Return from Grangeville, Turtle Hand Batiks, and other happenings...

Well, yesterday was a busy day, to say the least. Over Labor Day weekend, Blake and I took the family in the camper up to Grangeville, ID to attend to his aunt’s ashes being interned. She died during covid and so the family wasn’t able to do any kind of gathering or ceremony until now. While it obviously wasn’t a “party” so to speak, it was great to build some relationships with that part of the extended family. Grangeville is about a 4 or 5-hour drive from where we live, so we don’t get to see them often and they hadn’t met the girls yet. They were all so wonderfully accepting and it brought a lot of warmth to my heart to watch them embrace my little ones.

Unfortunately, the state is on fire right now. It’s normal to have a late Summer fire season here and there’s an entire industry around managing these fires until the rains come in the fall months. Being from the upper mid-west (Great Lakes Region), it took me a while to wrap my head around the concept of fire=season. Luckily my ecology background helps. Nevertheless, it reminds me of how climate change is making these events more frequent and extreme and our available water resources are declining due to both drier dry seasons and population growth. I’ll be happy when the rains return for sure.

While in Grangeville, I was handed two family quilts to repair. They belong to Blake’s eldest aunt, and the quilts themselves I’m guessing are from the original Sunbonnet Sue craze (1930s maybe). They certainly look completely hand made, but decades of use have worn out the perimeter and borders. I’m going to try restoring them as best I can. What strikes me is how common it is to meet people with these old, antique quilts, who just don’t know what to do with them other than toss them when they are worn. That is a completely fair line-of-thought, but I encourage people to consider saving what can be saved. Once the quilt is gone, it’s a part of (often personal) history that is gone as well. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of quilters with the time, knowledge, or even just desire, to fix old quilts. I try to be an educator when I can and hopefully save as many family heirlooms as possible. You can only do what you can do however.

After returning from the family gathering, we went straight to Nampa for the Nampa Modern Quilt Guild meeting. I was facilitating the program - an educational Zoom meeting with Tina Hilton of Turtle Hand Batiks. Turtle Hand is a small wholesaler (and I mean small) which speciallizes in artisan-made, hand painted, Malaysian batiks. Malaysian Batiks are make strictly in small-batch (like under 5 yards small), by an artisan with a depth of knowledge of their craft. Most of these artisans have come from generations of batik makers. They are used in Malaysia primarily for clothing, and so the quality of the fabric is wonderful. It feels almost velvety to the touch. Tina imports these fabrics in small batches from a small group of artisans she partners with and then wholesale distributes them to a very limited number of shops in the US. I’m super excited that The Quilt Idaho has become one of those shops and I’ve been working hard to educate and promote the fabric style as I believe they are really special. Only a few yards is made of each print and that’s all that exists in the world. Check out our Malaysian Batiks here: Our Turtle Hand selection. I’m working with Tina to build our inventory of her products to include possible small kits and panels. I’ll be excited when I can share the new inventory photos with you all.

The meeting was a success, but the level of stress trying to hold a Zoom meeting with a large group of people is something else entirely. It all worked out in the end, but we ended using every backup of backup we had. It’s hard to imagine the world economy ran off programs such as Zoom for two years.