the photos. More challenges with my machine and Toni ended up here at my house at her Birthday celebration helping me adjust my machine to make the decorative stitches work. I added a few touches of lace to get the Victorian feel I wanted and was finished.
The photos are of Ellen at two different stages in her life. The lower left is a much younger Ellen than the one on the right. The upper left is a photo of some of the intricate stitches in a quilt that Ellen made well over 100 years ago. The quilt is mounted and displayed at AAFCS headquarters in Alexandria. The lower right is a photo of the medallion that was awarded in 1993 when Ellen was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca, New York. The medallion also resides at AAFCS offices.
The one lonely square is ready to travel across the country to AAFCS Textiles Community member, LynDee Lombardo, Olympia, Washington, who will join my work with other squares contributed to fashion them into the lovely quilt that will be raffled in Cleveland next June 2010.
As always, my affair with Ellen had stretched my comfort zone and propelled me into areas that I probably wouldn’t have ventured were it not for her influence and my desire to continue to tell her story via whatever means I can 
This vignette is part of the fall decorations in my home. You can see that Ellen is again front and center. This photo comes from one in a Vassar site and looks quite elegant in this antique frame I found at a thrift store.