My Process Quilt

 

I have come to call this my process quilt.  I had no idea what I was doing aside from putting together some cheerful fabrics and hand-piecing sunflower blocks.  I had no colour scheme in  mind:  I'd make it up as I went along, I told myself, just as I was making my life up as I went along during the last eighteen months.  I certainly had no idea how different fabrics would  fulfill their roles.  I didn't know, for example, that buying a crazy gold to match the floral fabric of the diamonds in the bottom right block would completely take over the block.  Nor did I know that being too "matchy-matchy" would compromise the drama of the middle block on the left.  I chose a pink for the points that picked up a pink in the diamonds.  That was my first block, and I was just following the rules I'd learned for conventional quilt blocks.  But the pink almost disappears and the white spaces in the red and white diamonds kind of take over.  I saw the diamonds in the top left block as, well, pink!  I didn't know how the white quatrefoils would make the diamonds look really busy and not very pink. But that was all okay. I just kept choosing cheerful fabric.  And I kept learning.  If you want two fabrics to contrast dramatically, changing value isn't enough.  Make one a cool colour, one a warm colour.  And maybe, as in my last block, the top one on the right, choose the centre first rather than choosing the three fabrics for the points and then hoping you have a good centre.  That gives the block more focus.

I just hit "delete."  

I had written two long paragraphs--an overly-long organ recital detailing the last eighteen months of my life.  "That gets in the way of the reader," I told myself.  All you really need to know--and I had love and support through the whole thing, and none of it was life-threatening, so you needn't feel sorry for me--is that for the last eighteen months I felt frightened, incompetent, and exhausted.  These are the words you can relate to, can map onto your own experience. 

Because I felt incompetent, I didn't hand quilt much and rarely played the piano.  I was doing enough things in my life badly; I wouldn't add these.  But I could hand piece. No one would see my stitches and note any irregularity.  If you mark your fabric carefully, using templates to trace the diamonds or triangles and place the dots where your sewing should begin and end and connect these dots with a pencil line, it's easy to piece this difficult blocks, as long as you also connect those dots with pins before you begin to sew. I simply chose cheerful fabrics that I hoped would work together because what I needed from the entire process was a little cheer and a challenge I could manage.

Marking the blocks--there are 16 pieces of each shape in each block--can be time-consuming, but I made that pleasant by streaming Soweto Kinch, the BBC's knowledgeable and upbeat jazz DJ. I guess you could say that I made an idiosyncratic little bit of pleasure out of the most boring part of the process.  Then you take the sixteen pointy pieces next to the centre and sew them to sixteen diamonds.  These you press before adding the rounded triangles of the outer edge.  Press again.  Then begin to put these little units of three together--a tricky proposition, because your seam doglegs in the middle. You pin the first half of the seam and sew it, and then completely rearrange seam allowances to find the dots and pin carefully at the turn.  Something grows under your hands and it's unpredictable and cheerful at the same time. It's a safe little adventure for those days when your brain can't penetrate the exhausted fog that hems you in.

I'm not convinced it's a good quilt, which usually has a unity of conception you might find in a work of art, but I do think it's cheerful and fun. I was going for process, for something doable. Something I could manage. I would sew four triangles to four diamonds after dinner in a kind of meditative way. Four 1 1/2 inch seams of tiny stitches.  

I had heard Oliver Burkeman be interviewed about Four Thousand Weeks, which was one of The New York Times's 100 notable books for 2021. If we live to eighty, we live 4,000 weeks.  It's an uncanny number, large and yet small enough that we can get our heads around it and feel mortality at our backs. Not like 280,000 days, which is the same time frame but feels much more generous.  What's a wasted day here or there? According to the interviews, there was one important takeaway:  we are not going to get everything done.  We are not going to accomplish everything on our list.  We have to make some choices. This rang true for me.  

When his Meditations for Mortals came out, I bought it. I guess self-help isn't exactly my cup of tea.  But there were a couple of things he said that stuck with me, probably because they were good metaphors.  The first is that we'd like our lives to play out on a computer-controlled super yacht.  We could put our course in our computer and get on with our daily lives, not worrying about navigating the larger trip.  But truth be told, we're really swooshing down a fairly rapid river in a kayak. We have to be observant navigators all the time. In another of his meditations, he puts it another way:  we can't stand on our toes and look over the fence of today to see into tomorrow. We have to live here and now. That's what each piece allowed me to do.  I could be inside the cheer of the fabrics and the tiny straightness of my stitches in a way that was almost meditative.

Two things might redeem my little made-up-on-the-fly process quilt.  One is craftsmanship.  The points of the triangles and diamonds are sharp. Each bit of carefulness--from marking to pinning to the tiny stitches--counted, just as you can make each minute count.  (It sure beats doom scrolling!)  The stitches fastening the sunflowers to the white and black background are invisible. Similarly, you may not know where you are going, but you can get there in a way that has both self-respect and pleasure in the moment.  That's not a bad recipe for getting through difficult days.

The second thing is the black sashing.  My sister Karen had made a small quilt out of half square triangles in a huge range of colours and then wondered how she could get it to hold together.  Try a black border I suggested, and it worked. Black will work where other neutrals like brown or tan won't because it's just sharp. Decisive. So as I worked on my process quilt, I was pretty sure black lattice would give the individual blocks enough space to be themselves, and that perhaps this would hold the quilt together. Like me, you've got a handful of tricks up your sleeve for getting life's waywardness to cohere.  

One trick, I think, for getting through rough times is to glory in the moment because you're doing something that is very you and you are taking the time to do it well. Something to do with your hands, psychologists tell us, is an added bonus because it's both soothing and cognitively a little challenging. Knitting a sock or a scarf.  Writing an email to an old friend. Working in the garden.  Sketching a flower. Bathing a baby. The other is having faith--hard-won faith, probably--that you know a thing or two about navigating tough times.