14. Running Stitches

"Ambivalence" returned. Or rather, some elements of that quilt reappeared: its plaid geometric shapes became scaled-down "houses" lining an imagined New England roadside in a quilt made of my racing t-shirts. It was inevitable, I guess, that my running and quilting interests would merge when my shirts began escaping from the drawers they were stuffed into.

It isn't easy composing a quilt with such a wide variety of large and bold graphic designs. The obvious choice, and the simplest, would have been to cut out all the logos in same-sized square shapes and sew them together in a grid, which--given the number of shirts I had--could have sheltered my whole extended family. I began to experiment by putting up pieces on my flannel-covered design wall, but the result looked more like a jumbled billboard than the quilted "running journal" I had hoped for, so it was back to the drawing board.

Gradually I realized that what I wanted to convey was my enjoyment of running, and--daughter of New England that I am--that meant my enjoyment of running on country roads through four seasons, with the companionship of good friends. Knowing what it is you want to say makes all the difference: once I understood why I was making the quilt, I was able to separate the shirts into winter, spring, summer, and fall colors; I cut out a fabric road for the center squares. Piecing fabrics together in an improvisational way, I tried to suggest houses and trees along the road, rather than to depict them realistically. My friends--with whom I have roamed the roads, solved many a problem, shared laughs and tears--are represented in photographs transferred to fabric. These days, it's simple to print a digital image directly onto fabric, but back in the early 90s when I made this quilt, the only option available for getting pictures onto fabric meant buying reverse-image color photocopies of my pictures, coating the copies with a white glue-like liquid, and letting them dry. Little by little, I used water and elbow grease to rub away the paper; what remained was a color image imprinted on a plastic-like medium which I then glued onto fabric. It was a tedious process, but it put my friends in the quilt.

The results were positive: I ended up with extra room in my drawers for new race shirts, great dust cloths from the shirt remnants (to this day, t-shirt rags take the place of paper towels in our house), and a quilt which led to my first magazine article. Back then, external rewards seemed to come easily and regularly as a result of exposure in various regional and national quilt shows; it seems to me now that I never even worried about whether I would get into a show, and I never had to look far for the next opportunity to present itself. And sure enough, this quilt brought a new chance my way. One afternoon I received a phone call from one of the editors of American Quilter Magazine. She asked if I were sitting down and went on to tell me that she and her co-editor wanted to put my running quilt on the cover of their magazine. As it turned out, the editors were overridden by a higher-up who wanted something more acceptable to a larger number of readers. Instead, they asked me write an article about the quilt so they could feature it within the pages of the magazine. This was my first shot at writing, and I hadn't even had to send a query letter. In hindsight, I marvel that I somehow avoided agonizing self-doubt and simply took advantage of the opportunities that came along. Those lucky first experiences have made it easier for me to recover from the sometimes appropriate yet always disheartening rejections from shows and magazines that I have experienced since. Little successes and little failures make for a balanced life in the long run.