Photo by Dane Anderson

ABOVE: Quilters, from left, Georgia Callahan, Susan Rubino, Ardyce Walser and Vada Boehme, look through fabric options for a new quilt during a semi-monthly meeting at the Westbank Library Jan. 26.Vada Boehme, Georgia Callahan and  Susie Reible and last week at the Westbank Community Library.

There may be a few gray hairs to be found at the Westbank Community Library on certain Thursdays of the month, but make no mistake about it, the women who show up there with bags of fabric and sewing equipment are not part of your grandmother’s quilting club. They come equipped with some pretty nifty technical gadgets and a wealth of Internet knowledge.

The Westbank Quilters meet every second and fourth Thursdays of the month at the local library. The organization was founded in 1992 by three women who wanted to get together and exercise their sewing creativity and make some quilts to raffle off as fundraisers for the library. Two of those members, Ardyce Walser and Georgia Callahan are still part of the group today.

“It’s really the library that binds us all together,” Walser said. “We knew the library always needed funding, and we wanted to help doing something we liked doing.”

As time went on, Walser and Callahan began to add more interested quilters to their group, some were experienced, some weren’t. Vada Boehme began quilting in the 1980s, but she got serious about it when she retired in 2005.

“I wanted to have some old quilts, but they were so expensive,” Boehne said. “So I decided to start quilting myself. My first quilt was an anniversary quilt for my in-laws.”

The last Thursday in January, the upstairs of the Westbank Library was filled with eight women and 1,000 pieces of fabric sprawled out across every table in sight. There were three projects going on – the beginning of a children’s animal print quilt, the end of a blue and white quilt called “Storm at Sea” and a large “Dresden Plate” quilt made from pieces of material from the 1930s donated by a woman who said she had become too old to quilt herself.

Some of the Westbank Quilters were busy picking out pieces of material for use in the pattern they designed themselves for the children’s quilt, looking at various squares of animal fabric, piecing those together with background fabric colors.

“I like the fabrics and the colors, finding things that go together and matching it all together,” Walser said.

Fran Drewe agreed.

“I love the creativity of it all – planning, choosing the fabric and even putting on the binding at the end,” Drew said. “It’s so satisfying after all the work, when you get to the end and you see it all finished. You know what you have created and that it is going to be around for a long time.”

A lot of the animal quilt will be sewn by machine, but the Dresden quilt will be completely hand sewn. The group of women have been working on the old pattern now for a year and a half, even putting the fabric on a frame for a while at the Laura Bush library.

“Because of the era, people didn’t use machines when they made their quilts in the 30s,” Boehne said.

The group fired up talking about the difference between quilting now and quilting as a necessity as their grandmothers did.

“They needed the quilts to stay warm back then,” Callahan said. “You had to use scrap fabric instead of buying new pieces. They took old feed bags with interesting patterns and any old piece of wool or whatever they cut up from worn out suits and clothes. And they got creative about how to piece them together.”

There is a movement of interest back to textile art that the experienced quilters have noticed in recent years.

“It’s a modern quilt movement that is attracting the green-haired girls as well as the blue-haired ladies,” Callahan said as she sifted through cloth pieces. “The fabrics they use are very different, and the patterns and designs are very different, much simpler.”

Westbank quilter Susan Rubino owns Over the Top Quilting Studio, a business in town that does long-arm quilting. Think of it as a sewing machine with enough space under the arm to stretch out a full-sized quilt.

“This generation, we see a lot of clients that come to us making baby quilts that they want to see loved to death,” Rubino said. “Some others are working on family heirlooms. “

When the Dresden and the animal quilt are finished, the Westbank quilters will have made and sold close to 20 quilts in 16 years to fund the local libraries. The last quilt that was raffled, an “I Spy” children’s quilt, brought in $1,200 for the library last year.

The local quilting group will host a quilt show at Laura’s Library from Feb. 1 through March 21, where the public will get a chance to see some of their personal creations. Included in the show will be quilts made by Boehme, Callahan, Walser, Drewe, Sharon Cole, Susie Reible, Debbie Hagan, and Cyndee Lindstrom. The quilters will host a demonstration of pieced and hand quilting at Laura’s Library today from 1-3 p.m.
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