needled

You may be wondering what has happened to Belle’s quilts. Well, it is taking time. I have to choose the right moments to work on them. They feel and smell of Belle. Making them is not an easy thing. But there has been some progress recently.

For the first quilt I chose twelve of Belle’s many stripey t-shirts. I cut them up and pieced them. The cutting was emotionally rather difficult. Once I had the pieces, though, the process became more abstracted and easier to do. I was making something, not cutting up her clothes, and the t-shirts were becoming another thing.

So the block design I chose is (rather loosely) based on those used in ‘bedspread 31′ in this book:

(There are some really lovely designs for all sorts of things in here and, because the diagrams are so clear, you do not need to read Japanese.)

Piecing the T-shirts was quite tricky at times, because of the different mix of fabrics. Some are made of pure, and rather heavy cotton jersey, others are lighter, and contain different percentages of viscose, lycra, and elastene. Not only did the pieces (being made of essentially of knit stockinette) want to curl up, each separate piece behaved differently under the sewing machine because they were made of different fibres. And the fact that I wanted my stripes to go in different directions — often against the grain of the fabric — complicated matters even further. Aigh!

Here are the pieced blocks laid out:

you can see how they like to curl. I tamed those babies with pins and sewing machine . . .

. . . and then put them all together:

Hurrah! I have now finished piecing the quilt top, and this is as far as I’ve got.

This quilt is supposed to have a seaside aesthetic — deck chairs and beach huts — and I’m pleased that it seems to suggest this (well it does to me in any case). Because of the unruly nature of the fabric (and perhaps, too, my own ineptitude) there is nothing neat about the piecing, but:
1) I really want the quilt to look like it is made, for its origins to be suggested, if not entirely visible
2) wobbly is a good look. Oh yes. A look I like.

Though cotton jersey — in various percentages and weights of cotton — is certainly not ideal quilting material, the resulting top is satisfyingly soft, and very fluid. I rather like it so far. But rather than face the horror of feeding acres of jersey through my machine again, I am going to quilt it all by hand. This might prove interesting as I’ve never attempted this before. I’m actually looking forward to it, though, which, given the emotional and difficult nature of the project, is a good thing.

Speaking of cotton jersey, I’ve been reading Natalie Chanin’s Alabama Stitch Book. All her projects involve pieced jersey, and all of them are sewn by hand. No feeding lycra mixes through your machine for her! Chanin designs clothes and accessories rather than quilts, and she certainly has lots of interesting ideas for recycling and refashioning cotton — putting a notoriously high-impact commodity to good new use. Admiring the idea of the book immensely, I felt almost ashamed that there was nothing in it that I actually really liked or was inspired by. This is probably because I just don’t go for stencils or reverse applique, or something. However, it was certainly refreshing to read an introduction from a designer who clearly thinks about the meanings of fabric, is sensitive to different textile traditions and histories, and makes these things integral to her design process. But though I enjoyed the book’s introduction, and found Chanin thoughtful and intelligent as well as creative, I did think that the particular spin she put on the history of cotton in the South was weirdly obfuscatory at times. To put it bluntly, it all felt a bit white.

Anyway, more from the t-shirt quilt soon. Have a nice weekend.

I nipped out this lunchtime to visit the Edinburgh Quilt Show. I spent quite a bit of time with the themed exhibitions, among which I saw several quilts, all of them nice variations on the same sampler design, made by students of Mandy Shaw.

This is how these quilts were described:

I confess I was rather puzzled by this. For starters, 2007 did not mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, but rather the bicentennial of the British government’s abolition of the slave trade. Slavery itself persisted in the British colonies until 1833, and was not abolished by the United States until 1865. And there were other anomalies to puzzle over as well. Here were quilts, made by British quilters, commemorating the moment when the British government decided to stop exchanging human beings as commodities. Yet these quilts were not about Britain’s involvement in the slave trade at all, but apparently told the story of Harriet Tubman, an African-American woman rightly famous for her political activities and work with the ante-bellum underground railroad. So the quilts did not actually commemorate Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807, but were rather about a moment and a culture four thousand miles and half a century away.

I noticed (and was disappointed by) a similar sort of historical mis-quilting, in the TAFF quilt exhibited in various venues last year:

This quilt is an amazing — and deeply moving — collaborative achievement. It carefully and beautifully documents the geography of the Atlantic Triangle and the conditions on board slave ships; explores several different ways of claiming and representing historical African identites, and accurately illustrates the activities of black and white British abolitionists. But while a block on the left meticuloulsly reproduces the text of the 1807 act to abolish the slave trade, an identificatory block on the right wrongly associates the quilt with the “200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery”

The TAFF quilt simply made one factual error — an error which I have noticed being corrected in depictions of the quilt in recent magazines. But the mis-quilting in the “Harriet Tubman” quilts I saw today was more worrying, and, I have to say, more pernicious as well. For it is not simply a case of a minor historical inacuracy — an inaccuracy that one might excuse as understandable given the (often confusing) ways that the bicentennial was ‘officially’ celebrated in Britain last year. Rather, associating Harriet Tubman with the abolition of the slave trade is incredibly misleading, and in fact performs a certain harm to the memory of both the important African-American woman and the long-overdue British parliamentary act. It is the same kind of wrongful harm that, in a recent edition, illustrates the narrative of Harriet Jacobs with the portrait of Phillis Wheatley — two completely different, completely unrelated, African-American women writers.

In illustrating the work of one woman with the portrait of another, this bizarre book cover has the effect of suggesting that black women writers are somehow interchangeable, that they all, in essence, tell the same story — the terrible story of Slavery with a capital S. But while they may both be women of colour, a hundred years, very different experiences of slavery, and a whole aesthetic world divides Wheatley from Jacobs, just as the Atlantic ocean and a completely different abolitionist culture divides Harriet Tubman from the British parliamentary act of 1807.

I don’t doubt the good intentions of Mandy Shaw and her students in making these quilts. But, particularly at this moment when the associations of quilts and slavery are so contested and so controversial**, one really has to ask oneself what political work these quilts are doing. It is simply not OK to remember one thing (the abolition of the slave trade) while actually remembering another (Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad). Rather than forming (as I’m sure they were intended to do) a thoughtful and powerful act of historical commemoration, these quilts are actually disguising history, falsely covering it over, neatly wrapping it up rather than bringing it to light. And in doing so, they add another quiet, but nonetheless significant act of falsificatory violence to slavery’s numerous, different, and particular violent histories. The textile practices of a specific cultural and historical moment are here wrongly appropriated in the service of the wrong story. At least the TAFF quilt was trying to tell it like it is. But these quilts — in a manner dangerously sentimental as well as historically misleading — do a disservice to contemporary quilting practice by telling it like it never was.

** For a careful and thorough account of the racial politics of contemporary quilt scholarship, see Shelly Zegart’s article “Myth and Methodology,” in Selvedge (January 2008).

I am wary of posting about something so painful and personal, but feel it is important, so here goes.

A few weeks ago, my mother-in-law died. Her death was unexpected, very sudden, and very sad indeed. Belle was only 64, was looking forward to retiring, and, in fact, would have done so this week. She worked as a cleaner at a local school until the day she died.

Belle was a warm, generous, funny, and truly lovely woman.

Losing Belle is utterly awful, and especially so for her three sons.

There have been many painful moments over the past few weeks, but some of the most difficult and emotional have concerned Belle’s things. I am sure anyone who has lost someone knows exactly what I mean. In all the stuff she had around her, Belle is very vividly present and her presence in these material things makes her absence all the more powerful and terrible. She is there in the chance placing of objects all over her house — the scribbled note of train times; the pebble she kept in her handbag as a souvenir from Malta; the hyacinth now sprouting on the kitchen window sill. Every new discovery of an object in which her hands, her actions, are apparent deals another blow. And somehow it is the smallest things — the things that seem most incidental and unimportant — that are the worst of all. A swimming costume still damp in a bag in her car; a forgotten earring left on a bookshelf; a pair of gloves hastily placed in a pocket against the cold.

The shock of the materiality of Belle — of her presence in her absence — was particularly hard when preparing the outfit that she was laid out in. We selected a beautiful suit — one she had recently worn at a wedding — and I packed a case for her. Selecting her underwear, her cosmetics, the hair-rollers she referred to as her “space helmet”, I felt very much as if I was caring for her. But I would never have the opportunity to care for her again.

Belle’s was a very material life. Her job was hard and physical. At 64 she was still lugging around heavy bags of rubbish and scrubbing acres of school floors. She spent every day dealing with the stark materiality of other people’s mess. But she also liked to make things:

. . . and to make things grow

. . . and she was always a woman of style.

Yesterday, Belle’s sons and I began to sort through her lovely things. This was a task of terrible intimacy. It felt as if we were erasing Belle’s materiality, removing the her-ness of her from the rooms that she lived in. But we decided that instead of discarding all her stuff, we might make it into something new, and, in so doing, attempt to transform her loss into a material memory. So over the next few weeks, I shall be making three quilts — one for each of her sons — out of Belle’s clothes and her fabric.

Making is, of course, no sort of compensation for the material fact of Belle’s death, but I hope it will be an act of meaning and memory at least.