The Scud Missile System of Quilt Storage

This image is from a lo o oong time ago. It was my original quilt storage system. Since the work was about a foot deep on the bed, the bed and the room were useless.

I had been using sonotube concrete pillar forms for shipping tubes for a long time. I spoke with my husband and asked about building the design you will see below.

Seems it sounded like a no problem, problem. Here is the structure as first designed and installed. The resident engineer, construction worker is in the distance. His name is Sam.

Actually he can do, make, design, build anything. Decades and decades ago he designed and built race cars. He drove them as well. He finally quit racing for the Honda Motorcycle Team in the Baja California, Mexico 500 when he was fifty.

It has not slowed him down much. He is still nineteen years old between his ears. For all the implications of that.

Below is the completed scud missile system of quilt storage as assembled in the back bedroom. The long tube at the top was one of those design modifications that the contractors always charge an arm and a leg for.

This will show you what the storage system looks like from one end. Since the tubes are for construction and used to form wet concrete into columns the lining is an industrial wax. One must roll and wrap each quilt. I use a swim tube rolling core that has the slats and core wrapped in muslin. The quilt is rolled outside out. Then the package is again wrapped in muslin. The ends are tied. A label tag is threaded through the chinese cellophane string identifying each quilt. One can sift through the tags to find the quilt to take out and display on the dye board in the workroom.

This is fairly early on in the career of the storage system. The full compliment of twenty two Left Turn Lane quilts had not been created or filled the bins to capacity.

All the time this storage system was in the bedroom it was a jungle gym for all the cats in the household. One could take a velcro lint remover and sweep the cat hair off the muslin wrapping. The quilts were safe. The cats were happy. I was blissfully unaware of how much fun was going on in the back room.

Here, you begin to see the accretions of "quilt blanks," tissue wrapped, returned quilts, a roll of black batting.

The short wrapped works were the beginning of Snake Hands. They were three vertical, irregularly shaped, quilts. Hand dyed rayon challis was alternated with cotton velveteen. The Snake Hands quilts were among the give aways that happened last month.

Down farther were things just stuffed there waiting time to properly wrap and store.

It appears that this image was taken at a time when all twenty two of the Left Turn Lane were in transit to or from some exhibition or another.

The lovely basket comes from the mid east. It now holds black discarded clothing for Valarie James. I am collecting enough black cotton, linen, and rayon challis that Valarie may make another cloth fiber sculpture of the Las Madres series in "Widow's Weeds Black." The Las Madres - No Mas Lagrimas project is one I have been privileged to watch. I helped un-mold the ivory sculpture.


Here is the image of the storage system as installed in the garage. We had to contend with my little red Del Sol roadster that I refuse to give up. The channel for the garage door meant that one tube had to be reduced to four feet long at the top.

The very long tube that was at the top in the bedroom is now on the bottom. Although the cats are allowed in the garage on a random sort of basis, ends were placed on the tubes to discourage snakes, lizards, mice, and pack rats. Personally, I would prefer a jungle gym and a hunting ground for the cats. However, I do need to protect my inventory.

All this means that I now have retrieved the second bedroom in the small house I live in. It is less than 1400 square feet. The third bedroom has always been my office and my workroom. There is no way it will ever go back to bedroom. The dye kitchen puts it more in the category of wet bar.