Bio 1: one thing at a time
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Out of high school, I became a quilter because my mom had developed pancreatic cancer, and we were going through her things in the attic where we ran across a quilt top she had barely begun. I asked her to show me how to continue it, and she did, with cardboard templates, a pair of scissors, and a heavy black sewing machine she'd bought at an auction. I worked on that quilt top during eighteen months of her chemo and radiation and eventual hospice care at home. I finished the top two weeks after she died, and quilting became a form of continuing therapy for me over the next twenty years. I adopted plastic rulers and rotary cutters to help my accuracy, but I was not a fan of quick methods just because of their speed. I prefer scrap quilts over color-coordination, which has a way of slowing down the process. And, while I am not a complete Luddite (I machine-piece), I have never learned to machine quilt. I like the weight and warmth of quilting by hand.
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| This is not the quilt Mom helped me with but one of the latest quilts I finished. It's a mini I call Lumberjack Butterflies. |
Similarly, when my dad lay in hospice care in my home sixteen years later, I finally got the hang of needle knitting. I'd tried to learn several times before, even tried to learn from my mom in high school. But the quiet time spent sitting with my dad and a little bit of experience with knitting on looms finally gave me the mental space to understand how to work yarn over needles. I'm not a production knitter, and I've let go of the ambition that I should be, even though I will never live long enough to knit through the yarn stash I've curated. I plod along. During a good year, I have finished knitting a couple of items a month, from mittens to sweaters and the occasional afghan. Any more, I finish one thing maybe every other month.
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| A lace stole I made from my translation of a mid-1800s knitting pattern. |
I gloss over my folk art experience to point out that creating things is more meditative for me than it is anything else. I've heard the alternatives presented as Process versus Product. I like finishing a product, but I am essentially a process maker. I like to savor the process more than having finished it. I have a personal blog, Scrapdash, where I share the processes and projects I'm working on for myself. This blog is for endeavors I make that blend my love for sewing, knitting, and beads and that I offer to you. They, too, will be finished one at a time and with the care I hope I have developed over the years. I will introduce them in a later post.
