This is a story about quilting, the bonds of friendship and a gift of fine fabric that keeps on giving.

It begins with a violent attack and involves a serious accident resulting in neurological blindness, but it ends with hope and healing through art.

Fashioning quilts

Each month, QuiltWorks, a quilt shop on Greenwood Avenue in Bend, hosts a show of art quilts in its upstairs gallery.

But after QuiltWorks owner Marilyn Ulrich approached Betty Anne Guadalupe, of Prineville, about exhibiting her quilts during September, Ulrich didn’t get quite what she’d been expecting.

Instead, Guadalupe enlisted quilting friends around Central Oregon, Eugene and Portland to join her in making quilts from a selection of European luxury fabrics.

The initial results of their labors can be seen in the new show “Quilting Meets Couture.” When Guadalupe and longtime friend Claire Spector delivered it to QuiltWorks last week, they also spoke to The Bulletin.

The show opened Friday and will be on display through Oct. 3 (see “If you go,” Page B6). It features 24 art quilts and one wearable quilt art vest, made by 12 quilters. It also includes the first quilts Guadalupe and Spector made two decades ago.

But these quilts have an interesting wrinkle: The fine fabrics used in their making were originally given to Spector as a gift. Later, thinking she’d never sew again, Spector gave them to Guadalupe.

Reluctant quilters

To really explain all this, we need to look back about 21 years, to the early ’90s. At the time, Guadalupe, then of California, and Spector, then of New York, had yet to meet, but had coincidentally begun making their own art quilts.

Both were reluctant quilters at first.

“I didn’t know if I really wanted to be a quilter,” says Guadalupe, whose mother and grandmother had quilted. Back then, they say, quilting seemed the retro domain of women from another era.

“I was in the corporate world; I worked for Hewlett-Packard. I wasn’t going to have any of those funky things in my house,” Guadalupe says, adding with a chuckle, “and now it’s my life.”

Despite her misgivings, Guadalupe asked her mom if she happened to have any fabric. She later found on her doorstep a selection of ties that had belonged to an acquaintance.

Guadalupe dismantled the ties, and though the material was difficult and wiggly, was able to use them to make her first quilt, “Dead Man’s Ties,” which is part of the show.

“Fine silk, if you put a needle near it, it tries to get away,” says Spector, who had similar experiences learning to quilt.

“When you talk about stabilizing it, I didn’t even know that,” Spector says. “I didn’t know if you needed to, or even how to. I didn’t know I was a quilter. I was piecing on the subway in New York City and a gal sat down next to me and said, ‘Oh, you’re a quilter.’

“I said, ‘I don’t think so.’”

The woman insisted Spector was, and invited her to start attending monthly quilting meeting at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “That’s where I was first exposed” to quilting as art, says Spector.

It was also in New York in the early 1990s when a burglar broke into her apartment and attacked her one night. “It is was really pretty gruesome,” says Spector, who prefers to focus on the ways quilting has helped her heal.

As a gift during her recovery, a friend who worked for a famed European textile house and the friend’s colleagues invited Spector to pick whatever she wanted from “mind-bending,” as she calls them, selections of silks, linens, cottons and wools.

“I came into this collection of fabrics from the dynastic textile houses of Europe that were residing under one roof,” explains Spector.

“If you think in terms of runway-show couture, these are the folks that the designers go to,” Spector says. The textile makers lay out fabric samples, “and the designers (decide) what things they’re going to make with them.”

Likewise for Spector, who combed through piles of the samples to select what she wanted. She walked away with enough that she organized them, by color, among some 60 boxes.

“I sewed with them. They followed me around the country for a long time. I continued to make pieces,” she says. When Spector moved to California in 2002, the boxes went into storage.

Around 2003, she met Guadalupe, and the two began collaborating on quilts. “We just hit it off,” Spector says. “We started hanging out in the studio together.”

Never to sew again?

In 2005, Spector, an attorney, was sitting in a parked car studying for the California bar exam when a tree fell on the vehicle. “A tractor-trailer-sized tree,” she says.

It crushed the roof of her car, “with me in it,” she says.

Six months after the fact, she developed vision loss from head trauma incurred when the tree hit her car.

“My vision change is neurological; it’s not optical problems,” she says. “A lot of people coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq have neurological issues. I was fortunate that in the Bay Area, there’s a lot of people in the VA system, and doctors who serve that system, who know about neuro-visual (problems).”

She explains that she has perfect distance vision, strong enough that she has a California driver’s license and is able to drive with proper window filtering and visors.

“It was really funny to take a driving test with the examiner, with a red and white cane. I went caning up to the car with her, and I said, ‘Do you do a lot of these?’ And she said, ‘Not really.’”

Her near vision, however, is another matter. When light is filtered, say, through trees during a hike, or something has “too geometric” of a shape — such as one of her quilts — her brain “won’t release the image, so it strobes,” she says.

Given the fact of her near vision problems, “I realized, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be able to sew again,’ Sector says. “So I thought, who else would I want in the world to have it?’”

She gave the fabrics to Guadalupe, who moved to Bend in 2005 and now lives in Prineville.

When Ulrich approached Guadalupe about being the featured quilter, “I started thinking about it … and I thought, ‘What an honor it would be to use some of Claire’s fabrics,’” Guadalupe says, “and invite other quilters to participate by using the fabric that Claire had collected.”

Guadalupe says that when she told Spector she’d given away some of the fabric, Spector gasped. They both begin to explain why learning those prized fabrics had been given away would make her gasp.

“It takes some skill,” Spector says.

“We asked some fine artists,” begins Guadalupe.

“Marilyn and Dave (Ulrich) sell really fine cotton goods that are really tight weave, and they’re pretty stable,” Spector says. “This is not that. This is —”

“Couture,” says Guadalupe.

“Fashion,” continues Spector, who speaks of the fine fabrics as though they’re somehow alive. “You have to chase it around with a needle, so it requires some measure of skill.”

‘You can do this’

At home in Santa Rosa, Spector had approached the staff at a vision rehabilitation center about learning to sew again.

“They teach you how to cook, and how to keep the house and everything, and they said, ‘We don’t really have anybody who’s doing that now.’”

When Guadalupe had lived in California, she had started a company called Sew Shall We, through which she taught quilting to people “who wouldn’t normally be able to go to a quilting class, that had differences,” Guadalupe explains. “I look for ways to (make) things easier for people who don’t have the concentration, or whatever.”

Says Spector, “I had forgotten she had Sew Shall We because, at the time, I didn’t need that kind of support.” She was reminded of it, however, when she made her first trip to Oregon in June to see what was happening with the “Quilting Meets Couture” project.

During that visit, Guadalupe told Spector, “I think you can do this,” referring to quilting.

Guadalupe gave Spector several blocks — the squares or other shapes of fabric that make up a quilt top — and Spector again began hand quilting, or stitching by hand.

“It started her taste buds,” Guadalupe says. “I knew what I was doing. I had some blocks that I had pieced, and I said, ‘How about you put these together?’”

“You just stick the edge of fabric up (under) your fingernail, and you’ve got a quarter of an inch. And if you’re pricking yourself, you’re pretty sure you’re in the right place,” she adds, laughing. “The fact is that my art life is kind of back.”

That’s with the help of her supportive partner, the composer Charles Sepos, and, of course, Guadalupe. Modern technology allows the two to communicate. Whenever Spector runs into a technical quilting issue, she snaps a photo on her iPhone and sends to Guadalupe for suggestions.

In the current version of the show, Spector has just her one original piece, “Courthouse Steps,” a name that speaks to the traditional pattern she used and the fact that she was awaiting the trial of her New York attacker when she made it.

However, a larger version of the exhibit is planned for the 2013 Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show. Spector expects to be part of it.

“Basically I was asked to be a featured artist, having my own little exhibition of my work, not only the piece that’s in this show,” but new quilt work as well.

“I was like, ‘What just happened?’”

To which Guadalupe — whose own quilting talents were the reason for the invitations to QuiltWorks and Sisters — answered, “Get in the car and I’ll explain.”

In July, Spector returned to Central Oregon and attended this year’s Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show, which Guadalupe explains was part of a dry run for next year’s show.

Trouble was, when the sun is directly overhead, “I’m totally blind. So trying to see the show was pretty trippy,” Spector says. “I’m so light sensitive, I’m often blind in the street, unless you turn me with my back to the sun.”

“We got her a fly-fishing hat,” says Guadalupe.

Becoming part of the quilting community again “is one of the most moving things,” Spector says. “It was moving to have Betty Anne have the notion to allow me to see the fabric used by artists who know what they’re doing, but … quilting is so much about community. It’s one of the few places in the American culture where it doesn’t matter, your politics, your religion. People come together and appreciate each other as artists.

“Quilting is putting the pieces together,” she says. “It’s useful to let people know that things can happen, and (quilting) can be a medium through which you move forward.

“That’s really the message, that quilting can take you real far on your way back, and beyond,” Spector says. “And it continues to heal.”

If you go

What: “Quilting Meets Couture,” a show of contemporary art quilts by Susan G. Cobb, Betty Davis Daggett, Grace Grinnell, Betty Anne Guadalupe, Tierney Davis Hogan, Amaarilla “Amber” Humphreys, Mary Nyquist Koons, Kathie Olsen Leonard, Olivia Mitchell, Claire Spector, Candice Spencer and Bette Colby Talmadge

When: Through Oct. 3

Where: QuiltWorks, 926 N.E. Greenwood Ave., Bend

Cost: Free

Contact: www.quiltworks .com or 541-728-0527