Janice Long's quilt "Borderland in Butternut and Blue" was created from patterns published in the Kansas City Star. (Roger Sims / Linn County Journal)
By Roger Sims, rsims@linncountyjournal.com
Parker resident Janice Long recalls a line she heard someone else use when that person describe how long she had been involved in quilting: “Sitting under my grandmother’s quilt frame and pushing the needle back up through the fabric.”
However, while she grew up helping family members make quilts, over the last 45 years she has focused almost exclusively on accessing material and piecing quilt tops together before sending it to someone else for the quilt stitching.
Long was one of several fabric artists whose work was on display in a quilt show at the Parker Historical Society Museum on Saturday, Sept. 21.
One of the quilts on display will be her “Borderland in Butternut and Blue,” a design published in the Kansas City Star’s weekly Star Magazine in 2007. .
Each year the magazine would publish the pattern for a different quilt in monthly installments. Once a month, it would publish the pattern for a block that would go with that year’s quilt. The newspaper stopped publishing that Sunday edition tabloid in 2015 after being a staple for 45 years.
In 2007, the quilt of the year was the “Borderland,” and Long began finding the material to piece it together.
Although she has done the actual quilting process where the blocks are sewn to the backing, Long now sends them to another person who has equipment to do that. The “Borderland” quilt was sent to Jean Nickell near Beagle who used her quilting machine to sew an intricate pattern that adds to the craftswomanship of the quilt.
“The only other hand quilting I have done was to make comforters for my daughters,” she said.
She admits that not all of her hand-quilted pieces have been finished.
“For the last 45 years I’ve been more interested in piecing the tops,” Long added.
Several of Long's quilts were on display in a show at the Parker Historical Society's museum on Parker Day, Sept. 201 (Roger Sims / Linn County Journal)
One of the downsides of being a prolific quilter is what to do with the finished product. The creative drive produces beautiful works, but there’s no way to display them all except for a quilt show or hanging them from a wall in the home.
“I got tired of storing quilts in my closet, so I joined the Quilts of Valor Foundation,” Long said. “I started making quilts for veterans.
“My husband’s was the first one I made. While it was at the quilter’s, I made a couple of others and took then to a different quilter. It just so happened that I got them back before my husband’s.”
That didn’t sit too well with her husband.
“He was a little put out,” she said. “He didn’t think he was going to get one. Eventually his was finished, and his attitude changed.”
The Quilts of Valor Foundation was created in 2002 by a Connecticut woman who made a quilt for her son returning from a year-long deployment in Iraq. The idea behind the quilts – using predominately red, white and blue material – was to honor the service of men and women returning from overseas and to welcome them home with love and gratitude.
Since then the foundation’s volunteers across the nation have created more than 161,000 quilts.
Long keeps a three-ring binder with photos and clippings about the veterans for each quilt she has made.
And while making the quilts for those men and women, most of whom are from this area, has given her a purpose for her creativity, it still hasn’t solved one of a quilters nagging problems.
“To date, I’ve made and presented about 30 quilts to veterans,” she said. “And my closet is still full.”
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