Let's see. It must have been 1994. We had spent August through early March in Seattle, saving our wages to move on to somewhere else. C swears it rained every single day we were there. As we drove east up towards Snoqualmie pass, the clouds parted and out came a huge rainbow. Certainly a sign. We stopped and spent a couple of days with a friend in Missoula, MT, checking out the Bitterroot valley to the south and the Mission and Swan valleys to the north. We like it, but we were only one day's drive from Seattle and still had two months of travelling money in our pockets so we weren't at all ready to settle again yet. Our travels took us from there back to Colorado, to see family in St. Louis and Dallas/Fort Worth, then onto New Mexico and Arizona, down to Mexico for a couple of weeks of camping on the beach about half way down the Baja Peninsula , and then back to Durango, Colorado where the money finally ran out.
We ended up on a newly established organic farm just north of the New Mexico border between Durango and Pagosa Springs and spent the spring and summer living in a canvas tent in an extraordinarily beautiful place. Yes, it was tent living, but not without the luxuries of a futon, feather bed, and down comforter. Long story short: The guy "running" the place really just wanted to be a spiritual guru, so half the people there were there to work hard and learn about organic farming and the other half were there working the minimum 4 hours a day and spending the rest of the time meditating.
There was plenty of food to eat but we didn't make a penny that spring or summer until C went to work for someone building a traditional adobe house nearby and I spent a couple of weeks picking chokecherries in the mountains to sell to a local buyer. Towards the end of the summer the farm fell to pieces and C and I ended up camping out of his truck and my car, eating a lot of turnip-rutabaga-carrot soup dug from the fields. (C won't touch a turnip or rutabaga ever again.) When the temperatures dropped in the fall I went to Boulder and crashed on C's sister's floor, working two jobs (Starbucks AND the Bookend Cafe, a strange mix of both corporate and independent coffee shop jobs) until we could afford an apartment of our own. C came behind me a month or two later when his construction job was done. We spent about 2 years in Boulder living in a dive of an apartment at the primo location of 4th and Pearl, saving our money to buy land. Prices were out of our price range in Colorado so we moved to Montana. I miss so many things about Colorado. Someday we'll take the boys on a road trip back there to all our old haunts.
Oh. The quilt? Most of the fabrics are from second hand cotton shirts bought at a thrift store's $1 bag sale that summer, mixed with other scraps I already had, some of them leftovers from the first quilt. The quilting is by hand and I'm not sure about the piecing, maybe some by hand some by machine? It was probably finished in late 1994 or early 1995. I made a couple of tank tops as well that summer from an old cotton sheet, tracing a tank I already had, embroidering flowers around the neckline. R has been using this quilt lately this spring and summer, ever since it's been too hot for a down comforter. It's showing some wear and could use new binding.
