belle’s summer quilt

The quilt is finished!

To recap: The quilt-top is made out of twelve of Belle’s stripey t-shirts, cut up and pieced together; I used an old blue sheet for the quilt back and one layer of light cotton batting. I tried various methods of hand-quilting the top, but didn’t like the way the stitches interfered with the fabric. So I tied the quilt with opal sock yarn (left over from a pair of socks I made for Mr B) and the ties are fixed so that they show through on the back rather than the front. Finally, I cut 2″ strips from a pair of gingham trousers, sewed them together, and used them to bind the quilt.

I am very pleased with the finished quilt. It was a difficult thing to make, but the process has been a thoughtful and a focused one.

Today we took the quilt out for a picnic in Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens. Everything is flourishing.

We picked a nice spot. . .

ate a picnic. . .

and enjoyed the scenery. . .

Here’s me shaking the crumbs from the quilt when it was time to go

and folding it up

and here’s a final shot of the quilt out on the grass in the sun.

In 2002, just after we moved to Edinburgh, Belle came to stay with us, and we went with her to the Botanic Gardens. It was this time of year, and just this kind of summer weather too. We had a lovely day. Belle loved flowers and plants and had a beautiful garden. It felt right to be taking a quilt made from her things to a place she liked so much, full of the plants that she enjoyed. Here she is in the glasshouse in the Botanic Gardens six years ago.

help

I fear I may be developing Brocketty tendencies. I spent the morning binding the quilt:

The binding is not made from T-shirt material like the rest of the quilt (couldn’t face the horror of binding it with jersey) so I cut strips from a pair of trousers instead. The fabric is a nice, stable cotton-linen mix. Worked well. So I am almost pleased with the quilt now. More from it tomorrow. But after my craft task was complete what did I do? Write? Go for a run? Read the knitting supplement in the Guardian? Oh no. I made wee buns. And then I decorated them.

Ye gods. I actually enjoyed piping the icing and everything.

Nothing wrong with making or decorating buns, you might say, but it is so unlike me that I felt something must surely be amiss. Anyway, they turned out reasonably well — I managed not to have a disaster with the colour in the icing, and, though they are intended for tomorrow’s picnic, I’ve already guzzled a fair few of these babies. I put orange zest and orange oil in them. Very tasty. So, I’m hoping this isn’t the start of something worrying, and that the cake-decorating activities are just part of the general novelty of having unimpeded access to the mixing bowl. Mr B usually does all the baking around here. And today he is out running in the hills.

Speaking of the kitchen, here’s something in it I like just as much as the buns — two moth buddies who came in our open windows last night. They are so pretty I haven’t got the heart to evict ‘em.

If they were of the wool eating kind it would of course be a different matter.

sounding out

Me and the quilt have been sounding each other out for some weeks now.

I have been trying various things on the quilt top. Various threads. Various directions. None of them felt or looked quite right. Whatever feeling I followed, the stitch lines just seemed wrong. Stitching the quilt top seemed to work against the wonky lines of the panels, against the stripes of the t-shirts. I felt I was losing Belle’s clothes in the stitches.

But then I tried tying the corners of the panels with sock yarn, so that the tie-ends showed on the quilt back.

This looked right. Sort of sounded right too. Like gracenotes rather than interference.

So I’ve sounded this quilt out now. It is tied, and trimmed, and I have the binding ready. It will be finished this weekend. A celebratory picnic is planned.

till then . . .

good morning

Hurrah! Apple have agreed to replace the logic board on the computer. We do not have to shell out. There is An Adventure planned for later. But I have a few hours this morning for reading, knitting. . .

. . . and taking a new direction with Belle’s quilt

slip-stitching

Jeanette’s question about technique has been on my mind. How do I want to finish the top of the T-shirt quilt? Really? How does it want to be done? I don’t want to lose the fluidity, or the pouffiness, or the wonkiness, for that matter. How much hand quilting should I do? Just in the ditch between blocks? Perhaps I should just tie it?

I have been really troubling about what I should do and how it will look. Meanwhile, I am halfway through sewing another thing for me, for wearing. I have been working on it this evening with a couple of beers and radio 4 (that’s living, I tell ya). I am at the finishing stages and I had an odd but good moment, which has led me to think I should try not to worry about the quilt, and take the attitude I usually do with knitting, which is to just go with it, and it will probably be alright.

While I like crewel embroidery, and quite enjoy finishing my knitting (unlike others I know) I have always disliked slip-stitching linings and hems — this, I think, goes back to having to sew the hems of my school skirts (sorry, Ma, but you know it is true — I was a horribly precocious 12 year old, and would have rather been reading a Georgette Heyer novel, or pretending I had the stigmata, or something, than slip-stitching the hem of a skirt). Anyway, there was a moment this evening, while distractedly slip-stitching the lining of my garment to its zip-tape, when my hands just started to work the other way . I had changed what I was doing and was slip stitching the right way! it felt right!

Gawd knows what is different, I really can’t explain it, but all I can say is that before I started sticking the needle in like this my hands were doing The Bad Thing that they must have been doing since I was twelve. I only hated slip-stitching because I was a crappy slip-stitcher. Suddenly I was zooming down the zip like nobody’s business and it felt good and speedy, like crochet, or picking up stitches, or knitting continental. Somehow, and quite unlike my approach to knitting, I have never thought about sewing or embroidery as a physical technique — I did not reflect on the appropriate motion of my hands. This is evidently about my attitude to the activity, and I do feel that something has changed. It is equivalent to a moment about three years ago when, after winding a strand around my ring finger, I felt that my right hand had begun to feed the yarn towards the needles in a way that controlled my tension in a way that was exactly right. I’ve had a few beers, remember, and the temptation here is to wankily philosophise, but I do feel, just as I do with knitting that the thing is to Trust Yer Hands. Now it is time for the T-Shirt quilt top. . .

Note: my slipped-stitch lining fabric has a knitting theme. Of course it does!

from twelve t-shirts

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.

jaunt

We went on a jaunt to the National Museum of Costume outside Dumfries, to see the “Hip Knits” exhibition. In the Museum’s permanent collections, there were some fabulous nineteenth-century dresses and shoes on display, but my favourite thing of the day was this:

incredibly fine linen whitework, backed with pink silk, and made by one Jenny Grant in 1724.

I have to say that the so-called knitting exhibition was something of a disappointment. As it was being held in a branch of the National Museum of Scotland, and given the rich variety of knitting traditions Scotland has to boast, I was hoping to see at least something about the history and techniques of Scottish knitting. But no. There was not a Sanquar glove, a Shetland shawl, or a Fair isle Sweater to be seen. The emphasis of the exhibition was firmly on the contemporary commercial appeal of machine knitted and woven woollen products. This would have been fair enough if there had been some sort of curatorial direction as to how to interpret the objects on display. But the viewer wasn’t given any sort of context to aid understanding of the small range of garments arranged about the room. A catalogue, or display cards, might have told us, for example, about the history of machine knitting and weaving; the emergence of distinctively Scottish modes of textile production; the evolution of industrial techniques; the importance of different regional knitting traditions, and so on. But there was very little of this nature for the viewer to get a handle on. There was no exhibition catalogue, and the information on the display cards told us only, in the briefest of terms, about the designers and producers of particular garments.

Donna Wilson’s Cuddly Clouds

While there was an overkill of the sort of brightly coloured, machine knit cashmere that tourists to Scotland seem to find endlessly appealing, objects and artefacts made in distinctive locales by innovative new Scottish designers were relegated to the edges of the exhibit. The most interesting things there (for me at least) were Donna Wilson’s witty machine knitted objects (Wilson also collaborates with the successful Orkney company Tait & Style) and Andrea Williamson’s beautiful muffler, influenced by both Shetland and Scandanavian design traditions. I liked looking at these things, but I wasn’t sure, in the end, what sort of relationship I was meant to conceive between these objects and the Vivien Westwood suit made up of jigsaws of woven tweed, or the pair of turquoise cashmere knickers. And while one could buy, in the musuem gift shop, Sarah Dallas’s Scottish Inspirations , in the exhibition proper one saw very little Scottish hand knitting at all. In the end, all these “hip-knits” said to the viewer was: here are a few woolly things that happen to be made in Scotland. And given how vital and intriguing the contemporary world of Scottish textiles is at the moment, that’s not really saying enough. . .

On a different sort of wool-front, the spring fields were alive with sheep and lambs all the way from Edinburgh to Dumfries. I ate this non-woolly one.

functional poetry

I have been making a start thinking about Belle’s quilts. She lived near Blackpool, and the first quilt will be a jolly sea-side-y affair, made up entirely of her stripey tops and T-shirts — of which she had over thirty. In the summer she was always in stripes. I’ve been looking at different methods of piecing and quilting striped fabrics:

. . .and getting lots of inspiration from the way that Jude makes — and writes — about the texture of memory.

Then yesterday I read Vladimir Arkhipov’s Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artefacts, and it completely blew me away.

Arkhipov is an artist, who, for the past decade and a half, has travelled all over Russia collecting and exhibiting ordinary and marvellous hand-made objects. The objects, and the human stories behind their making, are documented in this super book. The bigger picture here is Perestroika and Russia’s economic and political crises from the mid ’80s to the late ’90s — a period when not not only items of luxuriant or complex manufacture were difficult to get hold of, but when everyday commodities became both scarce and pricey. All of the objects in this book are useful, and the vast majority are born out of necessity — but scarcity and privation are only part of the story here. Arkhipov, and the individual makers whose work he brings to light, show how conditions of necessity produce a particular material grammar; a poetry of ingenuity out of the aesthetics of use.

Here is a poetry of mending quite different from those eighteenth-century darning samplers I wrote about a few weeks ago:

Lubov Arkhipova, Socks, Kolomna (1995)

Arkhipov describes his archive of hand-made objects as “socially responsible art . . . in which people are [authors] of their own histories, histories that have unique illustrations — the self-production of everyday things.” His collection shows individuals as creators not just of things, but of meanings, as each maker accounts for their object in their own words. These short texts and multiple voices often produce intriguing dialogues between the makers and their objects through the narratives, memories, and desires with which they are invested. For example Aleski Solomkin’s contribution to the collection is a doormat made of beer-bottle tops that his neighbour and drinking partner kept flicking over the fence into his garden. Forced to clear up the debris of several evenings’ drinking, Solomkin felt “it would have been a shame to just chuck them all away,” and created an object that, beyond its immediate function, is also a quiet celebration of booze, friendship, and neighbourly-ness.

Many makers also speak persuasively about the pleasure of everyday materials and the creative process. For example, this beautifully made leather cap is formed out of an old Soviet punch bag and a worn out pair of leather boots:

Aleksandr Yakimovich, Cap, Moscow (1993)

Aleksandr Yakimovich talks about how the leather of the punchbag softened up over fifteen years of hard use, and of the “great pleasure” he derived from “making something out of something else” and subsequently wearing it. “Its one of my masterpieces” he says of the cap.

In terms of my own thinking about piecing cloth and memory together, the object I was most drawn to was this quilt made by Galina Svistakova for her son, out of the clothes of his brother, his father and his grandmother.

Galina Svistakova, Quilt, Ryazan (c.1990)

Of this wonderful cloth Svistakova’s son says “I think that things possess the aura of their owners, of a person who may very well no longer be with us, that things all carry information and inform us, and harmonise with other people’s things. I believe they live their own independent lives and that we need to. . . harmonise with them and be sensitive to them, in order for them to work in our favour.” This is the sort of functional poetry I can only aspire towards.

same as it never was

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).

belle’s things

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.