Quilter's days are filled with patterns, color

SANDPOINT — "I love puzzles, and essentially, when you make a quilt, you are creating your own puzzle," said Carol Beber, the featured quilter for this year's Panhandle Piecemakers Quilt Guild’s Festival of Quilts.

The annual showcase of pieced and stitched creations takes place Aug. 13 and 14 at Sandpoint Community Hall, 204 First Ave., from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. The show is juried by members of the guild, so viewers will see the creme de la creme of the area's collective quilt treasury.

Beber first took up the art of quilting in 1988 when she inherited her mother's Bernina sewing machine. Lots of quilting tools came along with it, so she obtained an instruction book and dove in.

"My first quilt was a Fence Rail," she said. "I started off with enough fabric for a king (size quilt) and ended up with a twin."

Even though she had plenty of experience with sewing growing up, quilting presented new challenges, and Beber said that she made plenty of beginner's mistakes.

However, she noted, when it comes to quilting, fabric is seldom wasted, and neither is knowledge. 

"I was self-taught at the beginning. I made a lot of mistakes because a book doesn’t tell you everything. I teach a beginning quilting class for the guild and teach them all the beginner’s mistakes."

When Beber and her husband moved to Sandpoint from Frisco, Colo., several years ago, she was taken aback by her first long, cold winter. A volunteer with Angels Over Sandpoint at the time, she asked other members for advice on dealing with the gray days.

"Someone suggested putting Bailey's Irish Creme in my coffee," Beber said. "Instead, I went home and cut a quilt."

That was the beginning of what would become an annual rite of the season.

"Every year, I've made a January Blues quilt. It's the light and color that gets me through," she said. "Last year, I did two of them. It's a great way to fill my time ... I fill my days with color and fabric. And jigsaw puzzles."

Beber has MS, which had necessitated some changes in her quilting style.

"I machine piece and do free-motion quilting on my Bernina. Lately, as my disease progresses and I get slower, I find it hard to manipulate the bigger pieces. I find myself making smaller pieces," she said.

Another change she has made, this one by choice, is moving toward modern art quilts.

"I’ve grown to appreciate the simplicity and the beauty of abstractness. You can let the fabrics speak for themselves. I’m not much of a traditionalist.”

She has belonged to Panhandle Piecemakers for three or four years, and enjoys the comradery she has found there. 

"It's a good tribe, because everyone is supportive. I've never met a crabby quilter," she said. “We all come from different backgrounds, but we all speak the same language.”

She believes persistence, patience and accuracy are the key competencies of a skilled quilter.

"Accuracy can be learned, if you have the patience and persistence to do so. I teach my students not to rush the cutting. We spend the majority of the morning doing nothing but learning to cut.”

Beber has set aside a variety of finished pieces for the upcoming show, but will make her final selections closer to the event.

"I’ll be showing 16-24 feet of quilts. I’m going try to choose pieces that I had done two or three years ago when I was at my peak of free-motion quilting. And some modern pieces that are more recent," she said.

Adult admission to the Festival of Quilts is $5, with husbands and children under 11 free. In addition to the quilts on display, the event will feature live demonstrations, a marketplace, a bake sale, door prizes and a quilt raffle.