The Big Why

 

Whenever I start sewing the binding down on a quilt I start about sixteen inches away from a corner and sew towards it. Getting the first corner out of the way quickly is fun, but it means when I turn the fourth corner, I am well and fully in the home stretch. 

I am very eager to finish this quilt and toss it over the back of the couch and see it with the pink pillows for a few weeks before the Christmas decorations come out.

I've been telling you that Millie has been acting really demanding. This photo should really give you the idea of what she looks like when she Wants My Attention. 

(I told you!)

Later today I'll be meeting my dad at a local restaurant to gift the Garden Party quilt to Marjorie, the Lady Priest. I've made a PDF file of the story of her quilt and collected all the in-process pictures and copied all to a flash drive for her. I hope to have photos tomorrow. 

Pretty sure there will be tears.

So now I'm going to tell you something you may have heard here before, but it's the kind of thing we quiltmakers shouldn't forget. It's WHY we make quilts.

I believe that quilts are Magic. I believe that the very best present EVER is a quilt, that it supersedes money or any other THING. What separates a quilt from "other gifts" is time and touch. Quilts take time to make. Time to plan, to design, to sew, to quilt, to bind. During that time whoever makes the quilt touches every square inch many times. I believe that touch STAYS with the quilt, that the quilt holds that touch, that caring, those thoughts and then surrounds the persons who are wrapped or covered in it. 

Don't believe me? Go back to the very beginning of this quilt blog, back to July and August 2008 and read about the quilt I made for my goddaughter Violette. Violette's quilt was the first fully free pieced quilt I ever made. It had free pieced letters, asterisks and butterflies. It even had a cat hiding in a garden of flowers. I worked on that quilt for over four months, agonizing every inch of the way. I never gave up, even though the quilt changed many times from inception to completion. Violette lay under the quilt exactly once, when I took her picture. Ten days later she died.

To say I and her family were bereft is an understatement of epic proportions. I was disheartened that a quilt I had worked on for so long would be forgotten, tucked away in a drawer somewhere. One of my friends reassured me that would never happen. "Just wait," she said, "that quilt will be a comfort. You'll see."

After Violette's funeral (the quilt covered her tiny casket; not exactly the way I wanted to remember it), her eldest brother put the quilt on his bed, "so she wouldn't be alone." Weeks later her mother admitted that during one particularly rough night when she couldn't sleep, she went to get Violette's quilt from her son's bed and covered herself with it. "I fell right back to sleep, and slept so much better... I slept under it a lot after that. I even woke up one morning to find my husband sleeping under it...  It has become the quilt everybody wants. When anybody here is feeling blue or they are sick, they sleep under Violette's quilt..." (And every time I visit, I get to sleep under it. It always brings tears to my eyes.)

Yeah. Hearing that story took my breath away. But since then, I've heard other similar stories, so I know that quilts REALLY ARE as Magical as I think they are.

So remember this: When you gift a quilt, the recipient does not care if it is an original design or if it came from a book, a pattern or a kit. They do not care if the fabrics are "designer" or left over. They don't care if you bought fabric from eQuilter or the local big box sell everything store. They do not care if your seams are perfectly straight, if your quilt lies flat or if the tips of the triangles are chopped off. They do not care if the quilt was custom quilted, or hand guided quilted, or quilted by a long arm machine running a CAD program. They do not care which side of the quilt you finish sewed the binding on. They do not care if it was sewn by machine or by hand. They don't even care if it was never in a quilt show. Or even if it was.

What matters is that it came from YOUR hand. From YOUR heart, from YOUR time, and from YOUR love. What matters is that it came from YOU. That YOU made it. That YOUR touch is in it. 

NEVER underestimate the importance of that.

That is the rock bottom reason I make quilts, and frankly, I can't think of a better legacy.

I'll never be a millionaire. I'll never be so famous everybody knows my name, but there are people I love who sleep under my quilts every night and feel that love. Hell, even I don't sleep under a quilt I made. I sleep under a quilt that my best friend made for me, and another friend of ours quilted.

Like I said, tears.

**Update: I added a photo of Violette's quilt.

Love, Love, Love

My son, his cat, and the Magic Carpet quilt I made. Love, love, love. This picture tells why we make quilts.

Yeah.

Why?

I don't make quilts for the usual reasons, if there is any such a thing as a "usual" reason. Sure I make quilts for people I love, but the other quilts, the word quilts, those I make for me because I have an idea I want to push around.

It just so happens that the ideas I push around end up in fabric. I have arthritis in my hand, so I can't draw because it hurts to hold a pencil for two hours. It's also one of the reasons I don't paint.  I love fabric, I love to sew, I love color and I love solving puzzles. I can do all those things with fabric.

I love breaking the rules in such a way as to reinforce those rules at the same time. I love making you look. I love to fool you, to trick you, to make you get closer, to make you LOOK, to make you discover.

When I tell my students that one of my goals of my quilts is to reach out and grab the viewer by the shoulders, pull them close and say "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!" I am not joking. I want more than the five second glance. I want more than the "oh look that's a --------- pattern / design in -------- color scheme. I can / did / know how to do that." I want my quilts to be the "greedy little songbird," the diva, the star of the show.

I want to knock your socks off.

Where I differ from most quilters is my Art training. Not that I learned design, color, balance and all of that. It's that I come from a place where if it isn't working you erase, and start again. You are OBLIGATED to start again. I come from a place where the emotional response of the viewer is more important than good technique. I come from a place where a great piece of Art cannot be quantified by the number of stitches per inch or how square or flat a quilt lies. In my world, the quilt police are burned at the stake ignored.

In my world, the nicely executed piece in a ubiquitous color scheme isn't given a second glance because it has nothing unique to recommend it. In my world a quilt made with ten thousand pieces is a yawner. So what? Big deal. Who cares? Who wants to make a quilt look like it was made by a machine?

There are lots of "pretty" quilts out there and they each have their purpose, and that's great, but that's not what I am after. I want more than "just" pretty. (There are lots of pretty paintings out there too, and I'm not in love with those either.)

When folks tell me my quilts are "cute," I have to restrain myself from rolling my eyes, although I've come to realize most viewers have no vocabulary for the kind of work that I do. I've come to appreciate the long pause, the silence, the soft "wow."

My son, who grew up in a family of artists and literally went to art shows every other week from the time he was two weeks old until he graduated from college in his early 20's, looked at one of my quilts in progress and said, "Mom, did you line this lady up so her hat was above the tops of the other letters? Because it looks like it's the dot on the letter "i."

Yes my darling.

"Wow, Mom," he said later, "These two MISS words. If you look quick you think they are made of exactly the same fabrics in each letter. But they're not. They're close, but they're different. You did that on purpose, didn't you?"

Indeed I did.

"Mom, those fabrics in that bland Crayons quilt. Did you pick them so they'd almost disappear? Did you do that on purpose?"

You bet.

"Why? You hate those bland colors."

Well everybody was making these "low volume" quilts and I was getting awfully sick of them. Like if it's low-volume it's more special. So I wanted to make a low-volume quilt of my own, and I wanted to make it with letters, mostly to show that it could be done. The thing that took the most time was figuring out what it should say, because I definitely wanted something that would be OPPOSITE of low volume. I wanted to make a low volume quilt that said, STICK IT! Yes, I wanted it to do two opposing things at the same time. And what could be MORE anti low-volume than something that said, "HEY BOZO! USE ALL THE CRAYONS!" We ALL have a complete set of magic crayons in our lives, and we need to use them ALL, and not just hide behind the ones that are "socially acceptable."

"You know what I like about the "USE ALL" in the Bright Crayons, Mom? I like that the letters start out tall, and get progressively shorter, then they grow again. And then on the bottom, you do the reverse. They each float higher, then settle down, making an arc. You did that on purpose, I know. It looks cool."

"Mom, you think about EVERY little thing? The shape, the placement, the negative space, the way one fabric element blends into another one next to it. You think about ALL of that?"

Yes dear. If it's in the quilt it's no accident.

"It's funny Mom. The Bright Crayons. It's bright, and happy, but at the same time it's kind of boring. So why did you make that one?"

Because I HATED the beige one so much I just HAD to make a bright one to cheer myself up, and to prove a point.

"What point?"

The Black Crayons. You have to work harder to see them. They are still low-contrast, just in reverse. But because you don't usually see black quilts like that, it makes you look, it draws you in. The great graphic artist Milton Glaser made a poster once called "Looking is not Seeing," and it broke every rule of posters. It was mostly black and dark colors. You couldn't read it from a distance. You had to get close, but that was the point. To figure it out, you had to give it more than the five seconds or less that we usually spend looking at something. It's exactly the same premise as the Mashed Potato beige crayons, but I've turned the idea on it's head.

"So okay, where did the Black and White Crayons come from?"

I wanted to do a black and white words quilt for a long time, and I really wanted to play with how you didn't necessarily need a fabric that had color from one edge to the other to "read" as a letter. To reduce that idea to it's simplest, most basic element, I had to eliminate color altogether, and use the strongest contrast there is, the Light/Dark contrast of Black and White. And I wanted to play with the idea that even the same black and white print could look different on a black background as on a light one. I wanted to play with that duality, that one wasn't complete without the other. So I knew I wanted to divide the words in half somehow, but I couldn't work it out.  You see, I was stuck with the idea of dividing the words in half horizontally. The words wouldn't be very legible that way, and if I'm going to make a quilt with words in it, you have to be able to read it.

"How'd you figure it out?"

Like I usually do. I set the idea aside and didn't worry about it. I knew it would come to me eventually. But it's the first time an idea for a quilt ever came to me in a dream.

"Really? I mean, Mom. Really? In a dream?"

Yes honey, cross my heart and hope to die. In a dream.  And I'm really pleased with it, because it shows what you can do when you have limited options. You have to pull out all the stops. You have to really get creative. Two colors and I can still tweak the phrase so that it means something. Use ALL the colors in the box, even if you have only two. And even though I give them only black and white, which aren't really considered colors at all, I get folks to THINK about all colors, about ALL options, and about pushing an idea around and not stopping at the first, obvious idea. Because obvious can be boring.

"I love you Mom. You rock."

Thank you my darling. I love you too.

Why?

My friend Megan, who lives in Sydney Australia, asked about my plans for the chicken quilt once I finished it.

My response: "I have no idea."

Megan wrote back, "I was just curious, Lynne. You invest a lot of time and thought and skill in your quilts, so I wondered whether you used their eventual use (eg, gift for someone special) as a motivator to keep solving the problems/challenges, or whether the satisfaction is sufficient in itself."



It's an excellent question. I like making quilts. I love solving the problems and challenges they present. I call it "cracking the nut."
 
When I was making the Sunburst Rainbow quilt, I sewed two rows together wrong. Oops. How could I make that work?

It looked good, so I just kept going. When I saw something else that looked good, I changed direction and incorporated that too.

How could I make the FUN interesting on Julie's quilt? The words "Miss the fun..." kept going around and around in my head. MISS the fun... what about if I made some hidden FUNS in the quilt? You could miss them...

How could I keep the brown background in the Black Box quilt interesting while I used only one fabric throughout? The scraps on my table gave me the answer... made fabric.

How can I convey the concept of TOO MUCH CHICKEN without saying "too much chicken?" I could play with the letters... so I tilted the second A in SALAD.

I could also make the letters jump around, look like they're sleeping or just leave some out.

None of that answers Megan's basic question. WHY?

I am not happy unless I am creating something. To create means to make something new, to look at something differently, to solve a puzzle, to make a discovery, to explore "what if." Having pushed all those boundaries, doing "normal" is dull, dull, dull. Sure, I've made predictable quilts, and I've used quilts in books as inspiration for the routine quilts that I do make, but I always tweak it somewhere along the line, break some rule somewhere, do my own thing. It's not an Ego thing. I don't need to "leave my mark." I just see things and I wonder "what if..." and I follow the idea where it leads me.

For me, it's all about process. I love to create. It's as simple as that. I do it because it gives me great joy.

Change Partners and Dance

When I got tired of doing finely detailed pencil portraits... (and developed arthritis in my drawing hand)

I did something a bit different. I worked with watercolors and made some abstract 3-D pieces.

Some of them made it into art shows and were exhibited.  I was attending the opening of one gallery show and I was chatting with John Hatch, one of my former Art professors from college, and one of my colleagues, a fellow painter.

"What do you do," she asked him, "when you get stuck?"

John gestured to me with his thumb, as if he were hitchhiking. "You do what this one does." He turned to me and smiled. "Change partners and dance." With that, he took me into his arms, twirled me around a couple of steps, kissed me on the cheek and sailed off. He was then about 77 years old, and he was that kind of guy. Everybody loved him, and he loved everybody.

It was the most succinct and eloquent piece of advice I had ever heard, and I never forgot it (how could I?). Someday I'm going to have to make a word quilt out of it, but that's another story.

Change partners and dance. It sounds so easy, and yet it isn't. How do you find a new partner to keep dancing in a crowded room, or even an empty one?

What he meant, I am quite sure (and I can't ask, he died in 1998), was that you had to look at things differently. It can be hard to do, you get stuck in a rut, and you keep doing the same thing over and over. You may be good at doing the same thing over and over, but to get out of the rut you have to know you're in one.

How you "reframe" a problem can really pay off. There's a new book by Tina Seeling, "inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity" that focuses on this idea. You can (and should) read the article in Fast Company, "How Reframing a Problem Unlocks Innovation."

Seelig writes, "The simple process of asking "Why" expands the landscape of solutions for a problem."

I've solved lots of quilt design problems by asking "Why?"

"Why do I have to have the background fabric in The Black Box Quilt run perfectly vertical?"

"Why do I have to use the same fabric as background all over in a quilt?"

"Why does the dog need to be centered?"

"Why do I have to make the letters the same size?"

"Why do I have to make the letters easy to see?"

"Why do I have to rip this seam?"**

Please read the article about Reframing. I promise it will be worthwhile.




** Regular readers will recognize these questions, and my responses to them.