Painter excels at new-found craft

By LAURA BEHENNA

Bigfork Eagle

Bigfork painter Toni Whitney says quilting is like having a huge, ready-made color palette in which fabric is her paint.

A self-taught artist, Whitney started her working career as a graphic designer in the sportswear industry. She moved to Bigfork with her husband, Frank Whitney, seven years ago. Frank grew up in Helena but his family's roots were in Bigfork, where he vacationed every summer as a youth.

In Bigfork, Whitney has continued as an artist by painting with acrylic, pastels and occasionally oil paint. She paints scenes of wildlife and horses — her horses are particularly popular, selling well at local galleries.

Last year, her friend Traci Marvel started doing marketing at Bigfork Bay Cotton Company, a high-end quilting shop, and invited Whitney to design some patterns for the store. Whitney began learning how to quilt there, and "I just fell in love with it," she said.

"This is like a breath of fresh air," she said of her newly acquired craft. "The industry is just booming. And quilters are the nicest people."

Many quilters make quilts as gifts for friends who are going through difficult times, or donate their quilts to charity, Whitney observed.

"It just amazes me, the generosity of these people," she said. "And they're happy. If you start losing faith in people, be around quilters."

The artistic opportunities Whitney has discovered in quilting keep her wanting to do and learn more about it. Her paintings of horses inspired her to make a series of quilt patterns featuring the dignified animals.

"Spring Storm" is a portrait of a silver-gray horse whose wind-blown mane swirls about his face in tendrils. "4-Ever Friends" shows the gentle faces of four friendly horses. The models belong to her sister-in-law in Great Falls. In "Wild Horse Canyon," two handsome equines pose in front of a golden sunrise above a southwestern-style canyon. Two local horses served as models for that pattern, and Whitney made up the background from her imagination.

These three original quilts are hanging at Bigfork Bay Cotton Company, and shoppers can buy the patterns or whole kits that come with the same kinds of fabrics Whitney used in her original, allowing the quilter to make an exact replica. The patterns and kits are distributed all over the U.S. and sell so briskly that Bigfork Bay Cotton Company struggles to keep them in stock, she said.

She made the three quilts using an iron-on adhesive called "fusible web" in sewing lingo. Fusible web is a man-made fiber that comes in sheets, rolled tape or as a spray-on mist. The adhesive is ironed or sprayed onto pieces of fabric, which can then be cut into shapes, assembled into a design, and ironed onto the background of the quilt — without sewing.

Whitney made the quilts entirely from batik fabrics made in Indonesia. Batik is a tightly woven cotton fabric treated with wax before dyeing to make elaborate designs. Batik cloth resists fraying, making it particularly suited to fusible web designs on quilts that will be hung rather than used as bedding.

Quilting is like painting with a palette of ready-mixed paint, Whitney said. When she starts out to design a quilt she has an idea of how it will look, but after she experiments with a multitude of different fabrics, her final design looks much different from what she imagined at first.

"I start one way and it never stops that way," she said.

Her next project will be a series of quilts featuring bison, bears and moose. Then she'll create another series of horses.

Whitney intends to keep painting and quilting for the rest of her life.

"This is like my little niche," she said. "To be able to do something you love and be around such great people — what more could you ask?"