JC squared*

*The quilt that started this whole experiment.

Above is JC squared, the quilt that sprouted the Quiltunes experiment. Before I made this piece almost 2 years ago, I had been quilting for about 6 years. I had started dabbling in improvisational and art quilts but mainly quilted using patterns. My standard practice was to quilt with online radio streaming after failed attempts at sewing and listening to Science Friday archives. I fell into the habit of setting up my project, reading instructions someone else wrote and letting a DJ out of New Orleans, Portland or Seattle pick music for me. It was comfortable and habitual.

Then I had the opportunity to take a class with the one and only Joe Cunningham. Joe is one of the most talented quilt artists and he is one of my PBS quilt heroes. (I cannot recommend the PBS series “Craft in America enough. If you haven’t seen these, get yourself some!) Joe’s style and techniques manage to meld a modern/improvisational style with a huge reverence for the traditional. I counted down the days until Joe’s workshop and then a massive forest fire broke out in our community and suddenly, everything was upended. I arrived at Joe’s workshop dazed from twelve hour days working the phones at our emergency operations center complete with red eyes, a raspy voice from overuse and a cough from the smoke — in short, a total mess. It was so surreal to be sitting in a room among many of my dearest friends with an icon like Joe at the helm with smoke billowing outside. But the dramatic situation out in the real world also made the experience all the more precious, to be in a room creating something beautiful while destruction raged a mere 10 miles away.

Spending time with Joe was just so enjoyable! The workshop was full of experimentation, new techniques, fun and music. What happened in that room is proof that crafting is good medicine. And Joe walked around the room strumming his guitar which also proves that music and quilting go together like coffee and croissants (or chips and salsa). Joe’s assignment for us was to pick three or four fabrics, slice and piece however you choose and to go big. I had a couple of linens with me so I incorporated in a different material in addition to the traditional cotton. For someone who tends to work small and with more fabrics, it was out of my box and oh so much fun! There was a lot of laughter in this workshop and minimal consternation; it felt like play. Put simply, it was a phenomenal two days. I gathered a lot of lessons from Joe and the main one is that experimentation is really fun. So this seed that had been in my brain pondering whether music impacted my craft started to sprout. Not only should I experiment with color, texture and different fabrics but also play with this idea of listening to a particular artist while I craft.

Enter the other JC – John Coltrane. “Blue Train” is definitely the album I have listened to most in my life and one of the most important. It’s the first album coming to my desert island with me. I discovered this disc when I was 17 or 18 shopping at record stores in Capitol Hill in Denver. The first time I listened to it, I was transported; it just moved me in a way that everything I had listened to before had not. When I was in college as a full-time student and barista, it was rare for me to have a whole day off. However, if I could take just one hour and lay on the floor and listen to this album, it was the ultimate treat and self-care. “Blue Train” is an album you want to lay down and just listen to, to let the notes seep into your cells and soul. This is my version of yoga and meditation (although I do these too, just not as successfully). And what does this album do for me 25 years later? It is the same thing. Everything just lifts when I hear those first few notes of the song “Blue Train”. This is not an album for driving, it is not background music — listening to it is the activity. I go back to this album when I need comfort or to be moved someplace else temporarily. Despite listening to it probably hundreds of times, the feelings it conjures are exactly the same. “Blue Train” is like a quilt, mac and cheese and a rainy day for my ears. If I can listen to this while wrapped in an actual quilt, all the better.

When looking at the unfinished scattered pieces I started in Joe’s workshop, I realized that this was my opportunity to make something unlike anything I had before and to listen to one artist whilst doing so. John Coltrane was the immediate answer to the question of what would pair well musically. One, the two artists seem to be a good pair. I never asked Joe Cunningham if he likes Coltrane but my gut says he does. Two, they both have the same initials and I am a sucker for alliteration and such. Three, both artists truly stand out in their own right and have added so much to their respective art forms. Four, we have a lot of Coltrane cds in our house…or so I thought until I gathered the bounty and discovered that we actually had duplicates of 4 albums. What can I say, we have good taste in music!

I decided that I would only listen to John Coltrane while I pieced this together and quilted it. For the finish I wanted to do some echo quilting in each piece since the shapes were so unique. I have to say that this proved to be more challenging than I originally thought and it is because I would get so into the music that I would space out. Because “Blue Train” and “Giant Steps” are albums that I typically listen to as the sole activity, transitioning to listening to them while I was working was so different. So this quilt has many interesting little lines that veer off a bit because I got super absorbed in the music. My quilts are never perfect and if this piece were to go into a show where a judge held their magnifying lens to my lines, oh my would I get some feedback on consistency! But you know what, that is not the point of this piece. I wanted this quilt to have some wonkiness because it wasn’t made in silence with total focus. This quilt was about me taking a challenge much different from my usual style and spending hours listening to some of my favorite albums to see what transpired.

Currently JC squared lives above our bed as a sort of headboard. When you live in an old house at 8,200 feet with horrible insulation, adding quilts to the walls becomes a (non-scientific) way to warm things up a bit. And a bonus of this piece that I never realized until I rotated it to its current position is that our abstract initials are embedded in a few pieces. I absolutely love JC squared because it means so much to me that I got to meet and learn from Joe Cunningham and that I was able to spend time crafting with John Coltrane. And it helped spark the concept of this blog too. Bonus.

Albums listened to: “Blue Train”, “A Love Supreme”, “Giant Steps” “John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman” and “Coltrane Jazz”.