Making a Quilt, Making a Life

Making a quilt is kind of like making a life.  You piece together this and that, get creative with what you have on hand, and before you know it, a pattern emerges...some of it planned and a lot of it a big, happy, imperfect surprise.  Recently, I got the urge to get back to my sewing.  I’d done quite a lot of quilting in the past, but once we moved to our new house 7 years ago and I started my own business, things just got too crazy for me and I couldn’t carve out the free time (and energy) necessary to undertake a sewing project.  Plus, the first spring after we moved here to South Portland, we had that Patriot’s Day storm which resulted in 14” of water flooding our basement and I lost a lot of my stash of quilting fabrics.  In any event, it took me a while to get back to it, but I finally did.

 

My desire to create artistic things with fabric stems from my relationship with my maternal grandmother, Laura Grondin.  Though she’s been gone from this world for many, many years, she is with me daily in spirit.  Not only was she THE source of unconditional love for me in an otherwise not-so-loving childhood, she was also an amazing gardener, cook, seamstress and queen of home arts in general and took it upon herself to pass these talents on to her granddaughters.  The home arts are fast becoming lost to our modern, fast-paced world and I feel so blessed to be carrying the torch now and bringing my own quilting projects to life.  

This quilt I am just finishing reminds me so much of my grandmother’s generation.  She was a young woman during the days of the Great Depression and learned to stretch her pennies and make do with very little and this way of living frugally stayed with her.  Visiting at her house, I’d come across pieces of twine and string rolled into a ball and kept for reuse in fastening things, jars of buttons sitting on a shelf to be later recycled in knitted sweaters and hand-stitched clothing.  I watched as she cut old woolen blankets and my grandfather’s worn out woolen hunting pants and coats into strips for use in wool rugs she’d later braid.  

     She also worked at the Hathaway shirt factory in Waterville, Maine.  Both of these experiences were reflected in her own quilts.  She would bring home scraps of shirting fabrics from her seamstress job and these would find their way into her quilts, either as part of the blocks or as patches when fabrics wore away through years of use and washing.  Most of her quilts weren’t fancy and were more utilitarian, using whatever fabrics she had on hand, whether they matched or not and whether they were 100% cotton or not. 

Over my years of quilting, I collected quite a few shirting fabrics and reproduction fabrics from the civil war and other periods.  The quilt I put together these last several weeks made use of all those fabrics.  I felt proud and frugal, knowing I used what I had on hand and didn’t spend lots of money on new fabrics that coordinated and matched perfectly.  And the resulting quilt reminds me of those from my childhood, on the beds and couches at our family camp on Great Pond, owned by three generations of Grondins.

Each time I entered my sun-lit art room to work on the project, I felt my grandmother’s presence.  The scent of steam rising from freshly laundered fabrics being pressed on the iron board reminded me of her.  The little embroidery scissors I use to snip sewing threads were hers.  The shirting fabrics I was cutting and piecing into the light portions of the blocks could’ve been from Hathaway shirts.  And certainly, the odd combinations of light and dark fabrics I was joining together in the blocks had me smiling in remembrance of her similar choices.

I moved my dog’s bed into my art room and on sewing days Tonya would snore peacefully as I worked away, both of us comforted and lulled by the whir of my machine stitch-stitch-stitching along.  Mike would join us at the end of his work day, touching each of the new blocks and laying out his favorites in a row on my work surface.  I’ve always known, and have told Michael many times, that our deceased grandmothers orchestrated us coming across each other and eventually falling in love.  They are “up there” having tea and looking down on this scene with smiles on their faces, for sure.  Seventeen years later, here we are:  me, sewing a quilt for our bed and him, enjoying the process and encouraging me at just the right times.

Making a decent quilt, like making a decent life for yourself, is no easy feat and is full of trial and error.  It takes lots of practice and many skills and there are so many opportunities to mess it up in small ways here and there that can add up to a crooked, ugly mess when all is said and done.  Getting back to my cutting tools, my ironing board and my trusty Singer machine after many years was both daunting and rewarding.  My skills came back after a while and I began to relax and enjoy each step, from choosing the design and fabrics to pressing to cutting to stitching and so on.  After the first day of working on the project, though, I had some incredibly intense low back pain.  Who knew that several hours of cutting and pressing and stitching would be kind of like an athletic event.   

While I was working, I did a lot of thinking and I had so many good thoughts, that I decided to start making a list of the Life Lessons I Learned While Quilting.  Here are a few:

Triangles are unstable.  Think about that.  It’s certainly true in sewing.  Because angles are cut across the grain of the fabric for quilt blocks, they can easily get stretched and distorted if not handled with care.  Isn’t the same true of “triangles” in our human lives?  It’s always been a tricky thing to manage the relationships between and amongst myself, my husband and my son, Brody, to keep it all balanced and everyone happy.  And when I think of the countless triangles that we get ourselves into in our love relationships, work relationships and family relationships over the course of a lifetime...wow!  Triangles really ARE unstable and need special care.

Expect to be less than perfect, but do your very best with each little task.  Every step of the way when making a quilt, you have to try really hard to get it close to perfect.  You have to measure perfectly and then cut precisely and then sew exactly and then stitch sewn pieces together just so.  You can even mess things up by getting too intense with the ironing!  It helps to take it slow and concentrate just on the present, doing the ONE task with all of your attention and care.  Otherwise, you get flustered and overwhelmed and start thinking about giving up.  And isn’t that true of life as well?  In my yoga practice, all of my emphasis is placed on staying present for the posture I’m working on in the here and now, dismissing any thoughts or distractions that may arise and keeping my focus on the ONE pose.  Many MANY times

along the way, I’ve wanted to give up and walk away, feeling inadequate, not good enough, not strong enough.  But when I focus on just today, just THIS class or THAT posture, I’m okay and I can keep going.  In my work with my dog students, taking one moment at a time and letting it go as soon as it’s over has saved me from going crazy and making it through long and trying days and weeks.  So it is with quilting.  If a seam is a bit crooked or not exactly 1/4”, I notice it and let it go, focusing on the next one and trying to make it better. 

Wash it first so it won’t bleed later.  When making a quilt, you’ve first got to take all of your fabrics and put them through the washer and dryer before you can begin.  Lots of quilters have great disdain for this necessity.  Prior to washing, the fabrics are a bit stiffer and are easier to work with, and you are just so excited and anxious to get started on the “real work” of making a quilt, so it’s easy to understand why a lot of us want to skip this step.  But...if you don’t wash and dry your fabrics, you risk disaster later on when the quilt needs to be washed.  Those fabrics, especially the dark ones, can bleed ink all over the light ones and ruin your beautiful work.  And the fabrics shrink a bit in the prewashing, so skipping that step means risking puckering and distortion in your quilt blocks later on.

In life, if we put off necessary and important tasks, the results often come screaming back to haunt us, making us bleed all over the place.  Take, for instance, my computerized accounting system.  Though it’s brilliant and keeps track of all my expenses and income, I have to actually input the numbers.  And if I don’t input the numbers on a regular basis, I’ve got a huge mountain of receipts and deposit slips to catch up on later, causing frustration, irritation and seepage of grouchy feelings all over the place.  On the other hand, keeping up on the task of entering data gives me a feeling of accomplishment and ease. 

Press toward the dark.  This lesson has given me the most pause.  In quilting, “pressing toward the dark” refers to the seams in your quilt blocks, rows, sashing and borders.  After stitching one fabric to another, you use a hot iron to press your seams one way or the other:  toward the light fabric or toward the dark.  Pressing toward the dark ensures that your lighter fabric at the seam doesn’t show through the darker one when the quilt is finished.  It makes good quilting sense.  I wonder, though, about pressing toward the darkness that exists inside each of us as human beings.  Certainly we all struggle with less-than-acceptable, kind or compassionate feelings, compulsions and actions...towards ourselves and others.  Some of us aren’t sure what motivates us to do some of the darker things we do.  Others are continually drawn to things (people, behaviors, situations) that aren’t so good for us.  Perhaps leaning into our darker side, being willing to explore the desire a bit, brings a greater understanding of our motivations and drives.  Sometimes, pressing toward the darkness is the best thing we can do for ourselves and those around us.  It’s easy to see and understand when the sun is shining a bright light, but so much more challenging to walk into the dark alone and feel our way.

     You CAN handle math and machines.  Quilting has given me ample opportunity to face two of my demons:  math and machinery.  I shy away from both, feeling like I'm not fit to work with either because they scare me and make me feel dumb.  But, I love fabric and making things with it, so I've had to make peace with both of my nemeses.  What I've found is this:  my junior high math teacher was correct - you do use your math in every day life!  And this:  mastering quilting math or quick-fixing my sewing machine leaves me feeling competent, able, and kind of like an independent little rock star in my small moments of success.  The sewing machine malfunctions regularly.  The bobbin jams.  The thread somehow gets all tangled.  The needle breaks.  And you just handle it.  You use your eyes and you examine the way things work and you fiddle with the different and assorted parts until you make the problem go away.  And then you keep on sewing happily.  

There's no such thing as a quilt without math.  Sure, you can avoid triangles (and I probably did for the first year or two) but at some point you realize that triangles make your quilts more sassy and visually interesting.  So you start to figure out quilting math and you get comfortable with the small measurements in an inch....like 5/8ths and 7/8ths.  And you start watching videos on Youtube on the various ways to figure out how big to cut squares so that you can then cut them into triangles that are the right measurement to fit your blocks.  Brilliant!  Small steps...and they lead to big confidence and a sense of self-reliance and independence.  You don't hear me yelling for Mike anymore when I'm stuck.  I just sit there and think and figure it out and THEN I yell for him to come and see my masterpiece.