Art meets craft meets work in this year’s MayWorks quilt.
The 14-foot long quilt made with the help of local quilters shows 100 years of Windsor and Essex County’s labour history in a unique way.
“We were focusing on people working and workplaces,” said Deborah Dunlop, a local quilter who headed the project. The quilt’s unveiling kicked off the city’s annual MayWorks Windsor festival, which celebrates the links between labour, the arts and the community.
Each one of the 60 blocks that make up the crazy quilt includes a historical photo showing examples of day-to-day work and important landmarks in Windsor-Essex.
MayWorks Windsor Quilt Project organizer Deborah Dunlop holds a panel of the impressive quilt during a project launch at Artcite on University Avenue West Thursday April 24, 2014. The quilt is titled Workers and Work: Time Stands Still and each panel depicts a Windsor and surrounding communities scene. (NICK BRANCACCIO/The Windsor Star)
Quilters like Cindi List created blocks with pictures of well-known family businesses, Ouellette Avenue when it was still a dirt road, the original Hotel-Dieu Hospital, the Sandwich post office, the construction of the Ambassador Bridge or the 1959 graduating class of the local nursing school.
Starting last autumn, Dunlop and local historian Brandi Lucier – who also quilts and made five blocks for this project – began compiling the photos, searching through the Baby House archive, the Windsor Star’s photo vault, the Windsor Public Library, old yearbooks and family photos volunteered by project volunteers.
Using special transfer paper, each image was reproduced onto white cotton.
From there, kits with pieces of quilting fabric were dispatched to volunteers to piece together over the winter. This spring, volunteers collected all the blocks, assembled them and Dunlop quilted the top to finish.
The resulting quilt is the size of two queen-sized blankets and, along with the black and white of the photographs, uses a lot of blues, browns and greens (a nod to the city’s motto: The river and the land sustain us) and embellishments like buttons, rick-rack trim and beads.
In her blocks, for example, List incorporated strips of lace her grandmother made by hand.
Why use a quilt to bring attention to the city’s labour history every year? It might have something to do with quilting’s inherently social aspect.
“I have this desire to bring people together and do good things together,” said Dunlop, who has headed the annual quilting project since 2012.
This is the third and largest quilt community quilt Dunlop and her fellow quilting volunteers put together for MayWorks each year. It will go on display at the Windsor Community Museum starting May 31.
For more information about MayWorks events, visit artcite.ca/mayworks.
bfantoni@windsorstar.com or Twitter.com/bfantoni
