Soft Stories
Hanging primly over the open door of a yellowish grey painted primitive cabinet that Jackie gave me is a crib-sized quilt made from pastel 1930’s reproduction feed sack fabric and creamy ivory muslin sashing. The effect is charming, and if you’re ever a guest at our home, you’ll get to wake up to this bit of simple creativity looking at you from your comfy place in the antique oak sleigh bed (also from Jackie) in the downstairs guest room. I didn’t have anyone in mind as I was making it—no friend expecting her first child, or a niece on the way. I just found the prints cheering, and wanted to try my hand at something as simple as the pinwheel block pattern. I started it the autumn before I was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, and put the last hand stitch in the binding the following spring, after my thyroid had been shrunk into oblivion by less than an ounce of radioactive iodine. That was over twenty years ago; thyroid still gone, quilt still here.
On the opposite wall from the primitive cabinet hangs my first attempt at art quilting, inspired by a rather dark set of circumstances in my life that needed to be released from my broken heart and made tangible. It has all the elements of a good cry, mingled with the tiniest scrap of hope for healing and better days to come—a dark pine green fabric for the background, in the lower left hand corner, brown and mother-of-pearl seed beads stitched down with an occasional seashell to mimic the beach, and in the upper right hand corner, a rust-colored sunburst made from a scrap of upholstery fabric from which dangles a jet black crow’s feather I found in a cemetery in Quincy, Michigan. A curved line of marbleized pink glass heart-shaped beads connects the sunburst-and-feather to the beaded beach to portray the ebb and flow of grief. A length of ivory satin cord, the kind you’d see on a fancy throw pillow, wraps the edges in a soft but sturdy binding. Every time I look at it I see endurance and strength and the importance of knowing we’re all in the middle of some grand movie that is our lives. Best not to walk out before we see how it ends.
Somehow, the little misshapen patchwork pillow I made when I was nine, from squares of the wildest 70’s fabric you’ll ever see, made it through my single-digit years and survived clear through to the other side of my adolescence, college degrees, and former boyfriends and was packed away in who knows what box for who knows how long until we were reunited quietly a few years before we landed here at the acreage. Now it holds a dignified and eclectic place of prominence on my grandmother’s armless rocking chair by the bed (yep, that same guest room on the first floor. You’re really gonna love staying here, I promise).
In the late fall and right through until spring, I sleep beneath the quilt I made for my parents’ 45th wedding anniversary. It’s full-size plus, hanging off the sides of the bed to hide what’s stored underneath. In the design phase, I asked each sibling and their children to select a die-cut fabric heart from a sample batch I bought (with no particular plan in mind) so that I could appliqué their selections to the quilt top and hand-embroider their names below these hearts, creating a warm and functional testimony to their love across the decades. Of course mom kept it folded at the end of their bed and refused to wash it for a long time, until I told her it had already been washed before I gave it to them. That old “save it for special occasions” approach…I was touched that she cherished it so.
In my closet upstairs is a lined collar-less jacket made from fabric depicting the manual alphabet in American Sign Language, each letter framed in its own box and set into a purple and blue batik-like ombré of rich colors. I bought yards of the stuff, once again with no plan in mind save for this reckless spark of an idea that I wanted to make something other than a four-sided straight-edged flat piece that someone would only see if they spent the night underneath it. So naturally I asked our 80-plus postmistress to help me. Went to her house a few farms away with my fabric and jacket pattern and iron and everything so she could guide me through the treacherous and picky steps of in-setting the sleeves (sewing friends, is that even the right terminology??). I left her home four and a half hours later with the jacket hanging proudly on the little hook just above the back window of my truck as I headed to the local thrift store to find the perfect shirt to wear with it. All because dad worked at the state school for the deaf and was going to smile broadly when he saw me wearing it.
Each room in our home has something soft and handmade, containing layers of perspective and stories as rich as any fully-funded archaeological dig. Sometimes I’m so surrounded by them, immersed in them, I forget they’re there and who I was when I first made that slightly off-kilter placemat, or put out my hands to accept the gift of two knife-edge throw pillows for our couch that still remind me of the dear friend who spent time selecting the fabric and poly-fil and squinted to thread the needle of her Singer some rainy Saturday afternoon.
In some practical part of my brain or heart, I know they’re just things and will probably outlive me (they’re all that well-crafted). But for now, on a chilly mid-winter evening, their warm comforting presence beckons me to pause and recall the relationships that brought them into being.
Not a bad way to close off the weekend.
