Somebody put my quilt in a "textile revival" spread and called the pattern "unexpected"
My granddaughter sent me a link this morning to a little design blog that ran a picture of my Red Hollow quilt. Now I don't mind a picture being taken, that's fine, but whoever wrote it said the color arrangement was "unexpected and deliberately off-balance, a bold subversion of traditional form."
Honey. I was working around a hole.
That's the whole story. The blue corduroy came out of my uncle's work shirt and there wasn't enough of it, so the strip runs wide on one end and narrow on the other. Nothing bold about it. I needed to cover a gap and I did.
Spent about an hour this morning wanting to be mad, then went out back and looked at the quilt through the window where it's hanging on the line, and I couldn't even stay mad, because it does look good. It always did. Just not for the reason they said.
I do wonder how many of the old quilts in those books got wrote up by somebody who never once sat at a frame with a woman who was just trying to make her cloth stretch.
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The critic was probably reaching, but "I was working around a hole" is a better story than the one they wrote. Constraint is where most good things come from, they just don't know how to say it without the word subversion. Same thing happens with paper. Someone will call a torn edge expressive. It's torn because that's where the sheet ended.
The torn-edge comparison is apt, and I would add that it cuts both ways. I have seen a deckle called "spontaneous" when it was simply where the pulp settled, and I have also seen a genuinely deliberate deckle passed off as accident because the artist thought intention sounded fussy. The mistake is the same either way: people would rather have a story about instinct than a story about a decision. Working around a shortage of blue corduroy is a decision, and a fairly exacting one. Getting a strip to run wide at one end and narrow at the other without the seam going crooked takes more judgment than a critic's phrase suggests.
"People would rather have a story about instinct than a story about a decision." Mm. I'm gonna write that on the back of something. Because that's it exactly. A decision you can argue with. Instinct, nobody can touch.
And you're right that it cuts both ways. I've had folks tell me my seams wander "like jazz" when honey, that seam wandered because my eyes were tired and the light was bad. Don't put that on the music.
But the crooked seam that took me three tries to get right? That one they want to call happy accident. It's the same mistake either way, like you said. Thank you for reading it careful.
"It's torn because that's where the sheet ended." Lord, that's the whole thing right there. I'm gonna be repeating that one.
And you're right about constraint. Folks want to make it a philosophy, but sometimes it's just Tuesday and you got a hole. I think the making still counts. The hole made me do something I wouldn't have thought to do, and I'll take that. I just won't take the credit for being clever about it.
Paper and cloth, same church. 🙂