3. Put Up or Shut Up

That was the runner up title for this blog. Either do something or stop talking about it. But there's a pun there, because canning is sometimes referred to as "putting up for the winter." In the end, I quilt more than I put up jam and pickles, and so "ease in fullness" was the title. More on that another time.

But this is my "Put Up or Shut Up" Quilt. I made it for my sister Colleen this past Christmas. Only two photos here, neither of them really that good, alas (December was a busy time). A long time ago I purchased, on a whim, a kit to make a jar quilt. The shtick was using novelty printed fabric of foods, cutting them into a general jar-like shape, putting a little rectangle on top for the lid, and putting these blocks all in rows like they were on a shelf. I found the idea cutesy and endearing, but it aged in my unfinished objects pile (UFOs).

My sister Colleen, my youngest sibling, lives in Columbia, Missouri with her boyfriend Tim. They play bike polo and get tattoos. She works at a library and he works at a local TV station. They live in a little house I've actually never seen but heard described. I'm thinking probably a lot like me and Mike when we were starting out, when "shabby chic" would have been stretching the definition.

But unlike many of her generation (we are of different generations, seriously, I'm firmly in Gen X and she's whatever you want to call the people who come after that), she sews and cooks and cans. I taught her canning, both she and Tim, one summer afternoon with jalapeno jelly. She has the beginnings of a garden and it's all so quirky and anti-traditional and I love the idea.

So this quilt says "Put up or shut up" along one side; the jars of random food (whole watermelons, for instance, and in one case, a pair of garden gnomes) in the middle, and the other side has a few vignettes from housekeeping: a woman ironing, a woman cooking, a woman taking a bath. The border is clothesline fabric with a variety of unmentionables hanging on the line. The back? pictures of vintage patterns.I barely quilted it, since this year was about the snuggly quilt (except Bevin's, but more on that later). I wanted these quilts to get carried to the couch and napped under, not hung on a wall and never touched. Not prize winners. Just fun stuff. But each jar on the quilt says something, mostly writing out the word "Kerr" or "Ball." But some, like the watermelon jar, say other things, like "WTF?" or just a question mark. Because the kit really stretched the idea of what one might possibly can. Whole radishes. Onions. Grapes still in bunches. Hence, I added the gnomes. I would put gnomes in a jar. Especially those two sly ones.