Of all the quirks (or charms if you’re so inclined) of our new town, one of the more reliably unique is the local radio station based out of the college up on the hill. The DJS are a mix of personas from the idealistic-world-conscious college student to the cannabis-imbibing deadheads arguing over tapes to the “ambient earth sounds show” (whatever that is). You truly never know what you’re going to get when you turn it on — which makes the station both a source of entertainment and consternation.
The other night we tuned in and discovered a new program: the youngster whose taste runs from way back to the days of poodle skirts and soda fountains. This whole program is devoted to 50’s pop like Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Surprising, yes, but everyone has their own thing they’re into and this kid just gets to share his with the entire Four Corners world. And, as a former kiddo who enjoyed choreographing dance routines with her girlfriends to Beach Boys songs, I get it. I do. I like the idea of drive-ups and malteds and cars with fins.
All of this does lead me to the picture above — the Twist quilt. Every time I worked on the quilt, I had Chubby Checker in my head urging me to “Come on baby, let’s do the twist”. Every single time. Now, as I spent a lot of time on this project hand-quilting the top with hand-dyed cotton, this nearly singular mantra coursed through my head like a, yep, broken record. This was my first experience getting a song, er line, stuck in my head because of a craft project.
The Twist quilt is pretty fun to make. First, you take a mix of 5-inch squares and lay all of them out in a pattern you like, then sew them together. Next, you take your nice checkerboard quilt, place the Twist tool at the axis of four corners and start cutting around the tool. Yes, you cut up a perfectly nice squared quilt to obtain another. After all of the cutting comes the reconfiguring, which gives you the pinwheel shapes. This is a different way to make pinwheels, and good for an imperfectionist such as myself whose points never match up. This is a fun project, song repetition and all.
I will do the twist again, like I did this summer.