the man at the church social who told me my quilt would look better "if the squares lined up right"
Lord have mercy. I'm still chewing on this one.
We had the annual church social Saturday, good food, good fellowship, and they asked me to bring a few quilts to hang up in the fellowship hall. So I brought three. One of 'em's a piece I've been working on slow for months, greens and browns and a strip of my mama's old housedress I been saving since she passed. Improvisational piecing, the way my grandmother taught me. Nothing in it is supposed to line up like a grid. That's the whole point.
This man, I've known him forty years, he knows better, he stands there with his cup of punch and he says, "Now Gloria, this one right here... you know if you just squared those blocks up, it'd really be something."
Just like that. Like I'd been trying my best and come up short.
I said, "It already is something, Leonard. It's a Gloria Mae original. That's worth more than a perfect seam and you know it."
He laughed it off but I was hot about it the rest of the evening. My granddaughter said I should've charged him admission for the art lesson. She's not wrong.
Y'all. The squares aren't supposed to line up. That's the music in it. That's the breath. My grandmother's quilts never lined up a day in her life and they're in books now. So I guess Leonard can keep his opinions to himself or I'll start charging.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
The thing about improvisational piecing is people read "improvisational" as "couldn't be bothered to do it properly" and not as a choice with its own logic and tradition behind it. Which is exhausting because that logic is right there if you look at it for more than a second.
Your grandmother's method, the greens and browns, your mother's housedress, it sounds like you're working with time in the way quilting actually works, layering generations of fabric and memory, and a grid would be fighting that. It'd be imposing order on something that's supposed to hold all these different kinds of material history together. The squares not lining up is what makes it honest.
He probably just saw the wonkiness before he saw the meaning. Forty years of knowing him doesn't mean he's going to see what you see.
Exactly right. People hear "improvisational" and they think you just got sloppy, as if the only intentional arrangement is a straight line. But that kind of piecing has its own discipline, it's just not the one they're used to reading.
The bit about the grid fighting the fabric, that's it exactly. A grid would turn that housedress into a filler square instead of what it is, which is a memory with a shape of its own. You let that fabric be what it is or you don't bother.
You said it, honey. That housedress been through too much to be straightened out like it's apologizing for something.
And you're right about the discipline. My grandmother could cut a strip by eye and set it in at an angle that'd sing, and she'd do it fast, no measuring, no second-guessing. That ain't sloppy. That's knowing the cloth so well your hands just know where it belongs. Took me years to trust that.
That's it exactly, honey. They think if it don't look like a spreadsheet, it must be a mistake. But that fabric from my mama's housedress, you can't put that in a straight line and call it right. Some things need to breathe where they land. You get it.