Thanks...Again: Reimagining the Moon
Posted Wednesday, November 8, 2017, 6:57am
Today, dear friends, I’m grateful for…
How big the world really is, big enough to hold us all
Patrick’s burst of energy last night, resulting in another wonderful dinner and some veggies fermenting merrily on the kitchen counter
Granola on top of fresh applesauce
Pink and blue sky blending on the horizon
Dusting off those plans for a moon phases quilt
What are you grateful for today, my friends? Every breath…every breath.
I have some pretty great ideas. Or, I think I do.
I keep them in this part of my brain that’s becoming more crowded, and the supplies I need to bring these ideas to life are kept in the downstairs guestroom/studio, which has always been crowded.
A month into last year’s lockdown, I stood in front of the old primitive cabinet in the studio whose contents—mostly fabric—had stopped behaving themselves and were spilling forth, cascading down the shelves onto the floor. It looked rather bohemian and artistic until the afternoon I found one of the kittens sleeping on a pile of fat quarters next to a zip-loc baggie of thread. Time to reclaim control—of the kitten, the fabric and the room—in that order.
I came into the art of quilting in my 30’s, which was a lot like trying to learn a new language well past the age when the brain is capable of doing so (for this comparison, I strongly encourage you, dear readers and lifelong learners, to explore the controversial body of work presented by linguist Noam Chomsky regarding the “language acquisition device”. He proposed that we are born with an innate mental instinct for learning the fundamentals of any new language—it’s grammar, syntax and vocabulary—up until around the age of 12 or so, and then it sharply declines, right about when school systems introduce foreign language classes in the curricula. No wonder Spanish and I had verbal fistfights all through my sophomore year in high school). Mom taught my sisters and me the basic language of mending, and in our teens we dabbled in creating pillows and such, but no one on any branch of our family tree, to whom we still had living access, quilted, at least not in front of us or with a room dedicated to the craft. What quilts we did encounter sat on the shelves of the local JC Penney’s in their clear zippered thick plastic bags and cost too much for us to each have one. We were content with cotton blankets layered one on top of the other in the winter.
But as I rounded the corner on 29-heading-toward-30, I came across a lovely coffee table book about the quilt art of Japan, and fell into a world of colors and textures that eventually led me back to that primitive cabinet and its cascading contents. I wanted to learn how to do that, to make art that would hang on a wall instead of drape over a bed, and how did they get it to be so puffy-looking? I started rather ambitiously, assembling a small rectangular piece depicting my grief over losing a job I loved. I knew nothing of technique or mechanics, just plowed right in, attaching beads and upholstery cording and gold metallic thread that would curl and knot up on itself and frustrate the bejeezus out of my bold and naive artistic spirit. More than once, I’d furiously push the work-in-progress aside and go bake something, then return all humble and repentant and freshly determined to be as patient with those Quilt Muses as they were with me. It worked, and the piece hangs on the wall in the guestroom/studio, testament to what some thread and fabric and not many rules can produce.
Somewhere between hanging that expression of grief on the wall and the morning I wrote this 2017 gratitude post, I must have imagined a much larger art quilt involving the phases of the moon and found the sketches for it. Thirty pale yellow curved slices of moon in the process of becoming full arced across a dawn-into-dusk sky background, the whole of which—get this—would hang suspended from an intricate network of lines and rods in the ceiling to create a quilt-in-the-round; you’d have to step inside this circle of fabric to see the design in its entirety. No, our house at the time didn’t have that cathedral arch over our heads, and the one we live in now has about three and a half feet of clearance from the top of my little pate, so…some blueprint modifications are in order if I’m going to get this baby off the ground.
But it’s not the construction that has me feeling all nostalgic. It’s the realization that my imagination soared that high and spread out that wide to even conceive of something so bold and elaborate in its architecture yet simple in its artistic design. Thirty slices of pale yellow fabric wouldn’t take that long to cut out, and a dawn-to-dusk background is largely a matter of fabric selection from some vendor’s ombre sky collection with a bit of careful cutting. Arrange the moon slices on the background in order of new-to-full moon, hand-applique them down, then assemble the layers of quilt top, batting and backing and sew the whole thing together in gentle swirling lines of shimmering silver thread. I’ve gotta tell you, just re-reading that makes me want to quit my day job and devote my remaining time on earth to bringing this soft vision into life.
Liz, whispers one of the quilt muses, you could still make this one.
Come on…I’ll help you.
