The Great Neck Choral Society

PROFILE Gilda Hecht: She likes to put the pieces together 4-13-05

Gilda Hecht grew up in Liberty, N.Y., in the heart of the Catskills, and she sang--"an alto then and forever"--in the high school chorus. But playing the violin took first place in those days, and when the family moved to New York City for two years after her father's death she was good enough to get into the prestigious High School of Music and Art. The middle sister of three, "I wasn't as good in school as they were," she says. "I guess I was the 'creative' one."

The creative bent led her to Syracuse University's School of Fine Arts for two years, but a practical bent then took her to New York University, where she graduated with a BS in Art Education in 1960. It wasn't quite that straighforward, though. Fourteen months earlier she had met Warren Hecht, a practicing Manhattan dentist, through a Jewish singles mixer. Four months later they married, and two months after she graduated the following year she give birth to their first child.

Three years later the Hechts moved from a Queens apartment to the stately colonial in Great Neck Estates where they have lived ever since. Their first child died of meningitis at the age of four, but four other children flourished, eventually to become, respectively, a physician, a school teacher, a biology researcher, and a graphics designer.

It was after a decade of child-raising that Gilda realized that "music-making was missing" in her life. Together with Joan Schussheim, a good friend, she joined GNCS in 1971. Despite all of the music in her childhood, she says, "I never learned to count until I joined GNCS."

When quilting became a passion

It was about four years later that the "fine arts" in her background began to press forward. She was doing volunteer work in the public schools, and one day she recalls, she was told, "You're going to make a quilt with the third-graders."

It was not much of a quilt, but Gilda was hooked. From then on she developed a passion for quilting. In her house, the evidence is everywhere--stacks of quilts, boxes of materials from which patches can be cut, and a sewing machine on the dining-room table. She no longer has to move the sewing machine. Ten years ago, she says, her indulgent husband volunteered to free her from meal-making so she could devote more time to her quilting. "I haven't cooked since," she says. "We're very well known in Great Neck restaurants."

At least once a year, Gilda attends what she calls "camp." She travels, often out of state, to join with other quilters from across the country in hearing lectures, viewing demonstrations, and getting hands-on experience. "They're wonderful," she says.

It's easy enough to make a simple quilt. You can cut same-size squares or triangles from various materials and sew them together at the edges to create larger blocks or strips, then join those pieces to make larger ones, and so on. Then you stitch the resulting "face" of the quilt to a cloth backing and an intermediate layer of batting. The basic challenges are making accurate cuts to avoid pucker, and making stitches that are neat and nearly invisible.

But then there are the so-called "art quilts." Though they, too, can keep a baby warm, they are truly works of art, and intended for display. The "art" is expressed in the selection or design of the pieces and the imaginative ways that pieces are combined. But it is also expressed in the choice of materials. Beginners making utilitarian quilts are generally advised to stick with cotton. But in addition to cotton, Gilda has used silk, paper, and rice paper. "The tactile quality of a quilt is a turn-on," she says. Nor does Gilda necessarily settle for the materials that are available to her. Increasingly, she uses acrylic paint to produce original patterns on her pieces. For one quilt she used silk onto which photographs had been transferred.

Stitching, moreover, may become part of the design. For a quilt Gilda was making at the time of our interview, she was "drawing with the machine"--using stitches to make decorative whorls.

Materials to make a quilt.	Stitching a pattern.