Another Great One Is Gone: Jane Hall

 Jane Hall has died. 

If you've dipped your toe in the quilting world's pool, you may well recognize her name. She wrote quilt books (8 of them, some with co-authors like her friend Dixie Haywood) and articles, taught and judged nationally, and was an American Quilter's Society-certified appraiser.

In spite of following the same professional circuit, I didn't bump into her that often. But over the years, we sometimes were booked for the same conferences ('gigs'). She came from North Carolina, a state dear to me because of the Brick's childhood there. She was funny, feisty and opinionated. And honest. When she liked something, she said it. When she didn't, she was tactful enough not to keep bringing up the subject -- but you could tell by her response that something wasn't quiiiite right. 

I liked her so much. 

Not only did I learn from her work on Log Cabin and Pineapple designs -- I benefited from her wise comments and advice about the strange, fascinating and quirky worlds we both shared: quilt-lover, quilting writer & teacher, and AQS quilt appraiser. 

You can learn more about her through her website, which is still up -- her books, or her obituary, which follows. Her memorial service, listed at the end of the obituary, is Oct. 26 in Raleigh, NC.

Rest easy, friend. Thank you, Jane. Thank you for everything.

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Jane Elizabeth Carroll Hall—daughter, wife, mother, writer, artist, teacher, friend—has left us. She didn’t want to go; Jane still had things to do and people to do them with, from working out a Wordle puzzle to having a glass of wine with her friends to designing a quilt to manning a shift at the downtown homeless shelter. In her 90 years she did a lot of things: she steadied one headstrong husband, raised five very different children, wrote and co-wrote eight books about quilting, and created hundreds of quilts and other works of art. Nobody enjoyed being alive more than Jane. 

 

Jane Elizabeth Carroll arrived in Rochester, New York, on May 31, 1932, the first of four children born to Lee, an outgoing country doctor, and Frieda, a pragmatic nurse. Jane was raised in Oswego, on the shores of Lake Ontario, in a large converted farmhouse in the country. When WWII came, Lee went off to the South Pacific for three years, leaving Frieda, four children, and a mother-in-law. They had an enormous Victory Garden, a cow, chickens, turkeys, and a pony. Jane learned to milk the cow, weed the garden, and pluck a chicken for the family dinner.

 

Jane graduated from Oswego High School as Valedictorian in 1949. She wanted to go to college but knew there were limitations on what she could do. “If you were a woman and wanted to go to college,” she once said, “you could be a teacher, nurse, or accountant—but even then, you were expected to get married and stay home and have babies.”

 

She went to Cornell University, beginning in pre-Med, but she ultimately figured out heavy math and science were not for her. She switched to Government as a pre-law student and graduated with Honors in 1953. Jane took a job with Proctor and Gamble doing Market Research, planning to go on to Law School. Her father was called back into the Army for the Korean War and was asked to join the Army as a Medical Corps officer, so the family moved to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

                  Paradise by Jane Hall

 

That’s where she met Robert Hall, an Army doctor who had served in World War II and Korea. Bob was tall, handsome, idealistic, and drove a green Buick convertible. They married on November 7, 1954 and started a family. Her children followed: Mike, Sue, Betsy, Tom, and Jenny. 

 

So did the moves: to Fort Bragg, Pensacola, Chapel Hill, England, Germany, Fort Benning (where she endured the Cuban Missile Crisis), Fort Monroe, Hawaii (her favorite), and Fort Sam Houston. Though the family followed Bob, Jane kept the family together. With her positive attitude and ability to organize everything and everybody, she made every place they moved feel like home. 

 

She was the organizer, cheerleader, and driver of children to countless practices and events. She loved managing her active family. “Time to wake up and be somebody!” she would tell her kids in the morning, “Quick, like a pickle!” she would say when they were dragging. 

 

She carried her can-do attitude to learning to do new things. She liked to work with her hands and she would sew Bob’s Army patches and make dresses for her daughters and shirts for her sons. She began needlepointing in the sixties; her first serious work was a vase full of colorful flowers. When the family lived in Hawaii in 1969, she became obsessed with a Hawaiian quilt she saw at a museum—it looked like a giant snowflake, she thought--and was determined to make one herself. She found a home-extension course she could take at the Army post, taught by a Hawaiian woman, and she bought a pattern from a woman on the slopes of Diamond Head for $5. It took a year to make the top, and by that time (1972) the family had moved to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Jane began the actual quilting of “Piko Haleakela” the day Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president, in January 1977. She finished it six months later, just in time to enter the Houston Quilt Show. She drove over from San Antonio with a carload of women, walked in, and there was a “best of show” ribbon on “Piko Haleakela.” 

 

Jane had fallen in love with quilting.

 

The family moved to Nassau Bay, south of Houston, and Jane taught basic quilting classes at a recreation center. She took classes too, on design theory and art, and began piecing, both by hand and machine. In 1979 Bob took a job in Raleigh (where he had grown up) as Director of the Wake County Health Department, and the family moved one final time, soon falling in love with the area. Jane also started taking quilting even more seriously. She turned the basement into her quilting room, and she would spend all morning and early afternoon working on quilts, until her two youngest children came home from school. 

 

Soon her kids had all left home and spread around the country—marrying and eventually giving her a total of 12 grandchildren. She continued quilting, even as she and Bob also did some serious traveling—especially after he retired for good in 1986. Every year they went abroad, mostly to England and France, but once to Korea to revisit battlefields and see Bob’s old Army buddies. 

 

Jane had started collecting old quilts and blocks, some from the early nineteenth century, and she would pull them out, run her fingers over them, and get ideas. Jane earned a teaching certificate from the National Quilting Association and began getting invitations from guilds around the country to teach as well as to judge contests. She once gave a presentation at a quilt shop in Paris, complete with an interpreter.

 

She loved showing new students how to make a pattern called the pineapple. In 1987 she and Dixie Haywood, a quilter from Pensacola, Florida, who also liked working with pineapples, began writing a book on the pattern. Two years later they published Perfect Pineapples. She and Dixie became good friends and wrote five more books. Jane also did two on her own.

 

During this time Jane made numerous quilts and got deep satisfaction from being an artist. Many of her quilts won blue ribbons. (You can see Jane’s work at janehallquilts.com) Even as she was becoming famous, she was also making quilts for her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. At the same time, she was active in the Capital Quilters Guild in Raleigh, serving as President and Workshop chair. She also chaired the North Carolina Quilt Symposium several times. 

One of the best reference books on the subject out there--

Here's Amazon's link to it.

 

If she loved quilting, she loved teaching even more, helping to bring women to that place where she had found herself. Everybody wants to be creative, she thought, but she knew that many women had been discouraged from even trying. “There is no right way to do a quilt,” she would tell them. “One of the joys of quilting is that you are in charge.” In fact, that was her mantra: “Just remember, you’re in charge.” Jane’s classes were so popular she was invited back every year to the Houston Quilt Show, the biggest in the country, for almost 25 years.

 

Bob died in 2011 at age 93 and left a huge hole in her heart. After a couple of years, realizing her own mortality, she left the rambling house on Transylvania and moved into the Cypress, a retirement community in north Raleigh, where she began a new phase of her life--and made some of the best friends she ever had. Many nights would find them sitting around and drinking wine and talking about their lives. Sometimes she would look around and say, “Who would have thought we’d make new friends at this age?” Jane loved to host the gatherings, loved to feel the thrum of activity around her. 

 

She was active in Creative Threads, a group of knitters/quilters/sewists that met weekly and made quilts and blankets for hospitals, Meals on Wheels, and the Rosewood rehab center. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, she would make face masks out of her quilting materials and deliver them to friends and other residents. Soon Creative Threads was making masks for staff and residents of the Rosewood. Jane also created Covid Unmasked, a quilt made of scraps from masks. 

 

Jane always had a smile and a laugh—and a glass-half-full view of the world. She was friendly with strangers, a reflection of her personality, but also a skill she had honed as an Army wife who moved often and was able to talk to anyone. Jane’s personality was on full display when she volunteered weekly at Urban Ministries--an organization helping the uninsured with medicine, food, and shelter. Jane held down the front desk and helped walk-ins figure out who in the building could help them best. 

                       Indigo Lights by Jane Hall

 

She was a creature of habit—she wore out her Birkenstocks but refused to get a new pair until they were falling apart. Her hair was always cut in the same short style, and her reading glasses seemed permanently perched on the end of her nose. She didn’t get her ears pierced until she was 70. Jane was a proud progressive in a conservative state, proud of her Obama and Biden bumper stickers. She loved to display the American flag on holidays. Jane was a patriot. 

 

She stayed in touch with her children and marveled at their children. When they would visit she greeted them with “Hello, sunshine!” She cared deeply for her friends and showed it whenever she could. Jane wasn’t a church-goer, but as her friend Connie said, “I don’t know a more Christian person than Jane. I don’t think we can name all the people she has quietly stood by and helped through their challenges.”  

 

Jane had her own challenges late in life, but after recuperating from each surgery or bout of chemotherapy, she would always pop back up again. “I feel like I’m being nibbled to death by ducks,” she would say with a chuckle. Jane rarely let her mood stay low for long. She was always saying how lucky she was to have had her husband, her kids, and her friends. At the end, she knew how loved she was. And she knew how much we will all miss her and keep her alive in our memories. 

 

Jane is survived by her children Jenny, Betsy, Sue, Mike, and Danny (and their spouses); numerous nieces, nephews, grandchildren and great grandchildren; her sisters Debby and Sue (and Fred); and her beloved cat Chessie. 

 

Jane will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery with Bob. A celebration of her and her amazing life will be held October 26 at 4 pm in the Ballroom at the Cypress of Raleigh, 8801 Cypress Lakes Dr. Instead of sending flowers, please consider making a donation in her honor to either of two Raleigh groups she supported: Urban Ministries https://urbanmin.org/ or Interfaith Food Shuttle https://www.foodshuttle.org/ — with Betsy Hall Champagne and 2 others.

Hope by Jane Hall