Quilts are fabric of life for staff assistant

Sophia is one lucky little 6-month-old. Shortly she will receive a special gift, an original quilt designed and created just for her by her adoring grandmother.

Said grandmother is Donna Ford, staff assistant to Vice Chancellor for Administration Darrell Bazzell. The office is responsible for the management and coordination of university-wide administrative, financial and support services.

Ford began her career at UW–Madison in the School of Business in 1972. She took time off to raise her family, and returned in 1980, working in the College of Engineering, the Sea Grant Institute and University-Industry Relations.

She’s been in her current post for the last four years, about the same time she took up quilting. Her mother, she says, was the instigator.

“My mom is a more traditional quilter than I am,” Ford says. “She does wonderful geometric patchwork designs with tons of beautiful handwork. I’ve never in my life done a patchwork quilt.”

Not that Ford has a problem with patchwork quilts, but she prefers to work in a genre perhaps best described as stylized realism. Eight or nine wall-mounted quilts somehow have been produced during uncharacteristic activity lulls in the evening and on weekends.

By any stretch of anyone’s imagination, Ford’s quilts qualify as fine art. Most have been appraised at between $1,600 and $2,000. Ford sells some of her quilts; others go to family and friends. Her largest piece, “Mendota Autumn” (2000) is 52 by 58 inches and hangs in Ford’s living room. The smallest, a miniature landscape, was made in 1999 for a friend in Perth, Australia.

Ford does not hand-sew any of her quilts. Instead, she prefers to use a Bernina sewing machine, dropping the automatic “feeddogs,” a practice that allows her optimal flexibility to create designs, she says. However, all the quilts are her original designs.

Ford never sketches patterns before she begins cutting. “I have some ideas about what I’d like to do, and then let the particular fabric inspire me,” she says.

Although she never has studied design or textiles formally, aside from the odd class here and there, Ford has the chops to be so decisive with her shears. She has worked as a designer for several fabric stores in the Madison area. Before that, she sewed apparel.

“I think there was a time when girls learned to sew as a matter of course,” she says. She took a required sewing class in junior high. “I barely passed,” she says. “Our school had machines with treadle (foot) pedals.” Nevertheless, she and her friends regularly got together for recreational sews at each other’s houses, where they made prom and homecoming dresses.

What drew Ford into this literal “material culture,” she says, was and is the lure of the fabric itself.

“I love the color and the texture. I love touching the fabric,” she says. Indeed, Ford often dyes her fabrics, or sometimes she bleaches them or stencils them with paint.

The results are undeniably stunning. “Midnight Blooms” (2002), for example, is a study in simplicity, a mass of buttercream yellow irises on a textured deep purple background, with a subtle feather design around the border.

In the quilt world, those borders are vitally important, Ford says.

“They have to be perfectly square, with all the edges rounded off and finished properly,” she says, noting that quilt competitions can be decided on just such details.

Ford’s work has won many awards in the few short years she’s been quilting. She has been invited to exhibit twice in both of the country’s two most prestigious shows: the American Quilter’s Society show in Paducah, Ky., in April and the International Quilters Association November show in Houston. “I’m hoping to be able to exhibit there this fall,” she says.

She already has a design in mind. “We live in Prairie du Sac, and there are a lot of eagles there. I’d like to do something large, maybe 70 by 80 inches, with eagles flying across a landscape,” she says.

For now, however, her favorite quilt is Sophia’s, an anthropomorphic scene featuring frolicking woodland creatures engaged in various humanesque activities. As yet the piece has no name. Ford is thinking that maybe Sophia’s mother can think of one, or maybe Sophia herself will title it when she gets older.

“I probably love this quilt so much because of who’s going to get it,” she says.