Quilter Carol Doak brightens Rain

Country Quilt Camp

Klas Stolpe

August 11, 2005.

“After dinner at the Elk’s Club last night I have decided this is a place that my husband and I could call home,” Rain Country Quilt Camp guest instructor Carol Doak said of this, her first trip to Little Norway. “We both love to fish. I had been all over the state and didn’t know Petersburg existed, but I absolutely love it. I’ve learned the foreign language here… the loop, down the Narrows. Everybody waving at everybody, the fishing village aspect.”

Doak was a title searcher in 1979 when she relocated with her husband from Connecticut to Ohio. A spot of tea with a new neighbor resulted to an invitation to a seven-week quilting class. The reluctant Doak went and in a year’s time was teaching that same class. She has been teaching for 25 years since and has 15 books published, the first in 1991. This year her works will be given honorable viewing at the Houston Quilt Festival, one of the top gatherings of quilters in the United States.

“It was a way just to meet people,” Doak commented. “I found out I absolutely loved it… and because I love quilting I really enjoy sharing that passion with other people. I get to just start from nothing and design something from my head that makes my heart sing,”  “It’s also a way to create something that will live on long after I do.”

Doak practices the paper-foundation-piece method, simply put it is a design that can be printed on paper and each of the patches are in a numbered sequence… sew by number. The method also calls for quilters to ‘sew the line on the paper creating the patch,’ that allows people to not have to cut the perfect size fabric piece or sew perfectly because the line on the paper does not stretch or pull. Then when done the paper pieces are sewn together and when the quilt is done the paper is taken off leaving just the fabric. Doak’s designs range from miniatures to full-size bed quilts.

It was obvious, as Carol Doak’s quilts were projected onto a screen at the Lutheran Church basement last week, that this quilting instructor was something special. Ooh’s and aah’s came from the 50 or so attendees, all with similar passions for quilting.

What was even more obvious was that quilters have a story behind each quilt. A memory. A moment in time that gets more comforting as the quilt ages. Doak, dubbed the ‘Queen Mother of quilting’ by one attendee, is from New Hampshire. Her Rain Country Quilt Camp teachings were entitled, One Quilters Journey, and as she told of her beginnings to her present day schedule the stories flew.

“I think a quilt will be inspired by an event, a person, a color, something you see…” Doak said. “It could be something that happens during the process of making it, or who you made it for… You are so invested in it. It’s not like a chair where you paint it red. It takes time, design, creativity, and it has that connection. A lot of times I can remember what I was doing, what was going on in the world when I made a quilt, it becomes a part of your life for a period of time.”

Her Comical Country quilt makes her laugh in remembrance. Nothing was perfect, deliberately. Instead of all black sheep there was one grey in color. Instead of all the pigs going in the same direction, one went opposite. Instead of all trees being perfect one had no top.

“At that time of my life I needed to have something different, rather than pristine and perfect.”

A quilt that her grandmother made for her mother is the only connection Doak has with her grandmother. Similarly, Doak’s Legacy Quilt is a personal treasure that was made to pass on to her children and grandchildren.

In 1988 quilter once called to request a quilt pattern Doak had on the cover of a magazine and five years later brought the finished quilt to a class Doak taught in Alaska. Doak has made a wedding quilt for her son, of course he was eight-years old at the time.

“He looked at me kind of funny when I told him it was his only if he married the right woman.”

It’s Snowing In Maine makes her laugh because it was the excuse she and a hotel room full of female quilters used when they called husbands on a trip, even though there were just a few flakes falling. There is also Forrest Of Friends from a luncheon, Out Of The Blue from a frantic quilter who would die if she didn’t get the shade of blue in one of Doak’s works, and Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, Not which anyone who has had their fill of the holidays can relate to.

Doak’s Double Wedding Ring quilt reminds her of her mother’s statement as to why SHE didn’t quilt and grandma did, ‘It’s like diabetes, it skips a generation.’

There was a quilt that brought a blush to the guilds male bus driver on one outing and another Amish friendship Bonus Quilt that was inspired when state troopers came knocking on the quilt guilds hotel room door to arrest them for the ‘interstate transport of fabric.’

“You can imagine with the piles of fabric we had spread out in the room that we were shocked, mortified, and hysterical… and then, being quilters, we were just plain indignant.”

Doak has also taught quilted and taught classes’ worldwide, including Iceland, England, France, and Australia.

“Quilting is such a wonderful, sharing, universal language,” Doak said. “I can be talking to people in Hawaii, Europe, Australia, or New Zealand, wherever I have been and we all talk the same language. America has the largest amount of fabric companies, the largest quilting publishers, so the majority of the quilters in Japan, Europe, and Australia purchase things from this country.”

Carol Doak’s newest book, Simply Sensational Nine Patch Stars, was released as she was in Petersburg and attendees of her Petersburg class signed a copy. She is also working on a new book.

“It’s not just me putting a design out there and saying you can make this,” Doak said emphatically. “It is also saying, or you can use these components and mathematically there are 2,500 options. So someone here can make a star-block quilt that I haven’t made.”

One of Doak’s patterns is called the Alaska Star. It is pink and teal in color, shades that stood out to her on her travels in the state.