Took the last two inches off my grandmother's log cabin blocks and now I can't sleep right
Working on a piece out of my grandmother's scraps, cloth she cut back in the eighties from old work shirts and a couple of Sunday dresses. Her blocks never did sit square, and I decided last week I'd true them up, trim the edges so they'd join clean. Took maybe two inches off each one off the top and bottom. Cut it Tuesday evening.
Now the top's laying on the floor of my sewing room and it's straight. Every seam meets. And it's dead. All that crookedness was her hand, every block leaning a little like she was talking while she cut. I trimmed her voice right off it.
I know better than this. My own quilts go crooked on purpose. But hers I wanted to honor and I went and made it a machine.
I got the trimmed pieces in a jar on the windowsill, I can't bring myself to throw them out. Thinking I might piece them into a strip down the back, let the offcuts live somewhere. That's about the best I can do for it now.
Any of you ever go and fix something that wasn't broken, thinking you were helping it? Not asking about the quilt so much. Asking about the wanting to fix.
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You learned the difference between a maker and a material the hard way. Straightening is a decision you make about someone else's decisions, and now you know what it costs.
For what it is worth, from a man who has spent thirty years learning this: the two inches are not gone, they just moved. You know exactly what her hand did now, in a way you did not fully before you cut. That knowledge will be in the next one. There is no way to put it back into this top, and you should probably stop trying to, because the trying is what makes people stop making things. Lay it down. Look at it for a month. Then decide.
The crookedness was not a defect you fixed. It was information. Now you have it.
"the two inches are not gone, they just moved" is such a good way to put it and I don't think I've heard it said like that before. I'm a painter, not a quilter, but I've done the exact same thing with a wash, overworked a passage trying to fix a wobble and killed the whole thing. The wobble WAS the painting. Sometimes you can't see what a mark was doing until you've erased it, and then you can't unsee it.
The month thing is right though. I've had pieces I hated on the wall for weeks and then one morning they were just... mine. Good luck, op. I'd genuinely love to see it.
The wash. That's it exactly, honey. You know what I mean better than most and you don't even sew. Overworking a passage trying to fix the wobble and the wobble was the whole point.
But here's what I keep coming back to since you said it. You can't unsee it. That part's true and it's the mercy, in a way. I laid that top on the floor and looked at it straight and clean and I couldn't feel her in it. So I know. I don't have to wonder for the next ten years whether I should've trimmed.
I got some of her old shirting still folded in the trunk. Not going to true up the next one. Might even cut a little crooked on purpose, see if I can teach my own hands to lean.
Go on and show me one of your overworked ones sometime. I want to see a wobble that means something.
Thirty years. Mm. Then you know what you're talking about and I'd be a fool not to hear it.
"Straightening is a decision you make about someone else's decisions." I read that twice. That's the whole thing right there, and I did it in one evening with a rotary cutter like it was nothing.
The part about laying it down and looking at it for a month, that's the part I don't want to do, and that's how I know it's right. I hung it on the wall in the hallway where I have to walk past it going to the kitchen. It'll have to live there a while.
What I'm taking from what you said is this. I was trying to put her hand back into it. But her hand is already in me, and that's the only place it ever needed to be. The next one'll be crooked. I'll let it lean.