This quilt celebrates my current family. The scrabble board in the center names us: my husband William Zwick, myself Valerie Brewer, and our children, stepdaughter Katherine and son William. Around the outside of the quilt are scenes which represent us between the years of 1984 and 2012. Starting in the upper left corner and moving clockwise,
1. Current pastimes: my husband likes to work on the computer and I sew. My stepdaughter enjoys both singing and reciting poetry at pubic venues, and my son is an accomplished portrait painter artist and teacher.
2. This is the house in Providence RI where the kids grew up, Katie from ages 5 to 22 and Billy from birth to age 14.
3. In the summers, we retreated to Narragansett RI where we kayaked on Salt Pond. That is our pet Iguana watching us from the shore.
4. During those years, we had a variety of pets: a nightingale Florence, a scottie Tosh, a Maine coon cat Lynx, an iguana Whip, and two basset hounds, Bo and Harley.
5. This square is dedicated to my husband and me: watching the sun go down at Narragansett beach, Bill watching Monday night football with a glass of milk and Oreos, me reading a book propped up in bed with a glass of white wine surrounded by pets, and my husband sailing a small boat on Salt Pond.
6. These are the homes where we have lived: Providence RI, Narragansett RI, Kaneohe HI, and Kailua-Kona HI.
7. This family portrait was done by Billy when he was four years old.
8. Here in Hawaii, Bill and I enjoy taking our basset hounds to the beach.
9. All four of us have advanced degrees: Bill, Katie, and I in clinical psychology; and Billy in Classical Realism Applied Art.
10. This square is dedicated to the kids. There is a drawing of Katie and her dad by Katie, an homage to her running the Chicago marathon, and an image of Katie's first tattoo and the shoes she bought to showcase it. Billy's first grade drawing of a loving alligator is a perfect metaphor for children that age. Billy studied karate as a child. In his teenage years, he tooled around Honolulu in an ancient Corvette he was restoring, surfboard in the back. Billy also enjoyed skydiving.
11. This block shows all of the different places each of the four of us had lived prior to 2012. If you follow any one of the four trails of footprints, you can follow one person's geographical path. For example, mine leads from Indiana to Massachusetts to Rhode Island to New York to Connecticut, back to Rhode Island, and then to Hawaii.
12. The last block shows all of the Halloween costumes the kids (and adult escorts) wore when the kids were young.
