otherNovember 6, 2017
Joyce Kester finds joy in piecing together quilts at her own pace
Joyce Kester isn't one to follow a pattern when she pieces her quilts. She just puts fabric pieces together until they look right, she says. Of course, there's more to it than that. There's a lifetime spent around quilting and fabric, for one, and there are techniques she learned, but with her skills and her eye for detail, Kester builds a scene down to the smallest element...
Joyce Kester isn't one to follow a pattern when she pieces her quilts.
She just puts fabric pieces together until they look right, she says.
Of course, there's more to it than that. There's a lifetime spent around quilting and fabric, for one, and there are techniques she learned, but with her skills and her eye for detail, Kester builds a scene down to the smallest element.
Quilting was in the background while she was a child, Kester says. Her mother sewed, and her grandmother quilted, but Kester never did any piecing or quilting herself growing up.
She worked in a fabric store, Pat's Fabric, that used to be between Cape Girardeau and Jackson, she says, and asked one of the girls there "Why would you buy pieces of fabric and cut it into little pieces and sew it back together?"
She laughs. "Then I got the quilting bug."
She pieced a few quilts, then when her sister-in-law signed up for a painting class, she decided to join her.
"But I already had the quilting hobby, and I'd done some embroidery, and I thought, 'You know, this is another hobby.' I could see it was going to run into money, and I just didn't have the time."
She got to thinking, she says, and realized she could achieve the same effect with fabric.
She did some research and found Natalie Sewell's books on landscape quilting.
"It just looked interesting to me," Kester says. "It looked like something you could create, didn't have to follow a pattern, could just do your thing."
She started collecting fabric, Kester says, stopping in to fabric stores and looking for patterns that looked like they could be either ground or sky or trees, even buildings, to create scenes.
She might not use a pattern, but she does work from pictures, Kester says.
She starts by blocking out the scene, roughly into thirds, she says, and she starts with the most distant pieces and works forward to create a layered effect. Dimensional, she says.
"I have pictures, and you'd be surprised how many pieces of fabric I put on and took off again because I didn't think it looked right," Kester says.
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"You just take scissors and start cutting -- there's no pattern, just whack out pieces of fabric and put them on there," she adds.
She's been approached about teaching a class, but, she says, "Anybody can do this! Just whack out pieces and put them together until it looks right."
But the rich detail of the scenes is evident. Individual leaves are cut out and stitched into place by hand. Three tiny birds dot the branches of the quilt showing the azalea farm.
There's a precision to the quilts, if not a plan.
Part of that is her quilting process. Kester says after she blocks out the quilt, she has a wall she hangs it on, and looks at it, thinks about placement of pieces, and makes a lot of changes before finally settling on a course of action and gluing pieces into place with a little bit of fabric glue -- just enough to hold it in place.
The scene determines how she sews it, she adds.
"I do free-motion quilting on my machine" once the pieces are glued into place, she says.
And after she has the picture in place, she adds batting and a backing, then binds it off, just like any other quilt, she says.
"It's a fun hobby," Kester says. "People have asked if I'd ever make one for someone, but I always say 'No, I don't do that.'" She laughs. "I've said 'You can't afford me.'"
She can't put a number to the hours she spends on each quilt, she says, because she doesn't work straight through on them.
That would make it tough to estimate a cost for one, she adds.
So she quilts for her own enjoyment, and sometimes submits her quilts to local shows. She won an award from the Cape Girardeau Quilters' Guild for the azalea farm quilt, she says, and two of her quilts were recently shown at the quilt show at the Oliver House Museum in Jackson.
What's next for her? She has fabric, she says, that she's collected one "fat quarter" (one-fourth of a yard) at a time, and she has an idea for a winter scene from a photo she took at her farm.
"Someday I'll start it," she says.
"I don't consider myself an expert or a professional quilter, it's just a hobby I enjoy doing," Kester says.
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