Church stitches together a solution for noise problem

c. 1997 Religion News Service MOBILE, Ala. _ The folks at Ashland Place United Methodist Church had a problem: the noise in the fellowship hall was deafening. Any time a group of children or even a wedding reception convened in the hall, the reverberation from the cement block walls was nerve-racking. When the board of […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

MOBILE, Ala. _ The folks at Ashland Place United Methodist Church had a problem: the noise in the fellowship hall was deafening. Any time a group of children or even a wedding reception convened in the hall, the reverberation from the cement block walls was nerve-racking.

When the board of trustees met a year ago to address the problem, the only woman on the board suggested a somewhat unconventional and a tad old-fashioned solution: quilts.


It’s a practical solution that also turned out to be a work of art.”I was really worried because you never know how they’re (men) going to react,”said Jane Finley, the lone woman on the church’s board of trustees.

But now, a year later, the answer to the acoustics problem hangs in the fellowship hall in the form of a series of five multicolored quilts designed and sewn by Joan Dodici, president of Mobile’s quilters’ guild, and Michele Nimtz.

The quilts were designed to replicate the stained-glass windows in the balcony of the church’s sanctuary.

In all, it took Dodici and Nimtz just over a year _ from the time they first photographed the church windows, made the patterns, purchased the fabric and sewed all the parts together _ to create and complete the quilts.

Originally the quilting duo wanted to use hand-dyed fabrics, but soon they realized they could not get all the colors they needed and eventually settled on suede cloth, a kind of 100 percent cotton, dyed”color on top of color,”Dodici said.

And they had to search fabrics stores as far as away as Paducah, Ky., to find all the right colors.

Dodici said she doesn’t know for sure how much fabric was required to make the 34-by-90-inch quilts, but just the backing alone took 13 yards.”And don’t even ask me how many spools of thread,”she said.


All of the work was done by hand.”It had to be cut, pressed, sewn, all by hand, nothing on the machine,”Dodici said.

She and Nimtz took different parts of the quilts to work on separately, and Dodici said she took her handiwork with her everywhere, always worrying the pattern might not turn out the way she and Nimtz had envisioned it.”No matter where I took them when I was working on them, every person told me they were a church window,”she said.”I was thrilled to death they knew what it was.” Dodici said the most complicated part of the task was sewing on the tiny strips of black that represent the rim or border”leading”between the colored sections of the windows. As a guide for the quarter-inch strips, Mrs. Dodici used what a lot of quilters use _ the blades from a street sweeper machine’s brushes.”If ever you see a lady following behind a street sweeper picking up those little blades, that’s a quilter,”she laughed.

Finley said she is proud of the finished product.”We came up with something that’s not seasonal, and they’re appropriate for any function.” END LONG

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