The log cabin worked in cloth on the "healing quilt" looks just like the home where the woman sits on the porch talking of her husband.
He built the porch and most of the cabin. He died about 18 months ago, leaving his wife adrift in painful sorrow.
Emblems of his life are sewn onto the quilt like a coat of arms on a flag: the Yamaha he used to ride, the rifle he liked to shoot, the Fourth of July fireworks he loved to set off on his lawn, the cross he carved for his wife.
She reads the quilt like a diary or a scrapbook. Each patch was cut from something her husband wore. The center is a fabric-art picture of their home. Her name is Deborah Thomason. His was Alex. While she talks, their daughter, Samantha, 4, chatters happily with a photographer taking her picture in the cabin in Pennsylvania.
"He got interested in stuff and he would just do it," Thomason says. "He grew a lot of stuff. Part of the field out there was a big pumpkin patch. He loved working the earth and planting flowers. Broom corn. He made his own brooms. He was a carver. As you walk around the porch you'll see his carvings. He did some chainsaw art. He liked to paint and do ceramic work. He also enjoyed writing, too. He left behind all kinds of journals and short stories and poems."
On the quilt, the pumpkins are appliqued on the porch of the cabin and so is a corn fiber broom, and up in the corner two owls, the big one Alex, the small one Deborah. She's a smallish woman, 5 feet tall and slight; her husband was a big man, 6-foot-4, 220 pounds, a protean man who had a big presence. "He did," Thomason says. "The biggest thing for me was missing his presence."
He grew up in Linthicum, the son of a state delegate. She was raised in Towson. They met while working at a Cockeysville property management firm.
Jenni Sipe, 53, the "Garden Lady Designs" fabric artist of Stewartstown, Pa., created the quilt, with lots of suggestions from Thomason and help from her business partner, Leslie Delp, 42, a bereavement counselor. Delp had been working with Thomason since the death of her husband. Sipe and Delp are longtime friends who, while watching their sons play baseball, used to talk about going into business together. About a year ago they formed Pieces of Love - Memory Keepsakes to make healing quilts.
Comforting memorabilia
Delp earned a master's degree in counseling psychology at Towson University. She's active in grief and loss counseling in York County, where she runs Camp Mend-A-Heart for young people who've lost a loved one. She's organizing a new, permanent bereavement center named Olivia's House, for a little girl who assuaged her own grief at the loss of her mother by helping another girl. And Delp is absolutely convinced of the therapeutic value of the quilts.
"I knew that children needed something to wrap up in," she says. "They needed a way to do therapy where they weren't feeling like there was something wrong with them. All children wrap up in blankets, but these are very special blankets that they help to create, and that means a lot to them."
The scent that persists in clothing is very comforting to children, she says, and adults as well.
Sipe made her first healing quilt for Delp, who lost the son she was expecting during the eighth month of her pregnancy.
"He would have been 22 this fall," Delp says. "You age your children that way when they die before you. You measure your life with their life."
Her quilt is made of clothes she bought for him and clothes she wore when she met her husband and when they went to school together and when they got married. "A pieces of love quilt," Delp says.
Sipe and Delp made a quilt for the family of Gene Gladfelter, a well-known biathlete from York who was only 38 when he died of Lou Gehrig's disease last July.
"He was actually one of Leslie's clients in her counseling program," Sipe says. "We met him and his wife a month before he died to talk about the quilts. ... He had special T-shirts he wanted in each quilt. He had them picked out."
With her help, he designed quilts for his wife, mother and children, Gracie, 6, and Gabriel, 8.
"He didn't want to die at an early age and not have his life be marked," Delp says. "So he left beautiful scrapbooks, and he left each of his children a journal. He typed them. When he no longer could use his hands he was able to peck on the computer with one or two fingers. That's what kept him going. He wanted the children's children and their children to know the races he ran."
He did his last race in a wheelchair and parts of that T-shirt are in all the quilts. The race is now called the Gene Gladfelter Memorial Run.
"And Gabe will tell you he will wrap up in his quilt when he needs to relax, when grief energy is more than he can handle as an 8-year-old," Delp says. "There's a special tree he likes to go to, and he climbs up in the tree and wraps himself in his quilt."
Thomason's daughter, Samantha, still wraps herself in the quilt made from her dad's clothes. Two of the patches include big pockets from a field jacket he wore.
"He always carried around a lot of Samantha's baby things," Thomason says. "If we went to music concerts, he carried her blankies, her juice or toys, and gum, because Samantha bought some gum for daddy, and still does."
Pieces of Love quilts are unique, Delp says, in that Sipe is a fabric artist who can create a portrait of a person, or a scene that gives meaning and significance to his or her life. And they create a history for each quilt. They listen to their clients tell the story of the clothes and memories they evoke.
"I go home and write what is called a healing quilt history, and it tells the life of the person," Delp says. This "bereavement history" is laminated and attached to the quilt.
"And when that quilt is complete and it is a piece of art, almost like a family heirloom, of course, it has its own history. One hundred years from now whoever inherits that quilt is also going to get the history of all the clothes and that person whose picture is on the front of that quilt.
"Samantha's grandchildren will know their great-grandfather through the history of the quilt Jenni created."
They've created about a dozen healing quilts so far, including one for a World War II veteran that's perhaps more patriotic than healing. He wanted insignia of all the armed forces and a "Ruptured Duck," the golden eagle pin World War II vets got on discharge.
The quilts range from $500 to $1,000, depending on the size - mostly 32 inches square, or 50 inches by 60 inches - and how much work Sipe puts into them. Typically, they take 60 to 80 hours to complete. The partners note that an Amish quilt might cost from $1,500 to $2,000 in Lancaster.
Country inspiration
Sipe has made quilts for more than 20 years, but she's been sewing almost all her life. She lives and works in an old firehouse in Stewartstown, Pa., less than four miles from the farm she grew up on and where her parents still live. Her grandparents had the farm next door, and she often stayed over with her grandmother.
"My inspiration for my quilts and whatever else I'm making comes from growing up on the family farm," she says. "Just being around animals and gardens. So I use a lot of country scenes in my quilts.
"My love of fabrics came from using my grandma's treadle sewing machine. ... When I was a little girl, animal feed came in fabric sacks. So I would take them and cut them up and make doll clothes and things like that."
Sipe created one of her earliest portraits from a photograph of her grandmother, Bertha Inez Dutton. "The geraniums in the corner were her favorite flower."
She has a grant from the Pennsylvania Institute for Cultural Heritage to make six quilts to use in nursing homes as a therapeutic tool.
"Jenni creates a fabric story board," Delp says. "Then the therapist at the Alzheimer's unit or senior center or nursing home can sit and talk with the elderly patient about what they see, what they remember, and because they live in the past they can tell their story and have a wonderful visit with their family."
"Helping Grandmother" was the first.
"That's me and my grandma," Sipe says. "That's just a conglomeration of all the things I remember. She had her specialties, coconut cake, angel food cake made from 12 eggs. I would go out and collect the eggs."
She calls the series of quilts "The Scent of Honeysuckle."
"I can remember sleeping in the bare bedroom at her house and smelling the honeysuckle at night. So that's one of my favorite smells," Sipe says.
The kitchen scene is decorated with a border of honeysuckle and apples and walnuts.
"We had a real big English walnut tree," she recalls. "And I loved that, gathering those walnuts in the fall and laying them on burlap sacks to dry."
So the remembrance of things past often seems captured in the scent of honeysuckle, or English walnuts, or the flannel shirt your father wore when he held you in his arms.
"You wrap yourself up in memories," Delp says. "It is really and truly what we have to do when we process loss. We move from a physical relationship to a spiritual relationship. Our memories create that spiritual relationship. This is one of the very beginning steps.
"The funeral's the first. Then you start making memories and living through your memories and attaching your heartstrings to the memories. You don't have the future anymore. But you have the past and you hang on to that."