Something to Think About

Crazy Quilt, Crazy Life

Elizabeth E.8 Comments

“Crazy Quilt,” by Tess Taylor

(picture of antique crazy quilt by Carolyn Aune)

Our grandma taught her nine-patch, strip-piecing,
how to measure, how a fabric falls.

My sister heard her and came out a maker.
She garners fabrics, hoards a jumble-pile.

She’s skilled enough to half ignore geometry,
to spread out winter evenings

and ignore us. Obbligato with the treadle’s whir, she leans
into a tag-sale apron, Japanese cottons,

cambrics dyed one summer in the yard.
She likes found fabric, asymmetries:

She’s taught herself to work by instinct
basting light to dark, canary

to an emerald paisley. We all watch
her coverlets grow wider.

Her expression’s almost revenant
as she rips, re-hems, and irons, mouth

full of pins, cloth billowing around her.
Tonight she sliced our mother’s raw silk saris.

Dark ribbons bloomed and I admired
her fierce concentration to resettle

all her scraps at staggered angles,
the way her body stores her making,

how she destroys each thing she’s salvaged
to harvest it as her exploding star.

***********************

An explanation:  The week before Christmas, I was diagnosed with malignant melanoma–a small spot on my leg that threatened to turn my world upside physically, yet did upend my world emotionally and mentally and in most every other way.  Before this story gets too scary, I should say that I am now home from surgery, convalescing, finding that reading poems on Poetry Daily is about all my anesthesia-fogged-in-mind can comprehend, besides feeling really grateful that the the surgeon excised a chunk of my leg to take out the offending spot and that the adjoining lymph node came up clear — free of cancer.

But it kind of puts a dead stop to things such as preparations for Christmas, as I harbored this little horrid secret away from everyone, not willing to go thunk into their holiday preparations, wanting instead to read only about sweetness and light and those tender feelings that I treasure so about this time of year.  So I went silent, instead, the cloth laying idle on the table while I shuttled to lab appointments and doctor’s appointments. Silent, here as well, on this blog, with pictures of holiday cheer a hopeful substitute for the writing.  (I did write about it on my other blog.)

The night we found out the news and the big awfulness of it all hovered over us like a black shroud was the same night we had decided to celebrate our Christmas (we were headed off to Ohio to my son’s for the actual holiday).  I cooked a full fancy meal, and we sat savoring the good food, the chaotic news, the uncertainty, the tenderness and love we felt for each other in our joined journey together as man and wife and wondered how we would ever bear it if the news should be bad.  Turned out two weeks later that it wasn’t, that I can anticipate many more happy years of seeing oncologists and dermatologists and that now I check over every spot on my husband’s arms and back like a mother looks at her child’s face, searching to make sure only happiness is written there, easing away gloom and fright by attention.

So poetry, short and rich and condensed in word and meaning, is my companion tonight and I found this poem which celebrates what we do as quilters: harvesting those quilts which are sown from destruction.  I felt it echoed my somewhat somber mood, as I struggle to make sense of things, still too fresh from surgery to sit (it hurts) and finger the cloth.  We cannot know how the bumps in our roads will shape us, inform us, or teach us, but I hope to have many more days cutting and sewing, willing my body to “store [my] making.”

I wish you all a Happy New Year. Good things are ahead.  Good quilts are in our future.

Take care.

Books · Quilts · Sewing

Quilting Organically

Elizabeth E.2 Comments

Not quilting with organic fabric.  I was thinking more along the lines of a quilt that just sort of evolves from one stage to the next, getting stalled, then moving forward again.  But Quilting Evolutionarily (is that a word?) just sounded like it was heading somewhere different.  Often I feel the pressure to rush things–you know, to Get-It-Done so I can have something to show off to everyone in the blogosphere.  Because why would anyone want to read about my humdrum, inch-by-inch progress in my projects?  Only because that’s probably how things are going for many of us, especially at the holidays, when we are pulled too many directions.

So, after I put the blue borders on my wonky log cabin, it sat.  Then after finishing the grading, the finals, I actually had a night when I was waiting for my husband to come home from a trip back East, and I wanted to stay up and I had a good novel going, so I was ready to sew.

Forgive the blurry picture–it was at night.  I sewed white strips onto the blue borders.  I also had a stack of “middles” without the blue borders (I’d run out of fabric).  I added red strips to those, and then green.

And then I alternated them up on the pinwall. And there they’ve been for a few days now, while I try to figure out the next step.  They are all different sizes, so I’m trying to decide which ones to cut down, and to which ones I should add a deep blue strip or two in order to get them to become roughly the same size.

The novel I’m listening to is Moon Over Manifest and it’s written for a bit younger crowd; I’m still really enjoying it as it combines two periods of history in the story of the twelve-year-old protagonist.  I’m considering it for my English class next semester: since the main character is 12, I don’t have to worry about inappropriate romantic entanglements that I’d have to deal with in class discussions.  I’m teaching a developmental class (one below Freshman Comp) so this level might be appropriate to most of their reading skills.

So, not that anyone’s reading with a week left until Christmas, and Hanukkah just beginning, and the general rush rush of buying gifts and decorating and baking, but I am making progress on this quilt.  It’s interesting to sew without a plan.  I’m sewing just for the pleasure of it, just to discover what will unfold — the kind of sewing I need right now.

Sewing

Sewing Machines as Decoration

Elizabeth E.3 Comments

Out at the outlet shops, gathering Christmas gifts, I spy this window display of antique sewing machines.  Covet.  Covet them all.

If your friend quilted on this machine, you could give truth to the phrase that you are merely sewing in order to keep up with the Joneses.  [Lame humor, I know.]  Makes our sleek, shiny machines look boring boring by comparison, doesn’t it?  (Although I like the way our new machines sew.)