8. Sailboats #1

This quilt was experimental in more ways than one. I had began to wonder about my efficiency, as I devoted more and more hours to my craft and correspondingly fewer hours to tasks like cleaning and laundry. Hmm, I wondered, why not cut two of everything and get two quilts for the design time of one?

Now I can tell you why. What I ended up with is one finished quilt and a pile of pieces that I was unable to sew together because I'd already done that and why, oh why, would I want to do it again? Only when it came time to give a young nephew a quilt did I complete the second one. Come to think of it, most of my quilts require deadlines at one stage or another. But deadlines or no, this remains the only quilt I have ever made twice.

Sailboats #1 marked a departure in another way. For the first time, I designed my own block pattern. I went out on a limb and made the block rectangular instead of square. Then, before learning whether this design would work, I introduced another variable into the experiment, deciding to vary the size of the blocks, doubling at least one of the dimensions in each new horizontal row, just to see what would happen. I was quite enamored of my creative idea. But as I made each new row of the quilt top, larger and larger empty spaces showed up in the blocks, and I was getting myself into design difficulty as I used larger and "busier" prints to fill them. I was trying so hard to do something “artistic”—because by now I had been exposed to quiltmakers whose work was more art than craft—that I had become quite self-conscious. Self-consciousness, I think, produces one of two things: paralysis or bad art. Or maybe both. I ended up feeling kind of silly about the whole experience, and with equal parts of desperation and humor, I added some cartoonish alligator and turtle appliqués along the bottom “shoreline” of the quilt.

A few years later, in the late 80's, I submitted this piece to a juried show and received a judge's comment that "the animals do nothing for this piece." Probably true as far as the judge could see, but they do serve to remind me not to get carried away by my own cleverness. Even though I should be wiser now, it's a lesson that bears repeating from time to time when I'm struggling with yet another piece, because even though I usually find brand new mistakes to make, I can also get seduced into repeating an old one from time to time.

This quilt did hang in a couple of local shows, and just in case the judge's comment didn't teach me enough of a lesson, one viewer drove the point home as she said (oblivious to the fact that the quilt's maker was standing near her), "I don't know why anyone would make a quilt that looks like that." Sometimes I do believe it's a wonder that I kept making quilts at all. On the other hand, at the very same show not too much later, I heard another viewer observe that my quilt was her favorite--and she didn't know I was standing there, either.

So I come away from this quilt and the many memories it evokes with the largest lesson being that if I design my own quilts, they had better be designs I love, because I can never guarantee that anyone else will appreciate them as I do.