Search

Y'all, I finally broke down and let my granddaughter talk me into getting a brand new machine. The old Singer I been sewing on since I don't know when, it still works, but the tension's been fighting me something fierce for about two years now and I been cussing at it quiet so the Lord don't hear me too clear. New one came in the mail yesterday. Shiny. Got all these stitches I don't know what to do with. And you know what I did? Sat and looked at it for twenty minutes before I touched it. It felt wrong somehow, like I was cheating on a old friend. My grandmother's machine was treadle. Foot-powered. I ever tell y'all that? I learned on that thing, how fast you go is how fast your foot wants to pump. This new one don't even need me to guide the fabric straight, it's got a little arm that does it for you. I told my granddaughter that ain't sewing, that's supervising. But I used it this morning. Made a little test block, just scraps, nothing special. And I got to admit it sews real pretty. Real even. I still don't trust it though. Might keep the old Singer right there next to it for a while, just so it knows I ain't forgot where I come from.

I keep my grandmother's sewing basket on the shelf above my machine. It's a wicker thing, split in a couple places, held together with a strip of cloth she tore from something years ago. Her thimble's still in there, worn smooth on one side where the needle pushed through a thousand evenings of quilt top. But the buttons. She had this little tin of buttons, save every one that ever fell off a coat or a shirt, and I cannot bring myself to use a single one in a quilt. I've got plenty of my own saved up. But those are hers, and putting hers in my work feels like borrowing something I didn't earn yet. I know she'd laugh at me for it. She'd say, child, I sewed those in so somebody'd use em. I'll get there one day. Right now it's just enough to have the tin where I can see it while I work. Some things you keep whole a while longer.

My Singer finally laid down and died this morning. Just made a sound I never heard it make before and then nothing. That machine has been with me since 1986, my husband at the time saved up layaway money for six months to get it for me for Christmas. I've sewed every one of my quilts on that thing, wedding quilts and baby quilts and funeral quilts, I hemmed my daughter's prom dress on it and my son's little league pants year after year. I went to the store today feeling like I was cheating on an old friend. New machine is fine, it's got all these computerized buttons and it threads itself and I'm sure I'll get used to it. But I sat down to sew just now and my hands didn't know what to do. The rhythm is all off. I guess that's how it goes. You spend decades learning a thing and the tool becomes part of you, and then one day you have to start over with a stranger. I know it's just a machine. But I had to stop and cry a little before I could even plug this one in. If you've been through this with a tool you loved, I'd be grateful to hear you got past it.

My youngest granddaughter, she's 16 and I been inviting her in here since she could walk. She'd poke her head in, look around, and find something else to do. Didn't push her. Just kept the door open. Saturday she walked in, didn't say a word, sat down at the machine. I went on about my business, let her be. Couple hours later she'd pieced this little top, not even a foot square, all zigzags and off-kilter, like she'd been watching me my whole life and just never told me. I asked her where she learned to sew it up like that. She said she didn't. She said she just let the fabric tell her where to go. I had to turn my face away for a minute. That's my grandmother's words coming out of that child's mouth, and she never even got to meet her. Told her I'd help her quilt it this weekend. She said good, and went back to her phone like nothing happened. But that little piece is sitting on my cutting table right now and I keep finding reasons to walk past and look at it. That's the whole story, honey. Sometimes they come to you on their own. That's the sweetest kind. 🙂

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.

My baby girl's wedding was last month and I finished her quilt two days before the ceremony. Two days, y'all. I been sewing since I could hold a needle and I still cut it that close. Every night for six months I was in that sewing room after supper, listening to my old radio, ripping out seams and re-doing them like a brand new girl. She asked for her great-grandmother's pattern, the one my grandmother made for my own wedding back when we didn't have two nickels. I didn't have that quilt no more, but I had a scrap of it. Mama kept one corner of it all these years and gave it to me, and I sewed that little piece of history right into the center of hers. She cried when she saw it and so did I, and neither one of us was ashamed. It ain't perfect. One seam on the back is a little crooked and I could see it clear as day every time I looked at it. But my grandmother used to say a quilt's got to have a mistake in it somewhere, because only the Lord makes things perfect. So I left it. Now I'm just glad it's done and out of my house before I had to look at it one more time, ha.

That old Singer from the 50s, my grandmother's machine, it's still right there in the corner of my studio. She bought it secondhand when I was a little girl and it's sewn every quilt I ever made, every dress for every child, every hem I ever turned. It's got a sound to it, a kind of whir and thump that's as steady as a heartbeat. The light flickers sometimes and I have to jiggle the cord just so. My granddaughter keeps telling me to get a new one, a modern one that does all the fancy stitches and whatnot. And I tried one, a couple years back, borrowed a neighbor's. Made a whole afternoon of it. And I couldn't stand it. Too quiet. Too smooth. Felt like the machine wasn't talking back to me. I know people say tools are just tools. But I don't know. That old Singer knows my hands. It's got my grandmother's prayers still in the metal somewhere. Anybody else got a tool they just can't swap out?

Now listen, I am not a fussy woman, but this old Singer of mine, bless her heart, decided today was the day to throw a fit. The thread keeps snapping, the stitches are all loopy on the back, and I swear I heard it sigh. I've tried cleaning it, re-threading it, even giving it a gentle talking-to. Nothing. It's like it woke up on the wrong side of the basket. I've got a memory quilt for my grandbaby that needs finishing, and this machine is just sitting there, stubborn as a mule.

Took my machine to the shop over in Bessemer Tuesday. Man said three days. It is now going on two weeks and every time I call he says "it's on the bench, Miz Mae." Sir. It has been on the bench since Tuesday before last. I know that bench. That bench is not that busy. I got a baby quilt half done for my youngest grandchild and no machine to finish it, so I been piecing by hand after supper like my grandmother did, and honey my fingers have forgot how. Thimble keeps sliding off. I've pricked myself so many times my thumb looks like I lost a fight with a rosebush. And the worst part? The hand piecing is coming out straighter than the machine ever did. I hate that. I hate it so much. Thirty years I've been telling myself the machine saves me time and here I am at the kitchen table proving myself a liar, one little stitch at a time. Anyway. If anybody knows a repair man in the Birmingham area who actually answers his phone, I'm listening. If not, I'll be here with my sore thumb, humbled.

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.

Now I want to tell y'all something and I hope it don't come out wrong. My granddaughter set me up on here back in 2019. She said "Mama, folks need to see these quilts." I didn't believe her. I've been sewing since I was nine years old and for most of that time the only people who saw my work were people who came to the house, or the church, or a funeral. That was enough. I wasn't looking for anybody to clap. Then a woman in Oregon bought one of my quilts off the internet and sent me a letter. A letter. Handwritten. She said it hung in her hallway and her grandbaby liked to touch the red pieces. That did something to me, I won't lie to you. But here's what I can't get right. I'll spend three weeks on a quilt and post it and get eleven likes from my cousins. Then I'll post a scrap of fabric on the ironing board with the steam still coming up off it and that thing goes everywhere. People want to see the work being worked. They don't want the finished picture on the wall. I don't understand it but I've stopped arguing with it. What I'm asking is this. Does anybody else feel like the thing you're actually good at and the thing the internet wants from you are two different things? Because I'm 63 and I've decided I'd rather be a little overlooked than start sewing for the algorithm. But I'd like to hear from somebody further along than me.

I pulled down a box from my closet shelf today I hadn't opened in maybe ten years. Inside was a feedsack my grandmother cut down and hemmed in 1952, the fabric so faded you can barely tell it was once yellow. She kept it all these years and I kept it after her. I just sat there on the floor holding it. That sack fed chickens and made dresses for three girls and now it's going in a quilt. I don't know what I'm going to put with it yet but I know it's the center. Some things just tell you when their time comes. Every piece of that old cloth has her hands on it somewhere. I can feel her in it like she just walked out of the room. I tell you what, that woman sewed love into everything she touched. It's a gift to still get to sew with her.

My granddaughter ordered me labels. Woven ones, my name and the year, "Gloria Mae" on a little folded tag. I've been sewing near about sixty one years, since I was seven on my grandmother's porch, and I have never once signed a quilt. She said folks need to know whose hands it was. So this morning I sat down with a small quilt top I made out of my mother's church dresses, three of them, the navy and the gray and that green she wore every Easter until she couldn't anymore. I sewed the label on the back corner, down in the ditch so you'd have to look for it. Took me four tries to get it on straight. My hands don't do small work like they did. Then I just sat there with it in my lap a while. It felt like signing something I didn't write, if that makes any sense. My grandmother never signed hers either. Nobody asked her to. And I'm glad somebody wants to know, I truly am. But I kept thinking, baby it's already got her in it. The green's right there. I left it on. Went and made coffee. Still don't know if it's staying.

I have this old tobacco tin on the shelf full of buttons I never use. Found it at a flea market years ago, tins were always good for something. Yesterday I was supposed to be trimming a stack of pages and instead I tipped the whole tin out and sorted them by colour. Two hours gone. Did not touch a single page. The thing is, I don't sew. I have never sewed a button onto anything in my life. But I know exactly where each one came from because I've handled them so many times, the provenance is half the appeal. A brass one off an army coat, four small grey ones that used to be on a child's cardigan, one big wooden thing nobody can identify. I put them back in unsorted. I do this when a piece isn't working. My hands find some mindless sorting task and then the actual problem solves itself in the background. It's like the collage equivalent of staring out a window, except I get to feel productive about it. The pages are still untrimmed. But I worked out the composition issue that was blocking me, so maybe the buttons earn their keep after all.

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 got a five gallon bucket under my cutting table that's nothing but selvage strips. Been dropping them in there since, mm, I want to say 2019. Every last one. The pinked edges, the little dots of color where the printing runs out, the name of the mill sometimes if I'm lucky. My grandson came by Saturday to put up the storm windows and he looked in that bucket and said "Mama Glo, that's trash." I said baby, that is not trash, that is a quilt I ain't made yet. Thing is, I don't know if that's true anymore. I've made two selvage quilts off that bucket and it don't look like it's gone down any. So either I'm fooling myself or I'm a slow worker, and I've been sewing fifty-some years so it ain't the second one. My grandmother kept a coffee can of scraps on the windowsill. Just one can. When it got full she'd piece it up into something, she didn't sort or plan, just sewed. I've got a bucket the size of a toddler and I sort by width. I'm not saying she was better. I'm saying she knew when to stop saving.

I finished a double wedding ring two weeks back. Hand pieced, all of it, and I used up cloth that had no business being in there together. My mother's church dress from 1971, a cotton print so faded you'd swear it was tan, and some bright orange scraps left over from a baby quilt I made in 1998. My granddaughter says it looks like a sunrise fell down. I said well, thank you baby. Put it up on the wall in the front room this morning, over the sofa where the light comes in about four o'clock. Sat with it a good while. Here's the thing I can't settle. Every quilt I've made in my life I made for somebody. Wedding, funeral, new baby, somebody leaving, somebody coming home. This one I just made because the idea got in me and wouldn't leave. Now it's hanging there and I keep looking at it wanting to know who it's for, like the answer's supposed to come to me. My husband walked through and said "that's a pretty one" and kept going, so he's no help. I'm not sorry I made it. I just don't know what to call it. A quilt with nobody's name on it yet feels half finished to me, and I've been sewing long enough to know that feeling usually means wait.

I been sewing log cabin blocks since I was maybe nine years old, sitting at my grandmother's machine with a footstool so I could reach the pedal. Thought I knew everything there was to know about it. Strip, strip, strip, go around and around. Then Tuesday I was piecing one for a new quilt and the light came on at my kitchen table, of all places. I had laid out this coral fabric from a dress my mama wore to church in the sixties, and I put it next to this dull brown from a pair of work pants my daddy had, and something in me just stopped. All these years I been cutting my strips even and square and neat. And my grandmother never did that. She eyeballed everything. That's why her corners never quite met and folks loved them anyway. I had to sit back in my chair and laugh at myself. Sixty years I've been making these blocks and I'm just now hearing what she was telling me all along. She wasn't sloppy, y'all. She was free. I ripped out that block and started over, let the strips run a little crooked on purpose. The Lord's sense of humor, me learning my own craft back to front at 63. Finished it and it feels like her hand is in it too. That's the best a quilt ever feels.

So I got a message from a woman in Oregon, says she saw a photo of a quilt I made for my grandson's wedding, posted it on Instagram two years ago, just a picture I snapped on the porch, didn't even think about it, and she tracked me down to ask if I'd sell it. I told her honey that quilt's been slept under and washed and loved on, it's got a wine stain from the reception and a cat hair woven right in there somewhere. She said she wanted it more for that reason. So I called my grandson, he said he'd make me a new one if I wanted to let this one go. So I did. She paid me more than I ever charged for a quilt in my life and sent me pictures of it hanging on her wall like it was a painting. And I'm sitting here thinking, I been sewing sixty years and the Lord let me live long enough to see folks call my grandmother's way of doing things "fine art" and buy it off a telephone. I don't know what to do with that. But I know if you had told Grandma Viola her granddaughter would sell a quilt to a stranger in Oregon who saw it on a picture box, she'd have laughed and said you were touched in the head. Anyway. Anybody else got a sale that felt like it came from another planet?

I got to thinking about my grandmother's feed sack quilts the other day. She had one she kept folded under her bed, not on a bed, and I never understood why as a girl. Now I know she was keeping it for the hard days. Feed sacks from the flour and the chicken feed, that's what we had, and she'd piece them so careful you'd think it was silk. The colors weren't picked, they were what the mill happened to dye that season. But she made them sing anyway. I hold onto a little piece of one of hers. Just a square, faded almost white now. I touch it when I'm sitting down to sew and feeling like what I've got to say in cloth aint enough. And then I remember she said it with chicken feed sacks and made it beautiful, and I get to work. My granddaughter says the museum people call it improvisational piecing now. I call it making do and making it pretty. Same thing, honey. Same thing.