Look at one of Kathy McNeil’s creations and you’ll probably say something like, “What a beautiful painting.”
Upon closer inspection — go ahead, you’ll want to touch it — you’ll realize that it’s not a painting after all. It’s a quilt.
A quilt held together with hundreds, occasionally more than a 1,000, tiny scraps of fabric and an awesome amount of tiny stitches.
“The eyes and facial expressions always speak to my soul,” said ZJ Humbach, editor of the worldwide Quilter’s Newsletter, which ran McNeil’s work as a cover story in 2002. “She masterfully creates a mood by combining various fabric textures and colors in her work. It’s difficult not to reach out and touch her quilts.”
“The beauty of each quilt draws you closer,” Humbach said. “But it’s the minute details that hold you captive and reveal the story of the quilt.”
McNeil’s works of art simultaneously inhabit the world of fabric, the world of painting and the world of words. Her pieces do bring exclamations of surprise, but each also sends a message.
The quilt “Take Me There,” a forested scene with a stream running through it, is about growing up in Darrington “when my mom would send us out with a peanut butter sandwich and told us to come back in five hours.”
The quilt “Courage” is a tribute to the birth mother of one of her adopted daughters from Korea.
Some of McNeil’s artistic quilts turn into poster art. Or a collection of Christmas cards. Some work she has sold for $10,000.
These quilts, taking between 400 and 700 hours each to make, showcase traditional techniques but with a contemporary bent, said Wendy Becker, Snohomish County’s economic and cultural development officer.
Becker became aware of McNeil’s work after McNeil won this year’s Best of Show Pacific International Quilt Art Festival award.
McNeil, a Tulalip resident, agreed that her style is quite traditional because all those little scraps of fabric are hand sewn, but says she much prefers working with many, many tiny scraps than trying to do math.
“I have a great love and respect for traditional quilters but they have to do so much math. It’s all geometrical with shapes coming together at fine points. It’s wonderful but it’s so structured, too much like nursing,” said McNeil, 55, who has been a registered emergency room nurse for 35 years.
A quilter for only 10 years, McNeil is self-taught and started after seeing a pictorial quilt of a seascape for the first time in a now-defunct Seattle shop.
She also credits local quilter Diane Coombs with encouraging her to show her work competitively.
“I felt guilty that I should be with my family … and then it turned out the kids would just come in where I was working,” said McNeil, who has two biological children and two adopted from Korea. “If I were to be a model for my daughters, I needed to show them that it’s OK to follow their own dreams.”
Now, McNeil sells and markets her work and travels about four times a year teaching her techniques to others. She’s done well enough to spend most of her time quilting at the Tulalip home she has shared with husband Bruce for 31 years.
“I’m probably the most obsessed quilter in the U.S. when it comes to using little scraps of fabric,” McNeil said. “It’s an awesome game of making a rock look like a bunch of flowers. The game of using fabric that isn’t supposed to be what it is.”
In the end, McNeil’s works may come out looking like paintings, but are even better because a painting you analyze, McNeil said.
“Quilts, you just feel them.”
Reporter Theresa Goffredo: 425-339-3424 or goffredo@heraldnet.com
Camano Island Quilter have 165 members and pay an annual dues of $20; hometown.aol.com/ciquilt
Busy Bee Quilters, Snohomish; yearly membership is $20; busybeequilters.com
Quilters Anonymous, based in Lynnwood, with hundreds of members and annual dues of $25; www.quiltersanonymous.com
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