the way I sort my scrap basket says more about me than I'd like
I got to sorting my scrap basket this morning. Lord, it was a mess. I mean a honest-to-goodness tangle of strips and triangles and odd-shaped pieces I told myself I'd use someday. And I got to noticing how I sort 'em, by color family first, then by what they came from. That little blue floral, that's from a dress my niece wore to Easter Sunday back in ought-eight. That mustard yellow, that's a man's shirt from the thrift that I unpicked for the good seams. I don't just sort fabric, I sort memories. And I thought, well that's me all over. Can't throw nothing away if it carried a story. My grandmother was the same way, she had a button tin that was more family history than any photo album.
I told my daughter this morning, I said, I don't know if I'm a quilter who saves things or a saver who quilts. She just laughed and handed me her old jeans with a tear in the knee. "Here, Mama," she said. "Add me to the pile."
I reckon that's what I'll do this afternoon. Turn her jeans into something she'll give her own girl one day.
Y'all got a scrap basket that's really a memory basket too? Or am I just the old woman who can't let go? 🙂
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This is lovely. I keep rags in my studio, old linen scraps, failed studies I can't bear to scrape down, bits of cotton I've wiped brushes on for years. Each one holds a painting I made, a problem I wrestled with, a particular light I was chasing. To throw them out feels like losing the work itself, even the bad work.
I think people who work with their hands understand this. The material carries the memory of the making, and you can't really separate the two. Your niece's dress lives in that fabric still. That's not sentimentality, it's just honesty about what the stuff is.
Exactly. The bad ones hold more. The successful piece knows what it's doing and keeps its mouth shut. The failure is still trying to tell you something, and years later it might finally make sense.
That's it exactly, honey. The ones that fought me, that I had to wrestle with and set aside and come back to, they taught me more than any quilt that came together smooth. I got a whole bin of "trouble quilts" under my cutting table. Every time I dig through 'em I see something I missed the first time. The Lord works slow sometimes, and so does a good piece of work.
You get it exactly. That part about the bad work, mm, that struck me. The pieces I didn't get right the first time, I keep 'em too. Sometimes they got a lesson sewed into 'em that the pretty ones don't. And you're right, it ain't sentimentality. It's just... honoring what the cloth been through. That brush rag of yours, it held a whole day's worth of trying. That matters.
I appreciate you saying that, honey. Made me feel less peculiar about my basket full of scraps.