AireLifted


It’s with great pride and love the ADT Quilting Bee offers you their 2004 Project “AIRElifted”. A beautiful quilt produced over 10 months by more than 30 ladies working on the project.


How do we go about these projects?

About 11-12 months from the time it is presented at Montgomery, the Quilting Bee starts their project. We discuss what each person thinks would be fun to depict in the quilt. Sometimes the ideas just flow, other times it takes a month or more of emails back in forth on the List to get an idea polished so that everyone agrees with the idea. When this year’s theme was decided, each quilter had to design a block showing Airedales with things in their mouths – ala the “Jaws of Death”
jokes we all read about on the lists and talk about when Airedale lovers everywhere get together.

Then each quilter that wants to do a block has to put her idea and basic design in words and send to the project manager. Then the quilters have to get busy and draw the design or have the design drawn for them. The designs are sent to the project coordinator (this year – Christie Williams did this) who proofs the drawings and sends out all the common supplies and directions to each quilter.

The quilt begins to evolve and take on its own life by this point. We normally have a nickname for the quilt and this year is was “JAWs” which every Airedale lovers fondly understands. But when we told a few of our family members about it, they reacted totally different than us and seemed alarmed. So a contest began to find a new “happy” name for our quilt. Without so much as a blink of an eye, Lydia Ross of Seattle, Washington emailed me the first suggestion - “aireLifted” and not another name seemed to come close – so “aireLifted” is was. We then needed a logo for the quilt to put on the tickets etc and everyone started doodling a way with great ideas coming from all over North America. Finally, a vote had to be done in order to break a tie with the two most popular drawings, one from Lydia Ross and one from Gena Booher. By a mere vote, the nod went to Gena’s cute drawing and it was on its way to Karen Brown to design and print our raffle tickets.

The quilts always vary, we have some quilts where a specific fabric or type of fabric is used to pull it together, or as in this year both as specific fabric for the background was used, a batik fabric which is hand dyed and known for its brightness was chosen. Each quilter could pick what ever color or dye pattern but it had to be batik and had to be bright to give us great contrast with the black sashing (border) that was used.

This year the Bee decided to have some fun and let the Airedales explode outside the block and spill over into the border giving some great possibilities for imagination and interpretations.

Every year something always tends to happen to at least one quilter and this year is was to a new quilter – Gina Bentz, the daughter of another quilter – Carolyn Finlayson. Here is the story in Gina’s own words –

Kacee-dale has decided that he needs to be a bigger part of the project. He doesn't just want to model ... he wants to participate! He had a little unsupervised activity in my sewing "space" yesterday and decided to see just how yummy my thread really was. Of course his selection was impeccable as he only ate the colors I was thread painting with!

I really did understand the whole "airelifted" thing without such a personal demonstration. Of course, finding my pincushion (what was left of it) under the couch was exciting too. Fortunately, the pins were not in it as my 4 year old had already decided to use every last one of them on my block (just one of many events leading to the second do-over)

Needless to say, I have the proverbial dog ate my homework excuse for turning my block in just under the deadline. I'm off to the quilt store with handfuls of masticated thread to see if I can find the right colors since he chewed the spools to pieces.

I'll have it (the third attempt) finished this weekend and off in the mail by Monday. If things keep trucking along here, I'll have my own quilt before this is done!

Once they are completed, the blocks are then sent to Christie Williams for proofing and then on to Carolyn Finlayson for assembling of the blocks into the quilt top. Then back to Christie Williams who assembles the quilt by creating a sandwich of the quilt top, a batting and the quilt backing. This is then machine quilted by Christie, a binding is done and our quilt is ready for photographing and being shipped to Christine Sheffer who takes the Quilt to Montgomery for display and the raffle drawing.

In the meantime, behind the scenes, we have our web pages being created by our co-moderator, Holly Coes of Canada. This is a time consuming job and without Holly’s hard work, the story of the quilt doesn’t get on the internet.

Linda Cunningham takes over the tickets sales and spends about 4 months of each year, scribbling named and phone numbers on the thousands of tickets that are purchased over the internet via Sidney Hardie’s great website, www.Airedaleterriers.org which graciously hosts our website each year. She has the only website that can handle the traffic the quilt generates each year.

Christie Williams and Christine Sheffer work to get everything ready for Montgomery, we look for volunteers to help sell the tickets around the various venues and man the tickets sales table in the Rescue tent.

Each and every quilter begins selling tickets to family, friends and foes. Handing out flyers and posters everywhere that they can. They also buy lots of tickets themselves since like me, they always dream of winning one of these and being able to touch and feel it and have it on their own wall. Each and every quilt has a part of our hearts in it when the blocks leave our hands and head to Christie’s home.

Many hours of hand sewing or machine appliquéing go into these wonderful blocks showing our Airedales at their most charming, silly selves. As project manger for this year’s quilt, I can tell you that I am always in awe of the talent these ladies in the Bee have and their never ending love for Airedales everywhere and their devotion to raising awareness and funds for Airedale Rescue.

Jeri Langman


If you would like to volunteer for any of our various jobs, please feel free to contact me at jeri0828@aol.com