Salt Lakes was a place I always wanted to visit over the years our family enjoyed visiting friends in Prince Rupert. We’ve been to Dodge Cove, CBC Hill and many of the other places Kristin brings to live in her memoir, and now feels as if I’ve been to Salt Lakes too. Below is a review of Kristin’s book I wrote for qathet Living.

Kristin will be showing slides of the people, quilts and boats as she tells the story of Knots and Stitches at the Powell River Public Library on January 20 from 2-3 pm. Books will be available there and can also be purchased at Pocket Books on Marine or through Chapters and Amazon.

Quilting Day on CBC hill across the harbour from Prince Rupert. Kristin is in the striped shirt on the left.

A 45-year friendship brought Kristin Miller to Powell River in 2017. She was looking for a place to land after a long-term relationship ended, and her friend’s offer to split the purchase of a Wildwood home was a “perfect solution.”

Her new book, Knots and Stitches: Community Quilts Across the Harbour, loops back to and in some ways echoes the beginning of that friendship. Kristin had been working as an occupational therapist in Nanaimo when she took up quilting. She found she enjoyed it and brought quilting with her when she moved to Prince Rupert to join a boyfriend, soon to be husband, in 1979. A chance encounter led them to Salt Lakes, a tiny community across the harbour where they bought a ramshackle cabin for $3500.

“We kept our tiny apartment in Rupert and played house at Salt Lakes, spending romantic candlelit evenings at the cabin, then going back to our real life in town. We imagined settling down in this slipshod paradise, but as it turned out, I ended up living there alone.”

After much trying, Kristin got pregnant, but nearly died from the complications of an abdominal pregnancy. After surgery, she was told she’d be unlikely to have children, information that completely changed the image she had of herself. Her faltering relationship and deep feelings of loss led her to move alone to the cabin. “I wanted to get away from everything,” she said.

Get away she did, to a leaky cabin without plumbing or electricity, accessible only by water. And the waters of Prince Rupert harbour can get very treacherous. Learning the boating skills needed to make that crossing and doing the chores necessary to stay warm and dry consumed much of her emotional and physical energy. The knowledge she needed came, in part, from the other women who lived there.

“Lorrie, Linda, and Margo were my three friends at Salt Lakes and were tremendous friends to each other. Their cabins stood three in a row, directly opposite mine, on the far side of the cove.” The most important kind of support they gave, she said, was by treating her as normal, not a tragedy.

Lorrie, Linda, and Margo’s cabins, on a wintry day at Salt Lakes in 1987. Kristin’s skiff is tied to the dock.

As she slowly healed, some of the women asked her for help finishing a baby quilt. They weren’t sure how to connect the individual squares, which were not all the same size. Kristin’s relaxed approach gave them the confidence to sew strips around the smaller squares and fit them together in whatever way seemed to work. She then showed them how to make “pass-the-medallion” quilts: one woman made a central panel and subsequent borders were attached by other quilters. There were no rules and the quilts became more and more creative, sometimes with applique and three-dimensional forms added. “They were all beautiful,” Kristin said. Often made from whatever materials were at hand in some of the women’s more remote locations, the very fabric of the quilts spoke to their makers’ creativity and resilience.

Over the next years, many women joined in to make dozens of quilts. Quilts for babies, quilts for weddings, and, as the women aged, quilts to comfort those who were ill and the families of those who had died.

“These robust, vigorous women might not fit the stereotype of the dainty, ladylike quilter, but their quilts embodied warmth, love and caring in a practical as well as symbolic way,” she writes.

Kristin began recording their stories as part of a project to display and document the work they had done. A visitor to their quilting show at the Prince Rupert Museum in 1992 invited Kristin to write a research paper, which she presented at an international conference in 1993. “If you’re writing about the quilts, you have to write about the quilters.”

Mia, who was given her own baby quilt in 1986, is delighted to receive a baby quilt for her son Levi in 2019.

“I thought about turning it into a book back then and ended up with fifteen or twenty so-called chapters. But the project became so big with about 100 quilts and a 100 people involved, I stowed it in a box. But when I reread those chapters a couple of years ago, I thought they were really good and decided to take up the project again.”

And they are good. The characters, the adventures, the feasts, the parties, all come to vivid life in her book. Anecdotes about some of her dating adventures are equally entertaining. But throughout she writes respectfully of the relationships she and others had. “That was one of the guiding principles of my writing; Don’t write anything hurtful,” she said. And she found she wanted to tell the story of her own pain and loss at not having children of her own. “I think I needed to do that,” she said.

That decision makes Knots and Stitches a candid memoir as well as an important addition to the history of the north coast. These adventurous women lived precariously in the tiny communities spread across the small islands out beyond Prince Rupert’s harbour. Like Kristin, they found themselves teaching each other how to survive and thrive in the challenging marine environment with its big tides and big weather. But as they aged and their families grew, most of them left those rigors behind and moved south, many to the gentler southern coast.

Most of these women are still linked and are still making quilts together. Kristin certainly hasn’t slowed down, especially after she progressed from the treadle sewing machine and wood-stove-heated flatirons of her Salt Lakes days. “I’ve made at least 500 big quilts of my own,” she said.

The friendships connect her still. She shares a house with Lorrie, her old friend from Salt Lakes. They have brought the warmth and connections formed all those years ago and are now stitching themselves into our community. 

Kristin, (left) Jane Wilde and Lorrie Thompson still quilting together.