To say that Gail Marirea quilts would be a bit of an understatement. Her quilts aren?t so much weekend hobby projects, but artistic endeavours.

Until a few weeks ago the world had never heard of Gail Marirea?s quilts. All that changed when Mrs. Marirea entered two of her quilts in a Masterworks Gallery art show.

One quilt depicted an Aquarium flamingo named Flo, known for her frequent escape attempts, and the other was of a reef teeming with tropical fish.

The quilts sold instantly, and now some of her quilts are on display at Government House being viewed by visiting royalty.

?Tom Butterfield at the Masterworks Gallery said, where have you been?? said Mrs. Marirea with a laugh. ?I said I have been in my closet quilting for the last couple of years.?

She started quilting when she retired eight years ago, but she quickly grew bored with the traditional Dresden china plate, bear claw and baby block patterns. However, the move away from hundreds of years of quilting tradition wasn?t deliberate.

?I am manipulating fabric to get a particular effect,? she said. ?That is intentional now. That is the way it seemed to go when I woke up one day and realised what was happening.?

What was happening was that her quilts had changed from something to keep her warm at night, to a piece of art to hang on the wall.

Her quilting beginnings were humble. Her first quilt ever was a sampler quilt comprised of traditional patterns. It now hangs proudly on her living room wall.

?It is really just a starter quilt,? said Mrs. Marirea. ?I made that and I thought I knew everything about quilting, but now I find that I am still learning things everyday.

?It doesn?t take me too long to make a quilt, because when I start I just keep at it. I do some things on the sewing machine, and other things completely by hand. At first, I was doing everything by hand, but then I realised if you want something to last it is better to do the piecework on a sewing machine. It is actually easier to do it by hand because its is sometimes hard to do the little points and turns on a sewing machine.?

When quilters talk about piecework, they mean stitching the various quilt blocks, squares and diamonds together. Actual quilting refers to the small running stitches that holds the three layers of a quilt together.

?To most people making the top is the fun part and the quilting part can be boring, but I enjoy both parts,? said Mrs. Marirea. ?I sit here at night, and I do my hand quilting and I do my piecework during the day. I do a lot of other things as well.?

She said it is nice to do something constructive in the evening besides watching television.

?Plus, I have a bad habit of having to do something with my hands all the time,? she said. ?I have to be doing something all the time. It is a great way of occupying yourself and accomplishing something all the time. So I am on the computer a lot and I am on the sewing machine a lot.?

She is entirely self-taught. Before she retired she worked as an accountant, and before that as a commercial teacher.

?I have been asked by people to give lessons,? she said. ?I enjoyed being a teacher, but I am afraid that I have a pretty full day as it is. If I taught, I wouldn?t have time to do what I am doing. Plus, I am a bit introverted. I didn?t spend eight years working in a closet by myself to suddenly now be out all the time with other people.

?Doing these little shows that they had down at Masterworks was really nice. I enjoyed it immensely. I was able to do it for four days quite intensely. Now I can just enjoy getting back to things again. Now working with Government House to put quilts in some of the rooms is keeping me busy.?

To make quilts, particularly art quilts, you need to have a variety of fabrics on hand. Every quilter has their ?stash? of fabrics. Unfortunately, in Bermuda, there isn?t a wide range of fabrics immediately available.

?When I go to the United States I load up on fabrics,? said Mrs. Marirea. ?Now I am into themes so I know what to shop for. There are so many different fabrics that you can end up bringing all sorts of things back that you don?t need, or aren?t going to use.

?Of course, you still always end up needing something. Because what you can get in Bermuda is limited, sometimes you have to change what you intend to do to suit what is available.?

Sometimes she will use ten different fabrics and only cut one fish out of each fabric, which can be a great waste of material. To use up scraps, she makes other things such as handbags and hotplates.

?To make a washable quilt, you have to use 100 percent cotton,? said Mrs. Marirea. ?Otherwise when you wash it, some of the non-cotton fabric might shrink, but the rest won?t therefore ruining the quilt. I do use other fabrics in my wall hangings though. Some of my quilts have batik prints in them, and sometimes I touch up the fish with paint, because there is no way you can get into all those little fins with a needle.?

When making her fish quilts she often consults with her husband to make sure that the types of fish she uses are in the right place, bottom fish on the bottom of the quilt, for example.

?They don?t look completely realistic, but they are as close as I can get to realism,? she said. ?My husband says if I sell any of my quilts I have to give him a percentage because he is a consultant.?

Until recently she didn?t sell her quilts because she needed them for her second home in the United States.

?I am not against selling them now,? she said. ?I learned when I was painting that you have to sell in order to recreate and keep going. It is hard to part with them, but you get use to the idea after a while.? (Especially since an art quilt can cost upwards of $1,000, in some cases.)

She said it is sometimes difficult to part with them, because she spent so much time on them. ?It isn?t just the sewing that takes time,? she said. ?You also spend time researching the quilt, shopping for fabrics and getting ideas. I may have an idea and I start out with it in miniature and by the time I finish it looks nothing like what I originally envisioned. It may use totally different colours.?

She tries to put something a little different in each quilt. For example, a quilt she calls ?Hot Salsa? has a Mexican flag quilted on the back. On her Flo Flamingo quilt, Flo?s wing actually raises.

?Almost every quilt has a mistake of some sort, because they are all done by hand and humans aren?t perfect,? said Mrs. Marirea.

?I am entirely self-taught. I haven?t had any lessons, I have gotten everything from just doing it, making a mistake and then doing it again, or from books. If I have a question, I look it up.?