5. Threads

The quilt pictured here (shown at the end of its usable life) is a complete mystery to my current self; I can't remember why I felt the need to apply the seam binding that now hangs off the central seams. Decoration? Camouflage for mistakes? Our great-Aunt Helen's green silk pants live on in shreds and tatters, revealing a “first” in this quilt: a polyester batting accompanied by actual hand quilting. My way of working still linked me to generations of imperfect quiltmakers before me who made up their own rules as needed. The hand quilting and the rail-fence border finally connected this quilt to the first one I ever saw.

Thus far, though I have talked about mistakes, I haven't been talking about struggling through a mistake-making process that can lead to personal growth. I've been describing the one place in my life that was free of struggle, full of bad sewing and great joy. Nothing was at stake, so if I did something less than perfectly, I could easily finish the project and move on, knowing I'd do better the next time around. But this unnamed quilt is possibly the last I made in a truly un-self-conscious way. There's a sadness in that for me, as I now realize that becoming more sophisticated in my working methods meant thinking more, and thinking more carried the danger of feeling less as I created. Making a quilt is a process of joining disparate elements into a unified whole. The more I made quilts, the more I felt that quilting was one of the elements that would make me whole. That made them important. Now there was something at stake. One thread had ended, and another was about to begin.