Quilting

When I was a teenager, the Ohio State Fair came to Columbus every August.  Amid the carnival rides, 4H animal competitions, and dumbo ears, there was the quilting competition.  Most of the quilts were submitted by Amish women who lived in northeast Ohio.  I was mesmerized at the complex patterns and colors.  They were soft, giant kaleidoscopes that hung on a wall or covered a bed.  I was amazed at the craftsmanship to make all of the squares and patterns come out so perfectly.  The final stitches across the top completed the picture.  I couldn't imagine I could ever have the skill, time, patience and planning to make something so beautiful and perfect.  I imagined the quilting bees where groups of women worked together and taught each other secrets to sewing, cutting and color, passing this on from generation to generation.

My aunts and grandmother were crafty in the kind sense of the word.  Needlepoint, crocheting, knitting, and sewing were all part of their repertoire.  My aunt made me a Raggedy Ann doll when I was seven that I slept with every night for years.  The doll was well loved, and soon came to fit her name.  My father taught me to braid using her hair.  My brother tried to steal her once, and I yanked her back, resulting in a rip beneath her chin.  I loved her nonetheless.

I missed out on this crafting phase.  My mom wasn't that into sewing and whatnot.  While I appreciated what my aunts and grandmother could do, it never was something that became part of my routine.  I tried to learn to knit in college, but studying math, history and the occasional art history class got in the way.  Plus, I wasn't that good at it.  Not seeing immediate success or progress made me move on to other things.  After college, work, city life and graduate school kept me busy.  My hobbies did not including noodling on a sewing machine or with knitting needles.  Working in consulting, my medium was spreadsheets and PowerPoint.  I can make a mean pie chart or bar graph and analyze data with the best of them.  But I could barely sew on a button that fell off a blouse.

A few years back, my husband and I took the kids to San Francisco where we saw the King Tut exhibit at the de Young Museum.  While the Pharaoh was the main attraction, the de Young also had an exhibit of the Quilts of Gee's Bend, created by African American women in Alabama in the 1950's, 60's and 70's.  Completely different in style and texture from the Amish women, these quilts were no less amazing.  Art critics compared these works made from leftover scraps of clothes to artwork from modern masters like Paul Klee and Henri Matisse.  While I still didn't have time to find a new hobby with two young children, I was inspired by the free form of these quilts.

I had saved my daughter's old and tattered dresses, the ones she wore to preschool that were stained or ripped and couldn't be given away.  I tucked them in the basement hoping one day to make them into a quilt she could pass on to her daughter.  I bought books on quilting, which I'd pour over.  Before I had kids and was working, my boss and I both secretly subscribed to Martha Stewart's Living.  Neither of us made anything from the magazine.  Rather, it was a portal to another world where people found time to shop at flea markets and make their own soap.  I would look at the quilting books in the same way, except now I had a bag of old clothes I wanted to turn into a masterpiece.  I was afraid to take scissors to her old dresses, not believing I could make the beautiful and consistent color patterns.  I didn't even own a sewing machine.  Making this quilt was clearly a case of wishful thinking.

When my daughter was in 4th grade, she wanted a sewing machine.  Her friend's mom introduced her to making homemade Ugly dolls out of fleece.  We bought her a sewing machine, and in no time she was making all sorts of creations.  I had to learn enough about it to show her, but then the student became the teacher.  She mastered the machine faster than I did, making buttonholes and showing me how to load the bobbin.

Last spring, I was beginning to roll off my volunteer job.  Instead of letting the old work continue to seep into my life, I decided start making my son's quilt.  I had just cleaned his dresser, and pulled out more than a dozen of his most loved t-shirts that no longer fit.  I couldn't give them away or turn them into rags.  I looked up "T-shirt quilt" online.  Most of what I saw was precise with evenly sized squares.  That wasn't going to happen.  I didn't need the quilt to be perfect.  I just needed it to be warm and soft and cover the bed.  The idea of re-using these well worm shirts appealed to me, but I secretly wanted to join the ranks of the Amish and Gee's Bend women.

One afternoon, my son and I got out the good scissors and took them to his shirts.  We were committed.  One step at a time: we cut the shirts, arranged them by color, and started to sew them together.  I learned which stitch to use on cotton weave, and used old crib sheets as an internal backing between the t-shirts and the batting.  The last step was the binding the edges, which perplexed me.  In typical procrastinator fashion, I let the quilt sit over the summer, the weather too nice to be inside sewing.  Once in a while, my husband and I flipped the quilt on the bed at night when the temperature dropped.  It worked and served its purpose to keeping us warm in the night. But it wasn't done.  I had to bind it.

Instead of asking my elders around the hearth, I watched several YouTube videos on binding quilts.  The videos were perfectly clear and simple and...there was no way I could do it.  I was afraid to cut the navy blue flannel for fear of doing it all wrong and ruining all of the effort I put into it thus far.  At the same time, not finishing the quilt was not an option either.  I was in over my head and past the point of no return.  During the summer, I had the Seattle excuse of doing nothing indoors in order to celebrate three months of sunshine.  Now the weather was starting to turn.  On a cool and overcast day, my friend Diane showed me how to bind it.  Now that I had a map for the final step, I felt compelled to get it done.  I finished Sunday morning, right before lunch.

There are a few Frankenstein style stitches, but that it okay.  I might not have the skill and sense of symmetry of the Amish or the flair and creativity of the women of Gee's bend, but now my son's favorite t-shirts are covering his bed.  It is his and only his, one of a kind.  It will never hang in a museum or win an award at the State Fair, but it is made of memories and will keep him warm.