Eleanore’s Inspiration

After telling myself and a few others that I was going to retire from quilt making, and especially to retire from buying more fabric — !!! — I was seduced to purchase, after weeks and weeks of to-ing and fro-ing, a bundle of 40 fat quarters that kept popping up wherever I went on the internet to read the news. I was enticed first of all by its name: Elinore’s Endeavors (a Moda line designed by Betsy Chutchian) but also by its beautiful colors: reds, pinks, blues, greens, blues, browns and blacks. I told my husband that is what I wanted for Christmas so he wrapped it for me and I dutifully waited until Christmas Eve to open the box.

But before opening it I pondered and pondered how to best serve the fabric — which quilt pattern to use — while also drawing on memories of my mother, also named Eleanore, who was the person who taught me how to quilt.

After Christmas and after more hemming and hawing / changing my mind, I struck out on one of my Go To patterns: Scrappy Trip Around the World. I must have made a 6 or 7 of these by now. This is such a fun pattern, made popular by Bonnie Hunter and of which there are oodles of images to Google because so many quilters have given it a whirl. It’s fun because there are so many variations which means it never gets boring (I suffer from a bad case of “Okay, This is Boring Me Now!) and it goes together quickly. Because Elinore’s Endeavor’s fat quarter bundle had more browns than I would have liked I decided to use up most of the browns first and I think this quilt was a good way to use them.

I really felt my mother’s presence in making this quilt. I often associate her with the color dark brown (brown hair, brown eyes, brown fudge, homemade chocolate sauce on homemade vanilla ice cream, rosewood furniture). I even wrote a Sestina about it once. One of my favorite outfits of hers was a dark brown corduroy jumper with a tiny pink flower printed on it which she wore with a pink turtleneck in the cold Allahabad winters. I thought she was so beautiful in that outfit. I regret horribly not telling her so at the time.

For this quilt I added in a scrap of music parchment print because she encouraged my piano studies. In fact, she was the one who taught me how to sing alto, mostly by banging out the alto part when she played hymns on our family piano as I stood over her shoulder following along.

I also put in some pieces of a blue palm print, too, because, well, aren’t palms associated with India? She loved her potted tropical plants on the verandah, and fresh cut flowers from the garden. I’m happy with this quilt and I love that I felt Eleanore’s Presence while making it. I thought of all of her endeavors while making it. Too numerous to list here, except to express a pretty major one: Sailing half way around the world with her husband and two little boys for a land only seen in exotic picture books. Seven years later she returned home to Minnesota for the first time, with two more little babies in tow.

Happily, I still had many many pieces in the Betsy Chutchian line that I hadn’t cut into yet! What to do with all those lovelies? And they have truly been lovely to work with. Stay tuned.

Here’s a link to the fabric line that so seduced me, in case you’re curious:

https://www.fatquartershop.com/elinore-endeavor-fat-quarter-bundle