There’s a secret to hand quilting that only long-time quilters know: it’s the best therapy in the world.
It may be the hypnotic rhythm of the needle moving across the colorful landscape, or the way your quilting fingers and eyes work in tandem with no conscious effort: whatever the process, when you take up your needle and sit down at the quilt, a door in your mind swings open and you step into a quiet place where time is of no consequence, worries fade away, and yesterday nips at the present trying to make itself understood. Quilting does not require immense skill, but the more you quilt, the tinier and more perfect your stitches, the more profound your thoughts, and the more of the dead you are able to resurrect.
My mother taught me how to quilt, on big old-fashioned frames that took up an entire wall of my spare bedroom. Thrilled at my interest, happy to be passing on a lost art, she reached high on a closet shelf and pulled out the last quilt top her mother had pieced before she died. She dug quilting frames owned by my father’s mother out of storage. She found her quilting needles and thread and two thimbles, and we began.
I had made it to my 30s without owning a thimble, but quickly learned a painful truth: although a person might cook without a recipe or sew on a button with a thimble-less finger, there is no way to quilt without one. My mother taught. I learned. Together we brought my grandmother’s beautiful log cabin quilt to life.
We talked as we quilted, often about the years when my mother was growing up, the days leading up to the death of her five-year-old sister from appendicitis in 1927, the grief she still feels at losing her best friend; the Depression’s brutally hard times. How her father hunted for wild game, and planted crops that he could trade at the grocery for food; how her mother raised a garden, maintained a flock of chickens, sold eggs for the cash to purchase what she could not make or raise, sweated over a hot stove canning anything that sprouted from the ground or ran across it. By the mid-1980s when I learned how to quilt, the big quilting bees - long a standard with farm families - had been abandoned. The older quilters had died off, and the women coming of age preferred work outside the home and a regular paycheck to the life of a housewife and such mundane tasks as rising at dawn to prepare a covered dish, traveling to a neighbor’s house and lining up on either side of quilting frames to spend the day sewing. Why waste hundreds of hours piecing and quilting a quilt when a factory-made comforter could be purchased cheaply, required no special care and was not nearly as fragile?
It grieves me to admit that - in my youth - I failed to see the beauty in mothers, grandmothers, and neighbors uniting in a common goal while children skirmished in the dark cave beneath the quilt and, feeling protected by the fence of legs and sensible lace-up shoes, were eventually lulled to sleep by the soft voices drifting down from above. I have pieced and quilted many quilts in the years since. The big quilting frames have been replaced with portable oval frames that enable my mother and me to work on our quilts individually in our homes and carry them to one another’s house, and occasionally the houses of my sisters. We talk as we work, resurrecting those who have gone on: the things they said, the things they did, their goodness, their quirks, their sacrifice. Sometimes we work silently, lost in the analysis of our own lives: where we have been, where we are headed. I cannot speak for the others but in my mind I harbor an unspoken dream: that one day I too will be resurrected by a descendant who is doing as God intended – crafting something beautiful, as she analyzes her life and the lives of those gone before.
https://youtu.be/oIuCwnnDq8k
