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I got a pair of sewing scissors that belonged to my grandmother, she carried them in her apron pocket my whole childhood and I'd watch her snip thread and cut fabric and trim little corners off pieced blocks, never setting them down, just keeping them right there at her hip like they was part of her. She passed in '84 and I got those scissors and honey they are dull as all get out and I don't care one bit. I could get them sharpened, I know I could. But it feels wrong somehow, like I'd be erasing the wear she put in them. Every little nick and gap in the blade is from her hand. My daughter bought me a nice new pair for Christmas two years ago and they sit in the drawer. I use them when I have to. But when I'm really working, when I'm piecing something that feels like it matters, I reach for Mamie's scissors every time. They pull at the fabric more than they cut it sometimes. And that's alright with me. Anybody else got a tool they keep using past when they should? Or am I just being sentimental?

there's a pair of kitchen scissors i stole from my ex-husband's apartment four years ago that i use for everything, cutting paper, trimming thread, opening packages of charcoal, cutting my own hair in a pinch. they're the worst scissors for art. not sharp, the pivot is loose, they leave a ragged edge on everything. i have three actual proper pairs of scissors within arm's reach right now. i reach for the bad kitchen ones every single time. i think about this more than makes sense. like, am i punishing the material? or is it that i learned to work around them and now the ragged edge is part of the process? or i just like that they're mine in a way nothing else in this room is mine. anyway. the paper i'm cutting right now looks like it's been chewed by something. i'm leaning into it.

I've been using them sixty-two years. She already had them worn smooth when she put them in my hand at eight years old, told me "these yours now, you take care." And I did. I sharpened them myself every year, oiled the screw, never dropped them once. Today I'm cutting a scrap for a border piece and they just, wouldn't. Snagged and pulled, made that awful crunch sound through the fabric. Laid them down real gentle and just looked at them a minute. I got a new pair at the craft store this afternoon. Nice enough scissors. They don't feel like mine. Told my daughter on the phone and she said "Mama, they were scissors." I said they were her great-grandmother's hands reaching through mine, is what they were. She got quiet. Anyway. I'll keep the old pair on the shelf. They earned their rest.

I've got this pair of scissors I bought for 35 kronor at a flea market maybe ten years ago. The pivot is loose, the blades don't quite meet at the tip anymore, and there's a rust spot near the screw that I've stopped trying to clean off. They look like they should be useless. But they cut paper exactly the way I want, a little rough, a little unpredictable, not that clean surgical snip you get from a new blade. I've tried replacing them twice with nicer scissors and both times I went back within a week. I don't know if it's muscle memory or just that I've learned exactly how they'll fail. But they're the only tool I own that I'd actually be unsettled to lose.

I have this one pair of embroidery scissors, very small, very old, I found them in my yiayia's sewing box after she died, probably from the 50s. I don't embroider. I don't sew. But they live on my workbench and I use them for exactly one thing: cutting the cotton thread I tie around bundles of smalti so they don't slide apart when I carry them from the shelf to the floor. Nothing else. If I need to cut string or paper or anything, I use something else. These scissors just do this one job. It's stupid. But there's something satisfying about having a tool that only exists for a single tiny task. Like a little ritual object. Anyone else have a tool like that, something absurdly specific that you keep around for one thing only?

I've had these old Wiss scissors since I was maybe twelve years old. They was my grandmother's before that, she used 'em to cut patterns and rip seams and trim threads for I don't know how many years. The handles was that old black rubber that gets sticky after a while, but they cut true right up till this morning. I was trimming the binding on a quilt I'm finishing and the little screw that holds 'em together just... gave out. Dropped right onto the floor. I sat there holding the two pieces like they was a little bird that died in my hand. You know how it is with a tool that's been with you that long. It ain't just the tool. It's her hands on it before mine. It's every quilt I made with these things, baby quilts for my children, my grandchildren, a wedding quilt for my niece, the one I made when my husband passed and I didn't know what else to do with my hands. All of it in those blades. I tried to see if I could get 'em fixed but the metal's worn thin where the screw goes through. They're done. I don't know if I'm more sad about losing the scissors or losing that little piece of her I still had in my hands every day. Gonna have to break in a new pair and hope they carry some of the same memory forward. That's the way of it, I suppose. Tools wear out. What they helped you make stays.🙏

Had my good shears out on the porch Monday, cutting through six layers of old denim for a strip quilt, and they started chewing instead of cutting. Chewing. You know that sound. So I went on down to the fabric store over in Bessemer, and I asked the young lady at the counter where they keep the sharpening stones, and she showed me a rotary blade refill and said "most folks just buy new ones." Buy new ones. Honey, these shears came to me from my grandmother. I don't know how old they are, older than me I expect. They've got a nick in the blade from the year my uncle used them to cut wire, and I've never let that nick go because it's his. You don't throw that in a bin and drive to the store. My granddaughter found me a sharpener online, one of the little ones with the two slots, and it did all right on the kitchen scissors but I'm not putting my good shears through it. So now I'm doing the old way, the whetstone, little circles, oil on my fingers, and it is slow going and my hands ache after. But they're coming back. Cutting paper smooth again this morning. I don't know, maybe every generation thinks the tools are getting too easy to replace. But I hear that girl's voice in my head every time I sit down with that stone, "most folks just buy new ones." Most folks don't have a pair of scissors with their uncle's mistake in them, I reckon.

We got together Tuesday night at Sister Odell's, six of us around the frame, working on the missionary quilt, and one of the younger ladies brought out a rotary cutter and a mat and says we could have all these strips cut in an hour, why do I still use scissors. Now I use scissors because my grandmother used scissors and that's how my hands learned it, and a good pair of shears following a chalk line will curve if the block asks it to. Rotary wants everything square and fast and same. But I sat there with my mouth set and did not say one word, and cut my strips with the scissors the whole night out of pure stubbornness, which I am not proud of. Thing is she's not wrong about the hour. We was there till near ten. I come home and told my granddaughter and she said Miss Gloria you are sixty three years old you can use whatever you want. And I said that's the trouble, baby. I don't know which one I want. I know which one my hands want. There's a strip in that quilt that's crooked because of it. I'm leaving it.

i've had this rubbermaid bin under my work table for like four years. t-shirts he wore that my mom couldn't throw away and neither could i. today i just took the scissors to one of them. a faded green one from a 5k he ran in 2008. felt like i was doing something wrong for the first ten minutes. now i'm gluing a strip of it into a piece about something else entirely and it finally makes sense being there. not as a memorial or whatever. just as a color and a texture that belongs in the thing. anyone else sit on materials forever before you can touch them? or is that just the hoarder gene

My granddaughter brought me a box last month, things she found cleaning out her mama's closet. In it was my grandmother's church dress. Navy, little covered buttons down the front, worn thin at the elbows. She passed in 1979 and that dress has been folded in a cedar chest since before my youngest was born. I laid it on the table this morning meaning to take the back panel for a quilt I'm building. Memory quilt, for my great-grandbaby due in November. I got the scissors in my hand and then I just stood there. Couldn't do it. Went and made coffee instead, came back, sat down. Finally I did cut it. Took a deep breath and went slow. And honey, that navy sits right up against a red print I pulled from my own old housecoat like they were made for each other. The Lord puts things together like that sometimes. Now listen, I know some of you would've kept the dress whole and hung it in a frame, and I'm not saying that's wrong. But cloth was made to be used. My grandmother wore that dress to praise the Lord every Sunday for years, and now a piece of it's going to wrap a baby that won't be born till fall. That feels like the dress finishing what it started. Any of you ever cut into something you weren't sure you had the right to cut? I'd like to hear it.

I finally did it and cut up a quilt my grandmother made. It was worn down to nothing in the center, the good parts still fine along the edges, and I took scissors to it for a piece I'm workin on. My mama saw it hanging there and said, "Gloria Mae, you done lost your mind, that's Mama's work." And I told her, Grandma's work is still in there. Her stitches run through what I'm makin, just the same. I kept the best squares and they're goin into something new, and that's what she would've wanted. She used to say cloth don't die, it just changes homes. I set aside the good pieces and the frayed ones went in the garden to smother weeds, so not a scrap wasted. I tell you what, I thought about her all day. That's the thing about this work, you never really retire a piece of cloth. You just pass it along.

I have had my grandmother's church dress folded in the cedar chest since 1994. Navy, short sleeves, a little shine at the elbows from all that kneeling and fanning. I have taken it out and put it back maybe twenty times over the years. Today I laid it on the table and cut it. Took me until after two o'clock to make the first cut. I sat there with the scissors and my hands just would not move. Then I remembered what she used to say when a quilt was fighting her, that cloth don't belong in a drawer, it belongs on somebody. So I cut two strips off the hem and set them in the middle of what I'm piecing. It's a small thing. Two strips, maybe four inches wide. But I had to walk out on the porch afterward and sit a minute. The rest of the dress is still on the table. I'll get to it. Some things you do in pieces, and that's not weakness, that's just how it goes.

Small gallery in the Croix-Rousse asked for three paintings for a group show in October. Fine, yes, I said. Then came the email: "and 150 words about your practice." I have painted for twenty-five years and I cannot write 150 words about my practice. I can tell you the pigment I used in the shadow of the left arm, I can tell you it took four sessions to get the edge of the table right without it looking cut out with scissors. That is not what they want. They want me to say that I "interrogate the domestic." I do not interrogate anything, I look at it for a long time until it stops being boring. My daughter read my attempt and said it sounded like a dishwasher manual. She is sixteen and she is right. Anyway, I put down: I paint what is in front of me, slowly, until the light in it is correct. That is 14 words. The other 136 I am still negotiating.

It had been folded in the cedar chest going on nineteen years. Navy blue with the little white flowers, short sleeves, the one she wore every fourth Sunday whether it was her turn on the usher board or not. I'd taken it out and put it back maybe six times over the years. Tuesday I laid it on the table and got the scissors and my hands were not steady, I'll tell you that. But you can't make a memory quilt out of a folded-up dress. That's just a dress in a chest. I only took the two sleeves. Left the body of it whole so it can still be a dress if anybody needs it to be, which I know doesn't make a bit of sense, but that's what I did. The blue is going in the middle of the quilt for my niece's girl, the one graduating in May. Right up against a red that don't match it at all. Grandmama would've put them together without blinking. Any of y'all got a piece of cloth in the house you can't bring yourself to cut? I surely understand it.

She came by Sunday after church with a kitchen bag full of them. Four shirts, two of them that blue chambray he wore near every week, the collar gone soft as a dishrag. She said "Mama Gloria, let's put him in a quilt," and she had that look on her face like she'd already solved it. I sat there with that bag in my lap a good while. Half of me wanted to say yes right then. The other half wanted to take the bag back in the house and set it on the shelf where it's been. Here's my trouble. I've made memory quilts for other people for thirty-odd years. I have told many a widow, honey, cut it, the cloth is meant to go on living. And I meant it every time. But those shirts smell like him. Once I cut, that's done. There's no getting it back. I don't think she's wrong. I just don't think she knows yet that the cutting is the easy part and the sewing is where you cry. Any of you ever had a piece of somebody's cloth you couldn't put scissors to?

working on a piece right now, one of the found photos, a kitchen table with someone's hand just at the edge of the frame. I tore the photo down the middle, not clean, along the actual fold line that was already there, and the tear came out perfect. like, exactly what I'd have designed. ragged, thin, the emulsion lifting at the edge. and I hate it. it reads decorative. it reads like I tore it on purpose to be beautiful about the loss, and there's a loud voice in my head saying the honest version would be a bad tear, the wrong tear, something that doesn't line up. but the bad tear I made last week just looked like a mistake. like I fumbled the scissors. so now I'm stuck between a tear that's too good and a tear that's too dumb, and I keep telling myself the real answer is somewhere in the middle which is usually the answer I give when I don't actually want to decide. the thing I can't get past: the photo already had that fold. it's not my gesture at all. I just followed it. but does that read to anyone else, or does it just look like a nice rip. because I genuinely can't tell anymore, I've been staring at this on the board for four days and I've lost the thread.

My mother passed in 2011 and I still have a paper sack of her slips in the hall closet. Half-slips, mostly, that nylon that feels like nothing in your hand. I've moved that sack to three different houses. Here's the thing nobody tells you. I have known for eleven years what they're for. There's a quilt in my head that's nothing but those slips and strips of my daddy's work shirts, and the reason I haven't started it is that I'd have to cut them. Right now they're whole. The minute I take the scissors to them, they're cloth. My daughter says Mama, that's what she'd want. And she's right and I know she's right and I still walk past that closet. Meanwhile I finished a top last month out of old denim and feed sack and it came together in nine days, no arguing with it at all. Easy work is easy, I guess. The sack's not going anywhere. I'm not asking y'all what to do with it. I just wanted to say out loud that it's there, and that I'm not ready, and that not being ready is allowed for a while.

Someone on marketplace was giving away a 60s credenza, walnut veneer, one leg busted. Free. I drove 40 minutes in the rain with a tarp and my brother's old ratchet straps still in the trunk, which I don't think about, they're just the straps. Got there and the piece was worse than the photos, water damage all along the bottom, drawer fronts swollen shut. And I stood in this guy's driveway and realized I didn't want the credenza, I wanted the hardware. The little brass pulls, the keyhole escutcheons. So I asked if I could just take those instead of the whole thing and he looked at me like I'd asked to keep his dog. Came home with eleven pulls and a keyhole plate in a ziploc. They're on the work table now. The credenza part of it, the actual furniture, I don't care about at all. I care that a stranger's hand turned these ten thousand times opening a drawer for a pair of scissors or a lighter or whatever was in there, and it polished the brass down to the base metal in one spot. Probably going to end up gluing them to a panel and calling it a piece about small repeated gestures, which is a sentence I'd hate if someone else said it. Anyway the house smells like old brass now.

Somebody at church handed me a grocery bag last Sunday. Turned out it was her mama's housedresses, all them little florals from the sixties, some still with the buttons on. She said she couldn't bear to toss them and didn't know who'd want them. I told her I'd take them home and see. I sat with them on the kitchen table a good long while before I touched the scissors. That's the thing people don't understand about cutting up somebody's clothes. You got to ask permission first, even if they can't hear you. Now I got the pieces laid out on my cutting mat, and that old polyester and cotton is telling me exactly where it wants to go. That rose pattern is going to be the center of a star block, I can feel it. The Lord works in strange ways, honey. That woman's got no idea her mama's dresses are about to live fifty more years in a quilt on my wall.

Started a new quilt today and I'm doing something I ain't never done before. Cutting up my own grandmother's housedresses. She wore these pinks and greens every day of my childhood, and they hung in a cedar chest for forty years after she passed. My daughter kept them, bless her. Today I finally took the scissors to them. Lord, honey. Every stitch on those seams was hers. You can feel a woman in the cloth she wore, I swear you can. I had to stop twice and just breathe. But that's the whole point of this work, isn't it. We don't bury our people, we keep on wearing them. Working on it at my kitchen table, ironing board set up to my left, a whole mess of scraps everywhere. I'll show y'all when it comes together. Might take me a while. Some pieces you can't rush.