Quilters Finance Alzheimer’s Discovery!

With $30,000 from the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative researchers at the University of Michigan were able to create new molecular tools that show promise for cleansing the brain of amyloid plaques, implicated in Alzheimer’s disease!  The plaques — a hallmark of  the disease —are thought to contribute to cell death, leading to devastating  memory loss and cognitive decline.

Learn how quilters are stitching towards a cure. Read the AAQIUpdate blog!

Funky Colored Denim And A Big MESS!

This is the before picture. I don’t think you’re going to see an “after” picture for quite a while. Notice the place on the carpet where I stand (no scraps)? I confess, I am a true slob.

(You can click the picture to see exactly how big a slob I am.)

Still, I’m pretty happy about the whole state of affairs. You see, I’ve been collecting funky colored jeans for at least a decade, and I finally came up with something to do with them!

I am making denim badge holders! 

By time you read this all of the AAQI Board Members in Houston will be wearing them around their necks, displaying the International Quilt Festival Exhibitor Badge (our ticket to get in to the Exhibit Hall) in the cute little plastic pocket on the front.

Inside is a large pocket, on the back are two more pockets, and some of the Badge Holders even have the AAQI logo, tagline, and web page on the front flap. (I used all the leftover ones we had from labeling the “Name Quilts” for the new exhibit.)

I am SO pleased with myself. I just knew that some day I would find a use for the funky colored pants! (It’s OK, I still have about 97 pounds more.)

We have seven of us board members. But I had about 15 fabric logos left, so I made more Badge Holders than we have board members. And then I didn’t count so well and had lots of leftover parts and made about three times as many as I needed. Since I ran out of the logo fabric, some of the extra ones are just “plain.”

Now I need your help. I want to donate all the extra ones to the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative and sell them at Festival. Am I silly? Would anybody even want one? More importantly, how much would they pay for one?!

In the comment section please tell me what I should charge. I need to know by 5 p.m. on Wednesday. That’s when the Sneak Preview opens and we start selling the 1,000 quilts, and hopefully one or two of these little badge holders. ( Exhibit Hall, Row S. —Tell your friends.) Did I mention I made them myself? And it was hard. (Wiping back of hand across brow…) And I still have to clean up the mess!

Seriously, what’s a good price. It’s for charity.

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And, don’t forget to read my blogs about the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative here.

Best Fortune Cookie EVER!

Is this not the best fortune for a quilter to find in her cookie? It’s  been stuck on my bulletin board for probably a decade; I even photocopied it once or twice in case it ever got lost.  

OK, so it says “rags.” “Scraps” would have been much better, but it has the word QUILT on it!

Perhaps my dinner partners will recall where I was and who they were, because it’s been so long ago and there have been so many wonderful meals with students over the years that I can’t remember. The food was great, the company even better, and the memento of the evening was the quilty fortune. 

When my mother turned 70 I made her a photo-transfer quilt. If you have a copy of Creating Scrapbook Quilts, you’ll see it on the cover. They story of how I pulled off the surprise quilt and the surprise birthday party is on page 41. The best picture of her being surprised is this one. (She had a pretty good time at the party.)

I bring this up because I had her surprise party at a Chinese restaurant and mail-ordered special fortune cookies for the event. (Yes, you can do that!) I think there were four different messages in the custom cookies, but I can only remember two: “You’re going to kiss an old lady.” and “There’s a little piece of rice stuck on your upper lip.”

You can also make your own digital fortune cookie image here. Just type in what you want it to say.

And your fortune would be…..what?

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The “Rose of Sharon” Project

Hats off to Sharon Pederson, and her Nine Patch Media business partner Elizabeth Phillips, for putting together the Rose of Sharon project. It was premiered at the International Quilt Market in Minneapolis last weekend where quilt shop owners go for the newest fabrics, thread, books, and gadgets.

The Electric Quilt Company hosted the Rose of Sharon block contest at the end of last year which netted 850 different blocks made by designers in 11 countries. Sharon and Elizabeth whittled the entries down to 50, and Alex Anderson and Ricky Tims  selected the top 12 designs for Sharon’s quilt shown here.

It’s called “Roses of Remembrance” because Sharon and Elizabeth made the project into an opportunity for the designers to share their connection with Alzheimer’s (if any) and for the partner companies to support the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative (AAQI) in the fight against Alzheimer’s.

Sharon made the quilt reversible. On the back of the quilt you can really see Barbara Shapel’s quilting!

Sharon’s new “Rose of Sharon” book, due out this fall (Martingale & Company), includes an introduction I wrote about my mother and the beginnings of the AAQI.  Sharon’s “Rose of Sharon”  instructional DVD from Nine Patch Media will also be available soon.

Shops throughout the country will be able to offer quilters a “Roses of Remembrance” BOM (block-of-the-month) with fabrics from Island Batiks.

AccuQuilt has Go! Dies for all the Rose of Sharon appliques, and Oklahoma Embroidery Supply & Design (OESD) has each block design digitized for machine embroidery and/or applique.  Aurifil has put together two Rose of Sharon thread collections to stitch and quilt everything together.

Quilt Market is always exciting, but this year it was especially so.

I’ll Be On The Quilt Show!

Yours truly will be a guest on The Quilt Show!  Look for me on a monitor near you some time at the beginning of 2011.

If you can’t wait that long, and you’re a member of The Quilt Show, come to the taping! It will be on August 10th and ”admission” is a completed, fully registered Priority: Alzheimer’s Quilt!  Alex and Ricky are making my dream come true — to look out over the audience and see every single person holding a little 9″ x 12″ donation quilt for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative. Either that, or possibly catching a glimpse of George Clooney in the back row. I could go either way.

Space is VERY limited. Put “Ami Simms” in the subject line when you request tickets for the August 10th taping.

If you can’t make the taping but you’d like to influence history, in your comment to this blog post tell me what you’d like me to do on the show. Let me rephrase that. I’m not showing my hand-dyed underpants, juggling is out, and there will be no cooking segments.  What else are you interested in seeing? What questions about the AAQI can I answer for you? What skills are you all excited to learn that I might happen to know?  What annoying habits should I try to stifle? All suggestions/comments welcome. Tell your friends.  And send Rolaids. I’m already getting nervous.

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There’s A New Quilt In The Works

Last week I had an opportunity to see Paula Poundstone perform. She was hysterical! If you ever get a chance to see her, go! She had us laughing for two hours straight and then came out afterwards to greet people and give autographs. She was so generous with her time, talking with everyone in line and posing for pictures.

Not one to miss an opportunity, I put together a little quilt for her to sign. More acturately, I brought her a “quilt” held together with more pins than thread, but she got the idea. As soon as it is finished it will be auctioned off to benefit the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative.

I’ve read her book and saw photographs of her, but a good look at her web site helped me decide just what to do with the quilt. I went to the Salvation Army and picked up a blue shirt for the front of the quilt. I cut away the sleeves and the back and made a polka dot tie from the leftover fabric. The suspenders are red and polka dotted too, except for the area on one where she wrote a message and signed her name.

Although it was in pieces, it actually looked like part of the “costume” she wears to perform in—not bad for four hours of work. She even Tweeted me a message: “…That quilt square is so cool!”

I’m hoping when the quilt is finished she’ll tell all her fans to bid on it. Meanwhile, there is the “practice” signature I just happen to have, black pen on white fabric.  Convince me you are the quilter to turn it into a another Priority: Alzheimer’s Quilt.

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I Just Wrote A Check for $30,000!

I just wrote a check for $30,000 and it felt GREAT—as soon as my heart stopped racing and I made sure I spelled all the words correctly. That much money, well, I don’t know about you, but I get a little tense.

Writing checks to pay for Alzheimer’s research is the best part of my duties as Executive Director of the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative.  I know there are some organizations who can give far more than we can and would consider a check for $30K a piddling amount. But I know how we earned it: one quilt at a time. I can’t tell you what a thrill it was, and how grateful I am that quilters throughout the United State (and beyond) made this grant possible.

This is the AAQI’s third research grant that we have funded directly and it is our largest one to date. This was also the first time I was able to hand deliver the check.

On Friday Debbie Chenail (AAQI Treasurer) and I drove to Ann Arbor, Michigan to met Dr. Mi Hee Lim and her research team at the University of Michigan. We brought several quilts from the current traveling exhibit, “Alzheimer’s: Forgetting Piece by Piece” along with five of the completed “Name Quilts” from the next exhibit, “Alzheimer’s Illustrated: From Heartbreak to Hope.”

I explained that for most AAQI supporters, fighting Alzheimer’s is a personal struggle. We have/had family members and friends with the disease and we have seen the devastating results. Every stitch in every quilt is made with purpose and with hope, and now that hope rests with these talented and dedicated scientists.

The team which will soon begin work, financed in part by the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative, is from left to right: Joseph Braymer, Dr. Mi Hee Lim, Nathan Merrill, Jung Suk Choi, Nicole Schmidt, Yihong Liu, and Alaina DeToma.

They hope to create a new class of molecules that will be used as chemical probes to better understand the role of metal ions in the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease and to hopefully create therapeutic agents for metal-ion chelation therapy. Godspeed!

If you would like to support the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative, there are 28 Ways You Can Help. For now I’m going to rest my check-writing hand and go make another quilt.

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The Fragrance of Memory

When I was little my mother wore deep red lipstick and Chanel Number 5.

It was fun to watch Mom put on makeup  because it meant she and Dad were going out, or people were coming in. It was exciting either way.

She’d stand in front of the mirror and begin by stroking the lipstick three times right in the middle of her upper lip. Lipstick to the right, then to the left, a quick schmear on the bottom lip, and then she’d move both lips together a few times to even out the coverage.

She’d blot with a piece of toilet paper and that was the extent of her “toilette.” There might have been some eyebrow pencil going on but I mostly remember the lipstick. I can see her now in my mind’s eye. What a good memory.

My family didn’t air kiss. You got kissed on the lips or on the cheek. And if you got lipsticked somebody was always there to rub it off, taking two or three layers of skin with it.

Mom only wore perfume when she dressed up. And it was always Chanel Number 5. She’d spray it on one wrist and then rub both wrists together. She smelled so good.

When I find myself by a perfume counter I always test the sample. The aroma carries me back to Mom. I hear her high heels on the wooden floor and the jangling of her bracelets. Funny how we have a mind’s “nose” and a mind’s “ear” too.

This past Christmas when I was mall-walking and Macy’s opened early for holiday shoppers I think I made a pest of myself at the perfume counter. I hoped  the Chanel Number 5 would go on sale; it never did. They probably had to break out a new sample bottle.

Recently, I finally got up the energy to clean out more of Mom’s things. She’s been gone over a year now, but I haven’t been in any hurry to tackle the stuff left behind when she moved out of my house and into Assisted Living in 2006.  To  my great surprise I found three bottles of Chanel Number 5! She hadn’t worn perfume for a really long time. I think she was saving it.

So, for the last few months I’ve been wearing exorbitantly expensive  perfume around the house. I’m not saving it. I squirt it on one wrist and then rub both of my wrists together just like Mom did, even if I’m wearing jeans and sneakers. And throughout the day I sniff my wrists and bring back Mom to my mind’s eye. She’s young and healthy, and she remembers my name, and I tell her how much I miss her. And that I will always love her.

Thanks for the perfume, Mom.

The Captain

There is a remarkable film called “The Captain” that you need to watch. It will take less than four minutes, maybe a little longer if you have to run for a tissue. Heartwarming doesn’t begin to touch it.

It was narrated by Allison Janney, the actress who portrayed Press Secretary C.J. Cregg from the television series The West Wing. (I have watched all seven seasons on my iPod, multiple times. There. I said it. ) Were Ms. Janney to read a few pages from the phone book, I would be enthralled, but hearing her speak the words of the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley went far, far beyond that.

The Captain stars a young man named Daniel Long. He is terrific.

A little bragging here: I went to college with his parents, Patti and Tim Long. My Steve (and her Tim) were roommates.  If you’ve heard me tell the story about hand quilting  on a long car trip, my 32″ oval hoop wedged between my chest and the dashboard of our Chevette, the part I left out was that we were on our way to Tim & Patti’s wedding. Now you know.

Turns out that Daniel’s brother Aaron, who is also mentioned in the credits (get out your magnifying glass), is friends with Allison Janney.  Well, I’m not incredibly well versed on how this “six degrees of separation” stuff works, but I have a big enough mouth. I asked Tim to ask Aaron to ask Allison (see we’re on a first name basis already) if she would autograph some fabric for a Priority: Alzheimer’s Quilt.

Long story short, she said yes!  And she signed SEVERAL pieces of fabric! I get dibs on one, but I’m opening it up to anyone else who would like to create a Priority: Alzheimer’s Quilt with the other four.

If you are interested, convince me that you are worthy.  Just so you know, we only need one quilt with gold fish and a flamingo but anything else is fair game.  No particular time limit, but sooner rather than later. Comment away…

February 27 Update:  The first four volunteers who commented to the blog were selected to receive one of the Allison Janney signatures. Thanks to everyone who volunteered.

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Thank you, Tiffany!

The words embroidered on the top and bottom inner borders of the quilt I just finished say:

“You have proven that the actions of a single person can make a profound difference in the lives of others. Thank you!”

I pieced the quilt and embroidered those words during the 27 days that my mother was in hospice last year.

This quilt is a gift for the young woman who took such very good care of my mother at the Alzheimer’s facility where she lived for the last three years of her life.

Tiffany cared for my mother amidst very trying circumstances, with kindness, compassion and devotion. It was Tiffany who “brought her back to life” on more than one occasion, getting Mom to eat, and to move again after falls that would have surely ended her life hed Tiffany not have been there.

Tiffany stayed at Mom’s bedside after Jennie and I were summoned from Houston, so she wouldn’t be alone until we got there. She did this on her own time after her shift had ended, off the clock, as a friend.

The names of  18 of the residents who lived with Mom are inked on the wrong side of 2″ x 6″ purple fabric in the middle of Tiffany’s Quilt. They are sashed and bordered with fabric that my mother hand dyed. I used the pillowcase from her bed as the backing. The embroidery floss was my grandmother’s and great grandmother’s.

I quilted funky feathers in the outside border, hanging hearts in the sashing, and various meandering stitches among the names.

I gave Tiffany the quilt top after Mom died and, in typical quilter fashion, told her I had to have it back to finish it. Embarrassingly, that was more than a year ago!

It is finally finished and I get to give Tiffany her quilt today!

Between the piecing and the quilting, Tiffany now works  part-time for me at Mallery Press, is a volunteer for the AAQI, and a caregiver for a gentleman with Alzheimer’s. In her spare time she goes to college, races cars , and works at Ba Doy Ow! I am honored to have her as a friend.

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