The Friction of a Hawaiian Quilt Block

Occasionally in Adam Mastroianni’s substack there are these fascinating-makes-me-think-or-go-aha sorts of observations. His missive this week happened to coincide with two other events: a couple of days at the beach and the making of a Hawaiian quilt block.

First, the quilt block. I posted I was starting this Hawaiian style of quilting and immediately a couple of quilters commented that it was a total fail for them, didn’t like it, tried and never doing it again. But it was Block Two of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the Indian quilt-a-long and since I already had finished the first block, I was determined to try the second. I also have never attempted a Hawaiian Block.

Second, the days at the beach came about because one of my sons was bringing his family to Oceanside, and I asked if my husband and I could tag along for part of their trip, and then the other son, who lives in the area, also joined us. Their dog Misa is above; she hated their pool when they first moved in to their new house, but now, she loves it. (Misa, too, is a part of this.)

Back to Mastroianni. He writes “The internet gives every social trend a pair of rocket-powered roller skates, speeding it toward its…final form. On Twitter, for instance, memes go from punchy to passé in a matter of days rather than decades. But if we could play culture on 1x speed rather than 10x speed, if we had time to screw around with different strategies before the game reached its cutthroat stage, we might have discovered different paths entirely….Instead, in a hyper-competitive marketplace of ideas, we end up with the same few memes, all done to death” (source is above).

We quilters have also been subjected to this rocket-powered roller skates. How many rainbow-ordered quilts have you seen in the last few years? How many quilts have you seen that really don’t need a pattern because they are so simple — but somehow they are everywhere and we all make one? Sometimes it is because we all read the same Instagram posts, or that the pattern writers are counting on the viral effect of social media to send sales skyrocketing. Fair. It’s a marketplace. But I can’t tell you how many guild show-and-tell nights I have sat through where every quilt somehow resembles the one before it, or the one before that.

Mastroianni calls this “de-frictioning.” He describes it like this: “We’ve forgotten how much time people in the past spent consuming content that they didn’t actually want to consume: the unskippable clunker of a song that came in the middle of an album, the late-night infomercial that you sat through because there was nothing else on, the magazine you read cover-to-cover in the waiting room….Each new media technology reduces this friction…they all allow us to spend more time with the content that we supposedly desire. And what happens when this friction goes away?”

Two Russian artists, Kolmar and Melamid, decided to find out, and interviewed people in many countries about what their most wanted painting was, and what was their least wanted painting. Here’s USA’s (source via Mastroianni):

If you were to interview quilters what their most wanted quilt block was, and what their least, what would we see? We would probably see what they were seeing the most. If they saw a lot of printed panel quilts, they may be looking for their favorite panel. If you were at a modern guild, you might get something abstract or perhaps boldly colored. We tend to go with what we see, what we are used to.

The weird thing was that so many people’s “most” pictures were similar, but their “least” pictures were quite different and interesting. Mastroianni notes that “people are capable of acquiring more interesting tastes, if you give them the chance. This is the work art does for us—it stretches our desires, rather than merely satisfying them.”

And this is the work that the little bit of friction of a new project can also do.

So what to do when a quilt-a-long comes into your view and it is a Hawaiian quilt block? Or you are moved into a house that has a swimming pool and you have never been in one before?

Or you go to the beach and get out of your regular routine and you see a group of beginning surfers feel the friction in the few inches of whitewater high up on the shore?

Then instead of sitting there like a lump, you reach into your bag and carefully pull out the pinned Hawaiian block, and really get going on it. No, it’s not perfect. You probably won’t make it again. But you don’t want to read the magazines you brought, the family is all at lunch and you are guarding their stuff, so you thread your needle and get going, and by the end of the day, and after good conversations and an occasional walk on the beach, the block may have a certain coconut suntan-lotion fragrance and perhaps some sea salt spray, but it’s mostly finished.

Another deviation from my usual.

And here’s where I got my quilter roller skates on and skated right into the sameness, but this time, happily so. More info here, and how to get her free pattern. Audrey is looking for more, so make one and send it off!