Dear Jane 2: details matter

The block on the left is the second block I've made for the Jane A. Stickle quilt.  It's a block I've never seen before:  she has managed to create a kind of sunburst out of triangles.  There are forty pieces in the 4 1/2-inchh block.  I've tried to imagine her creating a pattern, and I am frankly baffled.  In order to produce my blocks, I have an extraordinary set of twenty-first century tools, including clear rulers that help me create any angle and are thick enough that I can use a rotary cutter (think of a pizza cutter--only dangerously sharp) to cut my pieces exactly.  I also have a foot on my sewing machine that gives me an exact 1/4-inch seam.

Jane, in all likelihood, would have had a pencil, a school-girl's ruler, an old newspaper, needle, thread, and thimble.  Remember that blank paper was so precious that letters were written from top to bottom, and then that the paper was rotated 90 degrees to write in the spaces between the lines. In that context, I'm not sure where she would have found enough blank space in old newspapers to lay out her marvelous designs (which could have been drawn much smaller), but when it came to making the pattern pieces to show her the size of triangle, rectangle, or square she needed, she would likely have drawn her design to scale on an old newspaper and cut the pieces out to mark around them on her fabric.  That would be the finished size of the piece.  She would then have to add a quarter of an inch, which she probably did by eye, sewing along the pencil lines--and matching them up exactly.  It is a painstaking process, much more difficult than it would be today.  Were she making a one-patch, like the Ocean Waves below (alternatively entitled the "Tents of Armageddon"), a single template, perhaps made from something more sturdy like cardboard or butcher's paper, would have allowed you to make the whole quilt.   Jane, in contrast, must have made hundreds of templates.  But she did it--and did it accurately--because it mattered.

You will have noticed that my photograph of Jane's blocks seems to be taken at an angle, but it's not.  Rather, the first block I made is about 1/2 inch too small.  Now I'm a "measure twice (at least) and cut once" kind of girl, so you can be sure that my pieces were originally the right size.  So I read Brenda Papadakis's instructions again, only to note that she tells you to make your seam 3/16ths of an inch rather than the usual 1/4 inch.  A seam takes up space--not only where the seam threads join the pieces, but where you lose fabric when you open out the pieces and fold back the seam.  That's true of all quilt blocks, but if you have only 3 seams over a space of 6 or 9 inches, as you do in the nine-patch blocks in the Amish quilt below, that small difference doesn't really register. But when you have multiple seams over 4 1/2 inches, you can lose quite a lot. 

"Details matter" must have been one of Jane's mantras as she worked on her quilt and figured out how to translate her vision--each of those complicated and original blocks--onto fabric.  Or perhaps "details matter" might have simply been part of her temperament or her work ethic--a way of being she brought to everything she did.

Details matter, no matter whether you are building or creating or organizing.  If you are going to suspend all the activities of the Environmental Protection Agency, it helps to know that the EPA doesn't simply do research on climate change, but it helps to get lead-free water to Flint Michigan and helps to build water treatment plants.  If you are going to call coal "clean and beautiful," it would help to know that the World Health Organization estimates that burning coal claims 1 million lives annually.  If you are going to come out in favour of torture, it would help to know that experts believe they very seldom gain reliable intelligence from someone who is tortured--and that in the process of the torture, both the torturer and the tortured lose their humanity.  And in the meantime, you have lost your moral credibility and perhaps made the world even more dangerous.  If you are going to dismantle public education in the country, it would helps to know--as economist Tomas Piketty has taught me--that the best way to ensure economic equality is to give people the educations they need.  If you are going to unfund any agency who raises the issue of women's reproductive health, it would help to know that by so doing you condemning that community to poverty for a longer period of time than necessary--in short that allowing women to control their lives and giving them educations is the best way to lift the whole community's standard of living.

It is easy, outside the provenance of detail and truth, to claim and plan anything you want.  Jane could have said, every morning of her life, "I am going to make one of the most imaginative and inventive quilts ever," but until she gets down to planning the blocks and ensuring their accuracy--that they will all fit together--such plans are simply a convenient fiction.  If you want to create the quilt or the country you need to get your hands dirty with newsprint and ink, with truth and detail and fact (not alternative facts), with evidence, knowledge, information.  Not simply wishful thinking.