Some pictures live up to their proverbial one thousand word promise, others not so much. The photo of Jeffrey Gutcheon and me demonstrating our quilting styles and strategies may be one that meets the expectations of the adage. I'm not certain where it was taken, but I'm certain it was in 1976 or early 1977, as it shows my Necker’s Cube Quilt in the hoop and as yet unfinished. My database tells me that its “date completed” was 1977. Given the location of Necker’s Cube within that hoop, I'm estimating I hadn't yet completed much of the quilting, so this was likely 1976, probably at a quilt symposium.

I know that I first met the Gutcheons at the Finger Lakes Bicentennial Quilt Exhibit held in Ithaca, New York, in August 1976, though I don't believe this was taken there. More likely in Toronto, Canada, later that year. The other two of my quilts in the background appear to have been formally hung, and I don't think that was the case for my work at the Ithaca show, which I’d brought along with me. In any case, the approximate date for the photo is reliable.

By the time I met the Gutcheons we'd already corresponded once or twice, and I was eager to greet them in person. I'd accepted a ride to upstate New York from a quilt student from Rhode Island, Solveig Ronnqvist, with stars in my eyes. Not only were the Gutcheons on the program, but so was Jean Ray Laury. Their books had provided much inspiration in the previous two or three years, and the chance to get to know them better was irresistible. Those first in-person meetings developed into fast friendships and over the course of many years we'd spend quality time together at numerous conferences and symposia. The scene captured in that snapshot might have been staged in any one of several locations, at a moment when the quilt community was coalescing around large gatherings, regional and national “quilting bees” of a new sort, for the last part of the 20th century.

Wherever this was, I'd brought Necker's Cube with me, in progress.The Necker cube is a simple linear structure with a built-in ambiguity. It appears to move toward the viewer and simultaneously away from the viewer, in the mind's eye. It's a fascinating illusion that, when I first saw it in connection with searches for cube patterns related to the traditional "Baby Blocks" or "Tumbling Blocks" patchwork designs, struck me as ideal for a color and value treatment that would exaggerate the illusion. So this quilt was the result. The color palette was organized around the small cotton print of pink figures on an olive green background, and the contrasts set up both to emphasize the spatial illusion and to heighten the diamond "floats." The indents along the outer edge echo those "on point" diamonds. Structurally, it's a classic combination of visually complex repeat motifs and straightforward hand construction.

I no longer recall how many stitches Jeffrey might have contributed to the project. It was a photo opp, basically, and the novelty contained in a shot of two men working at a quilting hoop was the point. Surely, at least some onlookers were probably feeling somewhat skeptical, but speaking for myself, I almost always felt accepted and my work appreciated in those early years of the late twentieth century quilt revival. When a quilt conference attendee in Chattanooga, TN in the early 80s asked me what my father thought of what I did, I sensed in her tone a degree of suspicion, maybe disapproval. Not, she seemed to be suggesting, a manly enterprise, not something of which real men would approve. Conforming, at least in certain parts of my life, was never much of an ambition. Doing work that was fulfilling and satisfying was where my ambitions resided.

Necker's Cube Quilt accompanied me on my first transatlantic trip, to England in June 1980, at the invitation of Jenny and Alec Hutchison, then owners of Strawberry Fayre, a picturesque quilt shop in the equally picturesque town of Stockbridge, in Hampshire. The Hutchisons had already hosted the Gutcheons, and now they'd organized a series of workshops and talks on my behalf, welcoming me and my family with abundant warmth and generosity. As we prepared to return to the States after a couple of transformative weeks, I settled on making a gift to them appropriate to the richness of the experiences we'd enjoyed. Necker's Cube entered their personal collection, a token of appreciation and esteem that I feel just as viscerally these many years later.

Above, Strawberry Fayre quilt shop in Stockbridge, Hampshire, England as it was in 1980. The Hutchisons would eventually resettle in England's southwest, in Devon, and from that location, for many years, operate Strawberry Fayre as a mail order business. Below, an interior view of Strawberry Fayre, with Alec and Jenny Hutchison at right, tending to customers, June 1980.

As we were packing up at the close of that trip, Alec and Jenny gave us a copy of a book by artist and naturalist Janet Marsh called "Janet Marsh's Nature Diary," a carefully observed and illustrated record of a year in the natural life of a Hampshire village similar to Stockbridge. I have the book still. On the front end paper, this inscription in Alec's hand: