Real men do sew quilts
Landscape Photo
Kingston - Like many other men, Larry Godinez loves his Husqvarna and is quick to show off its unique features.
The 62-year-old retired Spanish teacher is the new president of the Wiltwyck Quilters Guild. He's been piecing together quilts in his basement for the last five years. His hobby outgrew the laundry and dining rooms. His wife, Tina, barred him from taking over the living room with pins and snippets of cloth, so he shifted operations to a pingpong table in his basement. Friends recently built him a custom sewing table large enough to easily work on his king-sized creations.
Godinez studied art years ago as a student at St. Lawrence University, but his professor/father convinced him in his junior year to go to Spain and return to the States as a high school Spanish teacher.
For 32 years he taught at Kingston High School, and every year brought groups of students to Spain to hone their language skills.
"I never could have quilted when I was still teaching. I gave everything to my students," he said.
When he retired, two friends invited Tina to learn to quilt. Though she preferred to stick to her knitting, Larry was an enthusiastic student. The sense of color and design he'd poured into his landscape paintings now filled his quilts with soft transitions and sensitive arrangements.
Like many other members of the guild, once he'd done a "Medley Opus" quilt showing his mastery of all the basic techniques, he was ready to move away from the classic patterns into creative designs of his own.
HIS DREAMS HELP HIM come up with designs or solve technique problems.
"I wanted to get more creative. One night I was dreaming of an underwater scene and when I woke up I knew I wanted to include that somehow in my design," Godinez said.
The result was a fish tank quilt with multiple transparent layers sandwiched with tinsel, embroidered fish and photographs screened onto fabric.
He has created several memory quilts and teddy bears for widows and their children, made of the clothes of their deceased loved ones. A particular favorite is a tie quilt he finished two weeks ago.
"A friend asked if I knew anyone who made quilts and I said I did," Godinez said. "She said she had a friend who wanted someone to make a quilt out of her father's neckties. It turned out to be a woman I'd worked with at the high school for years. We met, and she brought over a bag of 200 ties."
He laid out all the ties and spent months reinforcing the delicate silks with interface backing.
"The ties belonged to Bill Rose, who was a radio personality and was very active at Ulster Performing Arts Center," Godinez said.
Initially he'd wanted to put a photo of Bill in the middle, but his daughter, Cynthia Rose, didn't feel that would be the right image for the center medallion.
"Everything happens for a reason," Godinez said. "I came up with the idea to embroider a rose in the middle and along the bottom put some pictures of Bill and the phrase 'Old Bill,' because that's the name he was known by at UPAC."
The quilt took a full year to make and was mounted in the living room for weeks while guild members, neighbors and those who'd heard that the project was done all paid a call to see the quilt.
"When I finally gave it to Cynthia, she cried for an hour. She was so happy with how it came out," Godinez said.
IT HAS BEEN ENTERED in this year's Nashville Quilt Show competition and will be in the Wiltwyck Quilters Guild's annual show Oct. 14-15 at SUNY Ulster.
"I think there are a lot of men out there who are closet quilters," he said. "We have 155 members and only four of those are men, but at every meeting I'll hear women talk about how their husbands helped them with their quilts, but you could never get them to a meeting because it's their wives' hobby. It might be good to start a men's auxiliary, so men can learn what it is that their wives have been doing. Men are creative. This is a craft where they can show it."
For more information about the Wiltwyck Quilters Guild, go to www.wiltwyckquiltersguild.org.
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