Oneonta resident Jody Aultman has pieced together her passion.
The longtime quilter’s 94-inch by 94-inch piece, “Healing Time,” is being featured in the American Quilt Society’s “Quilt Week,” April 23 through 26, in Paducah, Kentucky. This marks Aultman’s fifth time having a piece accepted into the competition.
According to americanquilter.com, AQS’ Quilt Week “is a major event for quilters, offering a platform to showcase their work, learn new techniques, and connect with other enthusiasts.”
Aultman, member and president of the Susquehanna Valley Quilt Guild, said the Paducah iteration is the society’s largest.
“The American Quilt Society is an international quilt group, and they have shows throughout the year in different venues, but their largest show is in Paducah,” she said. “Basically, you enter your quilt, and they have many different categories and they choose so many to jury into the show. From those juried, then they choose the winners in each category.”
Aultman said her piece, accepted into the competition in early February, was inspired by personal hardships.
“It’s called ‘Healing Time’ because I started it when I had my first knee surgery,” she said. “I’d been told by a lot of people, ‘you don’t sleep, you doze (after surgery),’ and that is very true. Because I’m kind of an anxious person, I needed something to do in the middle of the night that was quiet. I’d been doing hand-sewing and embroidery work — my grandmother taught me — so, I thought, ‘let’s look for something to embroider.’
“I’d bought a book on mandalas, so what I did was, I altered them a bit and blew them up, because they were very tiny,” Aultman continued. “During my first knee surgery, I did one of them, which is the center square of the quilt, and I embellished it with beads and crystals and that really made it stand out.”
The finished quilt, Aultman said, includes several mandalas.
“I did five, and embellished them, then it was the question of, ‘what are you going to do with these?’” she said. “I was scheduled for the other knee surgery six months later, so I just kept stitching and got them all done and decided I had to hand quilt it — five rows down and five across, so it’s nice and squared up, and each square is about 17 inches.
“In my mind, I thought, ‘you would take a year and a half hand-stitching all these beautiful squares and then machine quilt it?’” Aultman continued. “It didn’t sound right; if you’ve done most of it by hand, you should finish it by hand. I’m not the best at it — I think my grandmother would be disappointed, because she sewed tiny — but it came out nice.”
Aultman said she entered “Healing Time” in competitions because she “has no place to hang something that large and it cannot go on a bed.”
Despite being a veteran entrant, Aultman said, she’s “very excited.”
“The quilt turned out beautiful, I’d have to say,” she said. “It’s still just as novel as it was when the first one was accepted. And there was kind of a side joke; I had finished it and sent pictures to my sisters in Iowa and they said, ‘Man, I want to see that.’ I said, ‘Here’s what I’ll do, I’ll enter it at Paducah and you can see my quilt,’ so that was part of why I entered. It started as a joke but then I said, ‘Guess what? We’re all going,’ so we’re all excited.”
In a written statement, fellow Susquehanna Valley Quilt Guild member Susan Sklenarik said, “This is quite an honor and our guild is excited and proud for Jody.”