What would you do if you found a box full of cassettes in your garage?
Most people would throw them out.
However, local quilter Lysa Flower used them as inspiration for a project that got her into one of the biggest modern quilt shows of the year.
‘Recently Flower,’ whose real name is Lysa Mair, learned that not only did her quilt make it into QuiltCon, an international exhibition held each year in the United States by the Modern Quilt Guild, but that it was one of nine chosen to feature the event in the Los Angeles Times newspaper.
With a combined print and online weekly audience of 4.1 million, that is big exposure for Flower, whose studio is in Ruskin.
“That was really cool because my quilt was sitting beside my quilting hero, Carolyn Friedlander. Her fabric was the fabric I used in my quilt,” said Flower.
“And my quilt, on the website, was right beside her quilt and she’s like a quilting superstar.”
Flower, whose background is in print making, co-founded the Fraser Valley Modern Quilt Guild in 2010.
Every year the guild has a challenge where quilters are given a stack of fabric with rules on where to use some of the fabric and the size of the piece.
“When I started the quilt, I just had a pile of fabric and a vague plan. It wasn’t from any pattern, I made up the pattern as I went,” explained Flower.
“I am really into mundane objects. So, objects that you use or have used in the past. And I’m quite interested in the things that we used in the past. The vintage stuff,” she continued.
“I started thinking about the diagonal that I could get with the brown tape part,” she continued about the cassette pattern.
The quilt took Flower four days to make, working feverishly in her studio for over 12 hours each day.
The goal was to have it ready for the Creative Stitches and Crafting Alive show held at Tradex in Abbotsford each March.
Flower started to live blog her work on Instagram and that’s when the project took on a life of its own. Comments and ‘likes’ started flooding in.
Once the quilt was completed, Flower posted a final photo to her account. She had 50 likes within five minutes and 100 likes by the time she woke up the next day.
This is QuiltCon’s third year and will be held Feb. 18-21 in Pasadena, Ca. Flower’s quilt called Mixed Cassette Tapes was one of 350 entries chosen from a pool of over 1,800.
