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I made a wedding ring quilt for a young woman at my church back in 2012. She didn't have much, her mama had passed and she wanted something of hers to carry into the marriage. I charged her $75 to cover the fabric and not a penny more. And I was glad to do it. Problem is, now I've made about seven of them since then for folks at church and I still can't bring myself to charge what it's worth. A queen-size wedding ring quilt takes me three, four weeks of evenings. Piecing those curves, all that handwork in the ditch. I know what the materials cost now, I know what my time adds up to. But these are church people, family, people I sat next to at potluck. I charged a woman from Atlanta $1,200 for a piece last spring and she didn't blink. And I'm sitting here hemming and hawing over whether to ask $200 from Sister RuthAnn for a baby quilt. My granddaughter told me I'm letting the church folks take advantage and I told her hush now, it's not that simple. But she might have a point I ain't ready to sit with.

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.

Sister Bernice cornered me after service today. Said she saw the picture my daughter posted of the wedding quilt I just finished for my niece. "Gloria Mae, that would be so much prettier if you just followed a nice pattern out of a book. All those crooked pieces just look like you made a mistake." I stood there holding my pocketbook and just smiled. Told her my grandmother didn't own a pattern book in her life and what she made hangs in museums now. Bernice's face went tight as fresh starch. Y'all, I been quilting since I was seven years old sitting on a flour sack at my grandmother's feet. The "mistakes" are where the breath gets in. The crooked pieces are where the spirit moves through. Bless her heart though. She means well. She's just used to quilts that lay flat and quiet. Some of us like our quilts to have something to say.

Was in a church in the old town today, not for work, just wandered in. And there's this floor mosaic I've walked past maybe a hundred times, Roman, nothing special, geometric, the tesserae are rough and uneven, some have come loose. But today I sat down on the cold stone and just looked at it for fifteen minutes. Some woman thought I was having a crisis. I was having a crisis actually. Crisis of admiration. The person who laid that floor, their hammer strokes are still in the stone. Pieces they cut with their own hands, eighteen hundred years ago, still holding. And I sit on my own floor at home, cutting the same material, same gestures, same ache in the neck after too long. I don't know why it hit me today and not the other times. Maybe I needed it to. Anyway if you've never sat on a church floor staring at somebody else's work for a quarter of an hour, try it. Feels strange and good.

Met a man at the community center show yesterday. He stood in front of my piece for a good long while, this one I'd been working on for weeks, pieced from my grandmother's old housedresses and my aunt's aprons, all those soft faded florals. He looked at it. Nodded. Said how much for this one. I told him. He about choked. Said "that much? My grandmother made quilts for free her whole life. Just gave 'em away." I said well sir, your grandmother probably did it in a time when nobody thought her work was worth money. And she was wronged by that same thinking. But I am not my grandmother in that way. He walked off. And I stood there thinking, that man thought he was telling me something about value. All he told me was that his grandmother never got paid for her gift. And somehow that's supposed to make me lower my price instead of raise it. My grandmother never sold a quilt in her life. She gave them to every child, every cousin, every newborn in the church. And they'd say thank you and put it on the bed and wear it thin. And she died never knowing what her hands were worth. So no sir. I'm not doing it for free. I'm doing it for both of us.

I got a call last week from a woman I didn't know. Said she found my name on a label sewed into an old quilt she bought at a church flea market over in Tuscaloosa. Asked if I wanted it back. I knew exactly which one before she even described it. That blue and yellow improv log cabin I made in '93, right after my youngest left for school. I was so lonesome that year I just sewed and sewed. Sold it for $40 at a craft fair at the county annex, first quilt I ever sold to a stranger. I remember watching the woman walk off with it folded over her arm and thinking I might've made a mistake letting it go. Anyway she mailed it to me and I opened the box and there it was. Still sturdy. Still a little crooked in places. I sat and held it in my lap a good long while before I could do anything else. I don't know what I'm gonna do with it now. Might keep it. Might hang it where I can see it. That quilt been out in the world longer than my own children lived in this house. Lord.

Y'all, I been selling quilts my whole life, church bazaars, word of mouth, folks stopping by the house. Never needed much more than that. But my granddaughter got me on Instagram a few years back, and I tell you what, the folks I've met through there... mm. People from England, from Japan, from California, wanting a piece of what I do. I sold a quilt last month to a woman in Paris. Paris, France. She saw a picture I took on my kitchen floor and paid more than I used to ask for a whole summer's worth of craft shows. And I'm grateful, don't get me wrong. The Lord's been good. But there's something funny about it, these folks paying top dollar for what my grandmother did out of a flour sack because that's what she had. They call it "art" now, and I guess it is. But it was art then too, wasn't it? Anyway. I'm still figuring out what to make of it. Grateful, but figuring.

A decorator from Atlanta came through here a few months back, bought a big improvisational piece I'd done, maybe 72 by 90, all in these warm ochres and deep blues, took me the better part of a month on and off between everything else. I charged her $1,200. Felt fair at the time. She didn't haggle, wrote the check, had me ship it. My granddaughter showed me the decorator's website last week. That same quilt's listed at $7,200 in a client's home. "Custom artisan textile" or some such. Now I'm not mad about the free market, I understand how that world works. But I look at what I charged her and I think about my grandmother who would've gotten maybe fifty dollars for a quilt she put her whole self into, if anybody bought it at all. And I think about how I'm still pricing myself like I'm selling at the church bazaar. Somebody out there thinks this work is worth seven thousand dollars. Maybe I ought to start believing them.

There's this late Byzantine panel from the Church of the Holy Apostles in Thessaloniki, Christ Pantokrator, standard stuff, and I copied it by hand for a conservation module back in 2004. Six weeks on my knees, matching every tessera, and I got it so close my professor kept it as a teaching example. The joke is that piece ruined me. I can't look at a face in mosaic anymore without measuring the eye spacing against that Pantokrator. Last week I finished a portrait commission, contemporary, abstracted, not even trying to be realistic, and I spent an hour staring at it thinking the left eye is two millimeters too far out. Client won't see it. Nobody will see it. But I know it's there because of a dead Byzantine emperor's face I memorized twenty years ago. Anyone else carry a reference piece in their head like a splinter? Something you studied so hard it rewired your eye permanently.

I've got a cardboard box under my cutting table been sitting there maybe twelve years now. Every time I think about tossing it, I dig through it again and pull something out. Little triangles from my grandbaby's Easter dress from 2011. A strip of polyester from a blouse my sister wore to church before she passed. Even a piece of my own wedding dress, Lord, that's been forty years and some change. My grandmother called it "saving for the hard times", not money, but cloth. Said you never know when a scrap you kept will be the very thing you need to finish a quilt right. I thought she was just being old and sentimental. But here I am, same habit, same box. Tell me somebody else keeps a scrap graveyard from pieces that oughta be rags. Or am I just a hoarder with a sewing machine? 😂🙏

Four months. I've been hunting for a specific red smalti, this particular Byzantine red, not too orange, not too brick, the one you see in the Ravenna churches and in bits of Hagia Sophia. My usual supplier in Venice stopped carrying it, the batch from the guy in Siena was wrong, too purple. I tried cutting my own from glass rods and it looked like cherry candy. Wrong wrong wrong. Yesterday I'm at a flea market in Ano Poli, not even looking, and there's an old guy selling boxes of tile scraps from a renovation. I'm rummaging because I can't help myself and there, at the very bottom, wrapped in newspaper from 2003, a kilo of exactly this red. Hand-cut, uneven, matt finish, the real thing. He charged me five euros. I came home and just laid a few pieces out on the bench and looked at them for a while like an idiot. People don't get it. But you probably do. That specific thing you need finding you when you stop hunting. Best feeling. 🙂

came into the studio this morning, absolutely Baltic out, and soon as I opened the door that cold linseed oil hit me. the sharp of it. the black of it. there's something about that smell that just says "right, you're home now" and the rest of the world can go hang. my wife says I smell like a garage and a church had a baby. she's not wrong. I've been printing all morning and my hands are a state, got black under every nail and probably on my face too. there's a print proof drying on the rack and I don't know yet if it's any good but the smell alone made it worth showing up. sure that counts for something.

My main workspace faces north-ish and in winter the light is this flat grey thing that flattens everything I'm cutting. I know people who chase the sun around their house with their work, move their table every few hours. I just... work in it. Put a task lamp on it and get on with it. The colours look different when the piece finally gets into proper light anyway, I've learned to allow for it. My conservation teacher used to say you should only ever judge a mosaic in the light it's going to live in, which is fine if you're doing a floor for a church in Palaiokastritsa, not so helpful when your client's living room faces west and you're working under a cloud.