Ahi o' Pele (Flames of Pele) is my very first Hawaiian quilt.  My sister and I were sitting on the black sand beach talking about my dream and I told her, "I want to live in a house by the sea.  I want to quilt in the mornings, and have friends come by in the afternoons to eat and talk story."  And then she said, "That is a wonderful dream.  What can you do to get there?"  I said, "Well, I suppose I could make a quilt."  Ahi o' Pele is the result.  This is a scan of a photograph, which is all I have as an image of this quilt and I apologize for the quality.  I made it in 1993 while we were living in a building of no value (that's what it said on the deed) on the Big Island and we had a camera--that's it, a camera.  It was purchased by the State of Hawaii for it's Art in Public Places program and I was blown away by the fact that a piece of my work would be left in Hawaii after I was gone.  The background is black cotton and the foreground is cut from one piece of red fabric, like the snowflakes we used to cut out of paper in grade school.  The stitiching is done in red thread and echoes around the image.  I wanted to have a visual symbol of the red lava glowing in the cracks between the folds  of the pahoehoe lava.

Imagine my surprise when Lau Puka Puka (Leaf With Holes) was purchased by the State of Hawaii for the same Art in Public Places program and was hung outside the governor's office in Honolulu!  I have a better image of this one since we had upgraded to slides.  

This quilt is 7 feet square and the leaves are about two feet across, which is exactly the same size as the leaves are in nature.  In fact my son Blake and I went for a walk and picked a few leaves to use as patterns when I designed this quilt.  It is a winter quilt, and the tiny green specks of the echo quilting stitches suggest the winter rains falling on the vibrant green of the wet leaves and the shiny black of the lava rock.  I worked on this quilt while I was watching Blake's soccer games and the other children would come and sit underneath it.  I forbid wiggling while I was working, so periodically they would get out from under it and jump around for a big to get their wiggles out.  As you can imagine by the time the quilt was done it had peanut butter, shave ice, chocolate, mud and heaven only knows what all over it.  I tossed it in the washer and the dryer at the laundromat and sent it off to the League of Hawaii Craftsmen juried show and then it went off to Honolulu to be mounted behind glass.  I like the fact that wiggly Hawaiian children, mine and others, got to play around it and under it and put their energy into it before it became a valuable artifact.

Li'i Li'i Ahi Pua o' Lehua (Little Flame Flower of Ohia) is another winter quilt and was my third Hawaiian quilt.  It, too, is 7 feet square and I used the green stitching as I had in Lau Puka Puka to suggest the winter rains.  The Ohia trees have little paintbrush flowers that glow bright red against the olive green of the leaves and the greyish black of the Ohia trunks.  This quilt was the last time that I used commercially dyed fabrics for my work.  After this I switched over to hand dyes.  This quilt is also the point at which the Hawaiian women in Hui Kapa Apana o' Hilo (The Quilt Group of Hilo) gave up on getting me to do Hawaiian quilting properly.  They kept telling me, with great patience, that black was a Kapu (taboo) color and that Hawaiian quilts did not use black.  They calmly explained, over and over, that Hawaiian quilts had white or cream backgrounds with a solid main color.  You could tell, after three quilts, that they were getting a little put off by my seeming inability to understand.  My workmanship was very good, tiny even stitches, nice smooth curves to the applique, but what was with the black?

I reluctantly told them that my house was primitive, my plumbing outdoors, my washing machine a washtub and scrub board, and my house was filled with muddy footed children and dogs.  It would have made me extremely unpleasant to live with if I had been working on a white background quilt and trying to keep it clean.  The black background, aside from the beautiful way it popped the colors, also disguised the dirt while I was working on it.  But it wasn't until I talked about the way that I was using the black to try to capture the black lava rock that they began to feel better about my work.  The black lava rock is an intense velvety black with a bluish iridescence.  In the winter rainy season the wet makes all the colors saturated, deepening the black, making the greens glow and the reds explode.  This they could understand, if it was an aesthetic and symbolic choice that made it, in its own way, traditional to the spirit of the Hawaiian quilt.  When I hung this quilt at the Wailoa Center in Hilo it got a warm response.  And I found my friend Sharon Balai, herself a renowned quilt designer, standing in front of it.  She pointed out the Celtic look of the central design and I informed her that my background was, in fact, Irish.  She nodded her head in acknowledgement and said, "Oh, yes.  You do Irish Hawaiian quilting." 

Four strong stones refers to the ovals quilted into the center diamond of this quilt.  You can only see the central diamond when the quilt is back lit as it is in the picture.  When the quilt is not backlit you just see the white ginger plants in the corners on a uniform peachy beige background -- no white center diamond, no white edges.  This is one of my love/hate quilts.  I love it, my nephew Christopher loved it, my brother Dan and his wife Linda who were given it love it.  My quilt group, my husband Joe, my son Joshua -- well they never really said but I could tell they weren't enthusiastic.  Some of the quilt group ladies were a little more frank.  This is what I was trying for with this one.
When we cleared the land we found a dip, a kind of glade in the jungle that was surrounded by white ginger plants.  It had obviously been cleared and used before because there were four stones set in a kind of conversational grouping in the center.  When I returned to the home place one evening my son Blake and my husband greeted me, excited and sweaty and both holding machetes and took me down, with my eyes covered, to show me the little space that they had discovered.  It was magical.

I was trying to capture that feeling of finding something already old, already used and loved, that sense of having unearthed rather than simply created something.  I dyed the muslin peachy brown color with ironwood bark in the tin washtub over a fire in the dooryard.  My son Joshua had cut some ironwood poles for walking sticks and commented, when he peeled the bark off, that the red brown stain might make a good dye.  And he was right.  I cut the white ginger branches out of bleached muslin and, after appliqueing them down, made up the backing with pieces of the white and the dyed muslin.  I tried to get it into the juried show for the League of Hawaii Craftsmen but the judges didn't love it like I did.  I would have been hurt by that except for what happened when I came to collect the quilt.  
I walked through the exhibition in Hilo, noticing the huge wooden drum that appeared to be carved from a single large Koa trunk.  It was about three feet across and I was aware of the age of the tree and could almost hear the deep resonant echoes of the sounds that it could make.  I looked up and saw a Hawaiian man standing in front of my quilt and I walked over and stood beside him.  I told him I had made it and he looked surprised.  "I thought it was an old style quilt," he said.  That made me happy.  I asked him if he had a piece in the show and he said he had made the drum.  "I love that drum," I said.  "I can feel that drum in my chest, but like it is coming from a long ways away, or a long time ago."  We grinned at each other.  I said, "All the pieces are good, but for me your's has Mana."  He told me he hadn't really looked at anything else, he just walked in, saw the quilt and came right over to stand in front of it.  In Hawaii they call that feeling of the hair raising on the back of your neck Chicken Skin.  We stood there together, covered in Chicken Skin, and basked in a glow of mutual admiration.