Women have been using quilts to face reality for a very long time. We have made birth quilts and mourning quilts, wedding quilts and divorce quilts, peace quilts and war quilts - quilts for all times and occasions. Perhaps the reason for all of these quilts is that it is somehow easier to face these emotional upheavals if you can do something - ANYTHING - about them, even if it’s just to pick up a needle and thread and sew bright patches on hard times. We cannot stem the tide or stop time or bring the dead to life, but we can pour our love and our tears and the breath of our spirit into a work of art to celebrate the living and remember the dead.
Death, they say, is a part of life. It is the passing of the spirit from the body to the ethereal plane, where the troubles of this world trouble no longer, and I truly believe that death is just a rite of passage from this life to the next. The people to be sorry for are not the ones who have passed on - it is the ones who are still here, trying to get by without the one who has left them behind that need our sympathy and support. Most times, the passing of a person leaves a great, empty, crying hole in the lives of at least a few people, and it is a struggle to get past that, to a place where one can remember with feelings of love, not abandonment.
It’s at times like these that a quilter goes to their stash and starts pulling out fabric, feeling it and sorting it, all the while remembering the good times and the bad, the beginnings and endings of life. There is something in the feel of fabric, something about color and beauty and softness that begins to heal that great, gaping hole left in life. Working on a memory piece often sends the quilter hunting through scrapbooks, looking through photographs, talking to others in the family to solidify and crystallize wispy memories and visions into something that can still be felt and held, even though your beloved friend or relative has passed out of the physical realm. All of these things help us heal, help us accept death as a part of life, help us get to work to make certain that the person will be remembered.
We make quilts to celebrate, to delight, to keep warm, but the quilts made to work through sadness are perhaps the most poignant. We all know that life is uncertain, and fragile, and something very bad is usually happening somewhere around the world. Sometimes it is close to home, or in our own family, and there is NOTHING we can do to stop it. Quilts, in and of themselves, won’t end hunger or stop child abuse or bring about world peace, but digging into hoarded fabric and spending some of it to make something beautiful somehow seems to put a bandage on the hurt. It seems to be saying that someone cares, someone took the time to take their talent and fabric and a big chunk of time to say “I’m so sorry. I wish I could help. I wish I could cure you. I want you to know that you are important to me and you will be remembered…”
This happened in our family not long ago. One of the last times I went to visit my father-in-law, I saw an old photograph on the wall of Bill when he was 4 years old on the dock of Bald Eagle Lake, where the family spent their summers. It was taken on the fourth of July, 1922, when Bill had just come in from his first fishing trip - his smile a bit uncertain and his shoe untied. I didn’t even know Bill was ill at the time I saw the photo - I just knew I had to make that photograph for my next quilt, so I begged him to send me a copy (grandparents are good at that), which he did. I didn’t tell him WHY I wanted the photo, just that I did want it, and started quietly making his portrait.
As I worked on that quilt, we slowly realized that Bill was not well. He was slowing down a lot, resting too much, and having a great deal of trouble getting around. I drew the pattern out and enlarged it, hand reversed appliquéd the figure of Bill as a little boy, and made three faces before I was finally satisfied that it looked like him. But then I was stuck. I didn’t know what color to make the boat, since it was a black and white photograph, and some historical accuracy is essential, after all. So I asked my husband to call and ask his Dad what color the boat was.
My husband called, and in the course of the phone call he not only let the cat out of the bag and told his Dad I was making the quilt, he found out that Bill had been to the hospital again. It looked like he had leukemia, and it wasn’t good. We lived several states away, had jobs and family and children to contend with, and it since it seemed Bill would be with us for at least another year, my husband called him every day and made plans to go see him in January. I kept working on my quilt, worrying and remembering, stitching and cutting and letting the fabric do its job.
Bill said the boat was green - which was fine, since I hadn’t started the boat yet, but he also said the outfit was brown. Too bad I’d already hand appliquéd for five days to make the outfit gray. The gray boy was relegated to the back, along with one of the reject faces, and I spent another five days hand reverse appliquéing the outfit brown. But I didn’t really care if the quilt took longer to make than I’d planned, because it was fulfilling my need to have something to do for him when I couldn’t be there, couldn’t cure him, and couldn’t do anything but remember him and the good times we had had together. It seemed to me that if I was very careful and held onto good thoughts, my quilt could keep him with us.
I worked and worked, careful to choose my loveliest fabrics, to quilt it carefully with golden threads, to make a border of deep green like Minnesota in the summertime, with dragonflies hovering in the hot, still air, like they did that long-ago fourth of July. My husband took a picture of the quilt before it had a border on it, had the photos enlarged, and sent the pictures to Bill. I didn’t send the quilt because it was also to be exhibited in a Show in November and didn’t have the borders or binding finished yet. Besides, I wanted it to be perfect for him to take it to Bill in January.
Well, Bill didn’t make it to January. He died three days after Christmas, and his passing left a great huge hole that no quilt will ever be able to patch. I finished quilting the border and bound it in black, for mourning. He never got to hold it, but from the photos of the quilt Patrick sent him, he knew I cared enough about him to make him a quilt.
My quilt didn’t cure his illness or stop time or bring him back to life, but the making of it helped me. It helped me to remember him not as a sick and dying old man, but as a loving spirit; a child’s spirit in a tired old body, a spirit that had been set free. We are the poorer for his passing, but we will remember him - and the memories of him won’t fade, they will be as fresh and new as a little four-year old boy with a fly in his pocket and his shoe untied, bringing in his First Catch.
Death, they say, is a part of life. It is the passing of the spirit from the body to the ethereal plane, where the troubles of this world trouble no longer, and I truly believe that death is just a rite of passage from this life to the next. The people to be sorry for are not the ones who have passed on - it is the ones who are still here, trying to get by without the one who has left them behind that need our sympathy and support. Most times, the passing of a person leaves a great, empty, crying hole in the lives of at least a few people, and it is a struggle to get past that, to a place where one can remember with feelings of love, not abandonment.
It’s at times like these that a quilter goes to their stash and starts pulling out fabric, feeling it and sorting it, all the while remembering the good times and the bad, the beginnings and endings of life. There is something in the feel of fabric, something about color and beauty and softness that begins to heal that great, gaping hole left in life. Working on a memory piece often sends the quilter hunting through scrapbooks, looking through photographs, talking to others in the family to solidify and crystallize wispy memories and visions into something that can still be felt and held, even though your beloved friend or relative has passed out of the physical realm. All of these things help us heal, help us accept death as a part of life, help us get to work to make certain that the person will be remembered.
We make quilts to celebrate, to delight, to keep warm, but the quilts made to work through sadness are perhaps the most poignant. We all know that life is uncertain, and fragile, and something very bad is usually happening somewhere around the world. Sometimes it is close to home, or in our own family, and there is NOTHING we can do to stop it. Quilts, in and of themselves, won’t end hunger or stop child abuse or bring about world peace, but digging into hoarded fabric and spending some of it to make something beautiful somehow seems to put a bandage on the hurt. It seems to be saying that someone cares, someone took the time to take their talent and fabric and a big chunk of time to say “I’m so sorry. I wish I could help. I wish I could cure you. I want you to know that you are important to me and you will be remembered…”
This happened in our family not long ago. One of the last times I went to visit my father-in-law, I saw an old photograph on the wall of Bill when he was 4 years old on the dock of Bald Eagle Lake, where the family spent their summers. It was taken on the fourth of July, 1922, when Bill had just come in from his first fishing trip - his smile a bit uncertain and his shoe untied. I didn’t even know Bill was ill at the time I saw the photo - I just knew I had to make that photograph for my next quilt, so I begged him to send me a copy (grandparents are good at that), which he did. I didn’t tell him WHY I wanted the photo, just that I did want it, and started quietly making his portrait.
As I worked on that quilt, we slowly realized that Bill was not well. He was slowing down a lot, resting too much, and having a great deal of trouble getting around. I drew the pattern out and enlarged it, hand reversed appliquéd the figure of Bill as a little boy, and made three faces before I was finally satisfied that it looked like him. But then I was stuck. I didn’t know what color to make the boat, since it was a black and white photograph, and some historical accuracy is essential, after all. So I asked my husband to call and ask his Dad what color the boat was.
My husband called, and in the course of the phone call he not only let the cat out of the bag and told his Dad I was making the quilt, he found out that Bill had been to the hospital again. It looked like he had leukemia, and it wasn’t good. We lived several states away, had jobs and family and children to contend with, and it since it seemed Bill would be with us for at least another year, my husband called him every day and made plans to go see him in January. I kept working on my quilt, worrying and remembering, stitching and cutting and letting the fabric do its job.
Bill said the boat was green - which was fine, since I hadn’t started the boat yet, but he also said the outfit was brown. Too bad I’d already hand appliquéd for five days to make the outfit gray. The gray boy was relegated to the back, along with one of the reject faces, and I spent another five days hand reverse appliquéing the outfit brown. But I didn’t really care if the quilt took longer to make than I’d planned, because it was fulfilling my need to have something to do for him when I couldn’t be there, couldn’t cure him, and couldn’t do anything but remember him and the good times we had had together. It seemed to me that if I was very careful and held onto good thoughts, my quilt could keep him with us.
I worked and worked, careful to choose my loveliest fabrics, to quilt it carefully with golden threads, to make a border of deep green like Minnesota in the summertime, with dragonflies hovering in the hot, still air, like they did that long-ago fourth of July. My husband took a picture of the quilt before it had a border on it, had the photos enlarged, and sent the pictures to Bill. I didn’t send the quilt because it was also to be exhibited in a Show in November and didn’t have the borders or binding finished yet. Besides, I wanted it to be perfect for him to take it to Bill in January.
Well, Bill didn’t make it to January. He died three days after Christmas, and his passing left a great huge hole that no quilt will ever be able to patch. I finished quilting the border and bound it in black, for mourning. He never got to hold it, but from the photos of the quilt Patrick sent him, he knew I cared enough about him to make him a quilt.
My quilt didn’t cure his illness or stop time or bring him back to life, but the making of it helped me. It helped me to remember him not as a sick and dying old man, but as a loving spirit; a child’s spirit in a tired old body, a spirit that had been set free. We are the poorer for his passing, but we will remember him - and the memories of him won’t fade, they will be as fresh and new as a little four-year old boy with a fly in his pocket and his shoe untied, bringing in his First Catch.