Houston - Or Bust!

Here it is - Wilde Ideas: Strings Attached - a compilation of 35 individual knife edge bound quilts, tied together. It features an Oscar Wilde quote from the Importance of Being Earnest - "the pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple". This baby was a ton of work: all of the gray target squares are machine quilted with truth-isms and it includes lots of hand quilted chicken scratch to fill in spaces. Every component of this quilt is a comment on the ambiguity of the quote. I am very proud of it. And, yesterday, I had to say goodbye. It's on the way to Houston for the Text on Textiles special exhibit at the International Quilt Festival, and will then travel for a year with the exhibit. I will admit, it was hard to let it go - I've heard of many stories of quilts gone missing from these shows and, well, I just hope it gets back home here safely and no worse for the wear.


Before shipping the quilt I had a lot of reinforcing to take care of - I tightened up all of the hardware, pinched together all of the openings of the metal eyes, triple stitched all of the blocks together from the back, and added a healthy dose of Fray Check to ensure my knots don't come undone.

I had to add a label - I am not fond of labels on my quilts and typically just hide a stitched signature and year somewhere in the quilt. The label ended up being the 35th quilt component to Wilde Ideas and includes the name of the quilt, my name and year. DOES NOT FOLLOW DIRECTIONS! Woops! After packing the whole thing up I realized I was to include my address and phone number on the quilt label as well - my bad - and you know what - I did not unpack it. If they call to complain I'll just have them hand write it on the label - if it makes it back home I'll remove the label anyway.

Here it is at my local UPS store. I was hoping to have it shipped in a tube but it wouldn't fit. When my friendly packaging expert at the store pulled out this box I had a fit - this quilt contains 2 wooden dowels and 2 slats as integral components to the structure. If the box bends, the wood breaks, end of the tour for Wilde Ideas. But my expert knows his packaging - he put it in the box and then slid compacted cardboard corner reinforcements in each of the corners of the box. That baby is smash proof, or so I hope. I made him put the fragile tape on every side of that box. I just checked tracking - I love tracking - it's in Dallas - yippee ya hoo! Cross your fingers that it arrives safely in Houston by Monday!