12. Ambivalence

It is just possible that I have succumbed to the twin dangers of too much nostalgia and too many episodes of Lost. I resolve to avoid "cliffhanger" blog endings for a while. But here is the promised "setback" story.

I've talked about a bit of the recognition Lynne and I received for our work together, but now is the time for the tale of how we were carried away by our own success. We began work on a piece which we would enter into a show entitled "Tactile Architecture." Not only did no one ever see it in that show, no one ever saw it in any show. Here's why.

With school-aged children and part-time jobs in addition to our "QuiltEssential" joint venture, Lynne and I were veering between “work” activities and “home” activities; we were women caught in the middle of a culture and era which caused me, at least, much confusion about exactly where my energy should be directed at any given moment, day, week, month, or year. We were taking our work very seriously, but we weren't exactly raking in piles of money. We were making some dollars, some art, and some bedcovers. I won't speak for Lynne (she's always had her head on straighter than mine on this topic), but I struggled to separate self-respect from earnings, and connect it to how well I was using my time in life.

We undertook a doomed effort to bring clarity about these conflicts into a quilt that ended up reflecting all of our confusion instead. Our design sketch depicted houses that said “family”, buildings that said “work/office”, and women's heads that said “we're caught between the two” (as well as "we don't quite know how to do fabric faces"). Our concept contrasted the straight lines of the buildings with the curved lines of the women “caught” in between.

Truly it was too much of a burden for one quilt to bear. Caught up in the ideas and the creative process, we failed to realize our folly. In fact, by that time, we were adding yet another layer of meaning in the hand stitching design: a tree of life, just in case the quilt was deficient in symbolism. To her credit, Lynne understood earlier than I that this quilt wasn't developing as successfully as we'd hoped. As the deadline for submission approached and the time pressure for finishing the hand quilting mounted, she abandoned the attempt. Unwilling to admit defeat, I completed the quilt. Persistence in the face of adversity isn't always a good choice. Together, we showed our work to a trusted friend of good judgment, who looked quizzically at the central shape containing those strangely disembodied heads and said, “interesting..."

For those who might not realize: that word is not a ringing endorsement. She followed up with “...but what's the football in the center?” From that moment, the quilt was referred to between us as “the football quilt”. Its true name is “Ambivalence,” a title chosen to enlighten the viewer about the ideas expressed in the quilt but which in fact ended up referring to our feelings about it.

HUGE lessons were learned: (1) no matter how great the idea, someone had better be seeing—and not just with the mind's eye—the visual design that is actually taking shape, preferably before too much work has been done; (2) no matter how many of those great ideas there are, it is probably wiser not to include all of them in one quilt. These days, I've learned to work in series so I can explore a subject over time and don't have to include all my favorite ideas or fabrics at once. I try to remember to look at what I'm doing and to see more truly and simply. I now know just how hard that is to do; "simple" never gets any easier, and I don't think it ever will. But I'm truly and simply happy that I can keep trying.