44. Sudoku

How many people can say their work of art has been purchased by a patron who is legally blind? I can, and I hardly know how to feel about that. But this quilt's new home is not where the story begins. It begins in Tokyo in 1998, where I purchased a really strange and interesting fabric with many designs, both abstract and figurative, repeated across its surface in bright colors. Then the story pauses for seven years, until the sudoku craze comes along, right around the time I had begun to think one more time about going back to writing for magazines. There's an idea for an article, I said to myself. This was back when I had the audacity to hope my bright idea hadn't yet occurred to every other quilter on the planet.

I set to work on making my sudoku quilt by learning to solve a sudoku puzzle--and another and another and another. Research, not procrastination. Curious to know if the visual patterns based on a logic puzzle would be as interesting as designs arranged "by eye", I took one of my solution grids and assigned a color as well as a motif from that long-ago fabric to each of the numbers one through nine. In cutting the different designs out of the fabric, I had carefully figured out that I could get nine each of nine different ones. But I had made a mistake and was one short, so one of my groups of nine is really a group of eight plus one little doggy picture. (Which creates a secondary puzzle: can you find the one-of-a-kind?)

Wow--did those choices make designing the quilt easy! No layout agonies here: just follow the solution grid and see how it looked. And the Japanese fabric--which I knew no one around these parts would ever have seen before--made it interesting as well as easy. Then I did another sudoku creation, this time a silk pillow cover, with charms and buttons and doodads assigned to numbers 1 through 9. With two samples and a story to tell, I wrote the article, sent it off, and got no response at all. About a year later sudoku quilts popped up in magazines and in quilt shows, and shortly after that a book about the subject was published. Too late I realized that the editor to whom I had sent my article had probably been swamped with sudoku ideas.

But I was not dismayed; real discouragement came only after the next article I sent out garnered an honest-to-goodness rejection, complete with the descriptive term "cute". In my world, this is not a good word when it refers to a piece of work or an idea. It was especially not good when I was actually trying to make a serious point in my article about experimenting with "ugly" fabrics in order to understand what is and is not "ugly." Ouch.

Some light of understanding began to dawn on me: there are times when I am good at picking up the new ideas "in the air" before most people, but I'm just a tad too late about it to lead the way. Add to this other times when I am simply out in left field somewhere, oblivious to what most people are really interested in. And the times when my ideas are not of sufficient "weight", and the times when they are just too heavy. Time to make my peace with the fact that on the planet Earth, I am going to feel like a Martian from time to time.

Catching a new "wave" from popular culture? Be careful--your work could be old before it's new. Getting credit for your "new" idea? Gratifying but extremely rare--it's usually not only your idea, anyway. Feeling like a Martian? Okay and inevitable. Feeling like an authentic version of yourself even in your occasional "cuteness"? Priceless.