INSIDE
The life of a quilter

by Jack Kintner

“Sometimes people expect something larger, but the biggest one of these is still only 3 1/2 by 4 feet,” said Point Roberts quilter Judy Ross.

Explaining that it’s called a quilt not because of size but because of its three-layered construction, she said that it’s a skill she learned as a child in Pocatello, Idaho, from her grandmother, who had been taught fine embroidery in a St. Louis finishing school. “She always said that a lady’s embroidery looks as good on the back as it does on the front, and hers did,” Ross said.

Her dad was a radio repairman, “The computer guys of their day,” said Ross. Radio sets, then one of the bigger pieces of fine wood furniture in most living rooms, brought family entertainment and, in those days, news of WW II.

As an undergraduate English major at Idaho State University she had an instructor who’d been on “Let’s Pretend” as a child. She's still a radio person, disdaining television “unless there's a national emergency.”

She's always been a reader, trying the patience of library staff with the number of books she'd try to check out as a young girl, returning some within a day, “but they’d tell me that no one reads that fast, and to come back tomorrow.” After Idaho State University she attended UCLA, and after a gap, a year of which she spent on Yap (“I expected sandy beaches but it's all mangrove swamps,” Ross said), she returned to the faculty of UCLA, this time in an inter-disciplinary program teaching medical ethics at the UCLA School of Medicine.

She and husband Ed Park, an employee of the Rand Corporation in Los Angeles, worked together on projects after her retirement from UCLA Medical School in 1992, some of which allowed them to telecommute to Washington, D.C. but also required them to travel every couple of weeks. “There’s something to be said for a peripatetic lifestyle,” Ross said, and she's kept it up.

They’d originally wanted to retire full time to Roberts Creek, B.C., on the Sunshine Coast but changes in Canadian immigration laws require that they live outside the country half the time. In 1995 she and Ed bought their Anderson street house, where he built a workshop for her, the windowless building across South Beach Road from the sheriff’s department. “So instead of living there full time, we do the Roberts’s,” she laughed. “We really do like both places, and there’s also something to be said for waking up one morning and saying 'Let’s go to another country!'”

The first quilt in her current series won a blue ribbon as most creative quilt at the Sunshine Coast Quilt Show last year. Response to her quilts was quite good during the Townsite Tour, she said, especially from B.C., and she even found out about some buildings on the Point she hadn’t yet noticed, so the entire series on old Point Roberts buildings is now up to 23 pieces from 19.

“They’re not for sale,” she said, “because I want to keep them together and I’m not even done with the series yet.” The best way to contact this elusive talent is via e-mail at judywross@sunshine.net.

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