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Written by Gwendolyn Rice

The Audacity of Quilting

Posted 10-13-11
It is 11:30pm on a Friday night and I cannot sleep. This hardly ever happens to me. But tonight my mind is too full. Full of animated conversations I’ve had, phone calls, emails, dozens of work projects I’ve barely begun, laundry in piles at the foot of the bed that threaten to topple onto my children, burying them forever, and a nagging feeling I’m forgetting something important. . . I roll out of bed and pad down the stairs to the basement in my bare feet. I pull out a bag of fabric pieces and begin to put them in order. The tired is starting to make my head feel heavy, but I am so comforted by the sound of the sewing machine – the low hum of my Bernina, Quilter’s Edition – the smoothly moving parts of a device that is an efficient, hypnotic feat of engineering. Fast and sleek with a computer built right in, it is a powerful tool. If it was a techno gadget, it would be the latest iphone. If it was a car, it would be a Mazerati.

I press the foot petal and stitches fall, white and even over the colored confetti of my quilt block – a complicated nine patch based on a pattern from the 1930s. I pause to cut some threads from a seam and realize how quiet the house is, except for the hum of the Bernina. No kids asking for juice, or books, or more time on the computer. No television news, no radio announcing the results of a world trade summit. Just me in the night, with the fabric pieces and the steady whir of the sewing machine. I think about how many thousands of women have been where I am now, alone in a quiet house with a quilt project. And I feel the peaceful meditation that must have also kept them up far too late at night, urging one more pass of the needle, because they needed some time to catch their breaths, some time for reflection after making it through too many difficult things during the day. Things that would be waiting again in the morning.

I am not an artist, and I am certainly not a visual person. But I love fabric. I love how it feels, how it falls in graceful piles on the floor as I iron away the fold lines of a two or three yard cut. I love the subtle gradations of color and the interlocking patterns as the print repeats on the bolt, and the companion pieces that each complement the focus fabric in dramatically different ways, like vocal parts in a chorus, the lights and darks mixing to form a more beautiful whole. Except for when I am stacking Lego blocks with my two-year-old, this is the only time I get to play with colors and shapes. My vocation and avocation are composed only of words and sentences. Each day my progress is measured in pages on a computer screen instead of anything with weight or sheen or weave or texture. Which is why I find such solace in quilting. It is utterly tactile and focused on process. At its best, it is following directions that are intuitive – lining up seams, pressing edges, forming points, pinning and matching small pieces to form bigger ones. It is rhythmic and repetitive in a way that is not tedious, but rather comforting. In other eras, it was the click of a spinning wheel, the tap of knitting needles. It is the way women have always provided for their families while feeding their souls in the same gentle movements.

When friends admire my quilts, I am embarrassed. When they ask if I have quilts on my bed, I sheepishly admit my own room was accessorized from Bed Bath and Beyond. The truth is, I give almost all my quilts away, because when I look at them I only see the flaws. And there are always flaws. I am a “good enough” quilter, meaning my work suffers a bit upon close inspection, but at arm’s length, it is certainly good enough. According to legend, Middle Eastern rug makers always include an imperfection in the tapestries they weave to express humility – after all, only Allah is perfect. This is the story I tell when I point out the corner that didn’t quite come together or the triangle of fabric that is obviously stretched.

My mother, on the other hand, is exact. She has an attention to detail, a meticulousness and a patience that I will never possess. Where my work is hurried as I put on the binding and attach the label, hers is calm. Steady. Flawless. Where I simply want to be finished, to move on to the next project, she embraces every step, challenging herself to try a more intricate pattern, a new technique, a more temperamental fabric with each successive stitch.

Some of my earliest memories are watching her sew in the basement of our house –a duplex at the end of a cul-de-sac, with the apple trees I learned to climb, and the walled flower garden that was perfect for hide and seek, and the gravel driveway that yielded the best hopscotch rocks in the neighborhood. Sitting on a rickety kitchen chair, Mom leaned in to her basic Singer machine, one side of her face reflecting the bright hot light of her sewing lamp. Pins in her mouth, the stainless steel iron hissing steam on the padded ironing board, every afternoon she put together dresses and Halloween costumes and pairs of pajamas for my sister and me. The results were for us, but I think the process was for her.

The first play I ever directed was about sewing – it was the musical Quilters. When I secured the rights and confirmed the $800 budget for the entire production, I rushed straight home to tell Mom about the marvelous project she had just embarked on with me. She made the quilt – only her second at the time. It was as big as the stage curtains that hung in the Milton High School auditorium, and it was cut from dark blue poly blend sheets we bought at Wal Mart. It was the centerpiece of the play – the thing that consumed every evening for Mom during my eight weeks of rehearsal – and it was glorious when it was finished.

Now, many many quilts later for both of us, I have a new project for her. For both of us. I have written a play about quilters – and a lot of other things – and now we are up late once again, stitching a project for opening night. But this time it’s not just us two. It’s a group of dynamic, talented artists – Forward Theater supporters all --who have attended many board meetings together, but before now, have never shared a rotary cutter. We met at a kitchen table over lemonade and picked the pattern out of our combined library of instruction books and magazines. We emptied our closets and fabric stashes to contribute colors for the blocks. And now we are stealing time away from our routines of dirty dishes, deadlines, and book clubs to sit at whirring machines, guiding strips of fabric under a bobbing needle. When it is finished in December, this quilt will be raffled off to raise money for Forward, during the world premiere of my play A Thousand Words.

While doing research for another writing project last year, I read an account of a pioneer woman in Northern Wisconsin who, snowbound for months in a tiny log cabin, took apart every piece of clothing her family owned and sewed them back together, just to keep herself going. Nights like this, when I can’t sleep, I think I know how she felt.

-Gwendolyn Rice, FTC Communications Director, playwright, and quilter