Hidden Threads

In Quilting and Patchwork today (the B5Media blog) Mary Emma Allen talks about special quilt projects commemorating the upcoming Olympics. She asks us to share any projects we have planned.

I found this so interesting. I’ve always thought of quilting as an individual or community venture, offering little slices of immortality by marking weddings or anniversaries, personal triumphs, in fabric.

I never really put it together until now, the thought of quilts as time capsules or quilts as cultural records. In my sense of it, quilts did those things, but not intentionally. I always saw them as unconcerned with the wider world and focused on the universal experience of their times through the personal experience of families.

This seems different somehow, a quilt to commemorate the Olympics in China. Now that the idea has taken hold of my imagination, I see that the AIDS Memorial Quilt is like that and probably many others too that I just never quite saw for what they were. Thank you Quilting and Patchwork for opening my eyes.

Ever wondered where your quilts will be in 80 years? Every time I finish a quilt, I wonder if what I’m really doing is placing a note in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean. I’ve even considered printing something on a piece of muslin and including it under the quilt top, a philosophical comment that I’d hesitate placing on the back on in a presentation card. It doesn’t matter that no one will ever see it. I’ll know that it’s there.

I’ve noticed that the heirloom quilts that appear on the quilt shows, the quilts that get comments and give rise to speculation about their owners, are often the odd ones, the quirky ones. You know, the people who were quilting with blacks and whites when everyone else was using bubble gum pinks; the oddballs and oddities that would have inspired sighs and raised eyebrows in their own time.

Oh yeah, there are always the magnificent quilts on display at museums or traveling exhibits that make the quilt programs and get their 20 seconds of awed air time, but somehow I think that my only shot at immortality will be for an oddball, not one of the best quilts of the century.

I think it makes me look at fabric differently, and strategize differently. It’s not that I want to be famous, but I’m not blind to the artistic side of the effort of putting fabric together into a pleasing pattern. After all, I’m an oddball. I could have my shot one day.

Maybe it will be for a homespun collage shaped like a fish flying over a night sky? Who knows? That’s one of the beauties of the process, for me anyway.  The unlimited possibilities for anyone with a needle and some scraps fabric.