Told me my quilt had "too many patterns" and asked could I make it plainer
My granddaughter posted a picture of the blue one, the one I finished in March, and a lady messaged me direct. Said she loved it. Then she asked could I make her one "but not so busy." Said all the different prints was giving her a headache.
Mm. Honey, that busy-ness is the whole quilt.
I cut those strips off my mother's church dresses. Three of them. There's a piece in there from a shirt my daddy wore to my brother's wedding in 1974. It don't match because it wasn't supposed to match. Nothing in this family ever matched and we made it work anyway.
I told her I'd be glad to make her one and I'd pick her out some nice fabrics, but I wasn't gone take the patterns out. She never wrote back.
Then Sunday I'm sitting behind Sister Ruth and she leans over and says the blue quilt put her in mind of her own mama's curtains. And that's it. That's the whole thing.
Somebody will always want it quieter. I'm not making it quieter.
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The "not so busy" request always gets me. What she's actually asking for is a different quilt, just using your hands to make it.
That business is the whole thing. Strip quilts built from worn clothing only make sense that way. If the pieces matched, nobody would ever ask where they came from, and then your mother's church dresses and your daddy's 1974 shirt become just fabric. You'd lose the entire story in one go.
I paint old Bangalore houses that are being pulled down for apartments, so I know a little about this. People keep telling me they'd like the picture more without all the wires and the mess and the shop boards. But the wires are the street. Take them out and it's just a building somewhere.
Anyway. You told her you'd be glad to make her one, and I hope the one you make her is exactly as busy as it wants to be. 🙂
The wires comparison is exact, and it's the same argument I'd make about the edition. A print where every impression is identical is technically a "better" multiple, and it tells you nothing. The variations are the proof that a person made it, twice, and both times by hand. Same with your strips: the mismatch is the record.
What I'd want to know is whether she even saw the blue one or just the photograph of it. Because a screen flattens exactly that kind of information. The headache she's describing might be the phone, not the quilt.
Honey, you just asked the question I didn't think to ask. She saw the picture. Far as I know she never laid eyes on that quilt in her life. My granddaughter takes a good photo but a phone can't hold cloth. You can't feel the weight in it, can't see how the light sits different on a dress that's been washed four hundred times next to one that's still stiff. All that comes through is noise.
So maybe you right. Maybe the headache is the screen.
But mm, I don't think that's all of it. Because she wasn't looking at a photograph when she wrote me. She was looking at a picture of a quilt and asking me to take the life out of it. Same as your prints. Somebody can look right at the variation and call it a flaw. That's not the phone, that's the eye.
Either way I told her I'd make her one. Didn't say I'd make it quieter.
The wires. Honey, that's it right there. Take the wires out and you got a pretty picture of a house that could be anywhere. Leave them in and it's that street, those people, that life about to be gone. I'd tell you to keep every one of them.
And mm, you said it plainer than I did. A different quilt using my hands to make it. That's exactly the size of it. She wasn't being ugly, I don't think. She just couldn't see it yet. So I told her come sit with me one afternoon and I'll show her whose dress that blue is, and let her feel the cloth. She may still want it plainer after. That's alright too.
But I ain't pulling out my mother to make somebody comfortable. Not for that price.