And here’s another
smaller dance,
stitched from the scraps
that would not
sit still
And a baby one
pieced from the scraps
of the scraps
until they were
all used up.
This is the third time I am writing a post about my paper doll series, so I have to find a new angle. It is stories. This particular story begins like this:
When I finished these four small quilts last week they needed to be named. At first I thought to title them Paper Dolls but my good friend Catherine Knox pointed out that this was too obvious. And she was right. The figures in the quilts are modelled on the paper dolls of childhood, but there was a bit more going on in the background as I designed and sewed them. So I thought and thought and after quite a few false starts came up with the title of Storylines. And it felt just right.
I am not going to even try to tell you what was going on in my head as I was making these quilts. Hopefully you will imagine your own story.
Much has been said about the magic and the importance of stories. Books and learned dissertations have been written about the topic. My mentor Don Maclennan, a professor who was also a poet, philosopher and friend, often reminded me of R.D. Laing’s assertion that “we are the stories we tell ourselves of who we are”. This cryptic statement holds a lot of water. We humans use stories – fictions – to cope with the chaos of reality and change. But I promised not to give you a long story!
And this is where this post should end. But I am going to ramble on a bit about my fascination with stories. If I think “book” I see a very tattered copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that I owned as child. Then I think of how my own children would not let me miss one night of reading them a bedtime story. I also think of how comforting bookshelves filled with books are (even if many of them are waiting to be read).
A few days ago I came across a passage in My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, which sums up the gap between reality and fiction; between life and stories:
She said … “It’s not my job to make readers know what’s a narrative voice and not the private view of the author,” and that alone made me glad I had come [to the author’s writing workshop]. The librarian seemed unable to understand. “What do you mean?” he kept saying, and she only repeated what she had said before. He said, “What is your job as a writer of fiction?” And she said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do. (p. 97-98).
In his book, Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari claims that the human imagination and our ability to create stories is the reason Homo sapiens rules the world. This is a simplified summary of his argument, which he makes convincingly and entertainingly. For example, he writes:
We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers… That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftover and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories (p. 27-28)
It is chilling to think how much power the human race has over the fate of the planet. That aside, without stories to warm us, life would be bleak indeed.
Stomach muscles
ripple flesh
into fluid circles of delight,
perfumed garden
and silky night
ancient enticement
sidles down
the spiral
and always the bellybutton
stillpoint at the centre
holy omphalos
that feeds the embryo.
I don’t dare
to do this dance.
Instead I stitch
baubles and beads
onto bold blocks
of sari silks and satins
bellybutton them
with embossed blazons
then circle them
with more stitchery
and couchings of gold.
Take an old lace doily, a piece of 10 inch square calico, a skein of hand dyed silk thread and add cotton batting and a backing. Pin these together, thread your needle, begin to stitch and see where it takes you.
This is what I did at the start of the National Arts Festival. (see Post # 20. On inspiration.) I stitched during in-between times to catch my breath between shows and visits to the exhibitions and craft market. It calmed and refreshed me for the next bout of festival fun. Here is a close-up of the doily. I quilted it down and added a bit of purple stitching in the centre and around the edge.
It was by chance that I found a pair of these lovely lace doilies at one of the craft stalls and, while admiring it, saw the centre of a flower in the pattern. Two years ago I started stitching a series that I called From a Secret Garden, which were inspired by the delightful drawings of flowers in Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Colouring Book by Johanna Bassford.
To repeat myself – I think that even the best machines can’t beat hand stitching and hand quilting. (See Post #3. On hand quilting) It has just struck me that embroiderers and quilters use repetition of stitch and pattern for effect. Ha!
I made you a quilt
of forty-two blocks
(six across seven down)
with 21 squares
in strips of berry colours
and 21 plain blocks
of burnt orange.
As I sewed I hoped
love would stitch herself in
but wooed her, anyway,
with slivers of silver and gold
for bright strips
on the plain blocks
from 1 to 21
to count the candles on the cakes
that processessed through the years
Not really. This week I did a workshop with star teacher Doortjie Gersbach and it was nose down and careful concentration. In two days we made two large stars (out of 13) and there was no time to look up at the sky and daydream. I have been quilting for 18 years and this is the most challenging stitching I have done. Here are my stars.
The workshop More Stars in the Sand was the fifth workshop I have done with Doortjie. Each time she delights and surprises us with her stories and with the new stitching tricks and methods that she teaches. And she comes to us. Grahamstown was her 46th (and last) stop on a three-month tour of the county with her husband Lochie. Each year they travel from town to town in South Africa to give prearranged classes. They come with a mobile shop and for us who live in small towns it is a real boon to be able to buy beautiful fabrics, notions and clever quilting aids – like a sandpaper board that keeps one’s fabric stable while drawing seam lines onto it.
Here are a few of the gems that Doortjie let drop during the star workshop:
For those of you that are still reading, here are the technical details on the making of the two stars. The first block we made was the good old Ohio Star (pictured top, left) and that is not too difficult a block. Except that Doortjie taught us how to make it using templates. This meant first making the template, then cutting out each shape in fabric with a seam allowance, then drawing around the template exactly to transfer the shape onto the fabric, then precisely pinning the pieces together along the lines taking care to match the corners, then carefully machine stitching along each line in a set order. For this self-confessed slapdash sewer that was quite a challenge.
It didn’t help that I drew my lines on the right instead of the wrong side of the fabric. I did not want pale inside-out stars, so I redrew the lines and then had to rub out the pencil marks that showed once I had stitched the star together. The first step of choosing the fabrics for the Ohio Star took quite a while and then Doortjie unerringly advised me to swop them around. And she was right.
Then just as we were breathing out and thinking how clever we were to make an Ohio Star with this template method, Doortjie gave us a real challenge. She let us ride on our accomplishments and did not warn us how hard it was going to be to construct her Two-Colour Star. We soon found out! It then became clear why she had shown us how to use this template method. It would not have been possible to make this star in any other way. She had us producing prefect Y joins. This was for the points of the stars where the three triangles were made to meet by inserting the equilateral triangle into the notch between the two long thin triangles. Here are some snaps of the action:
Today I googled the Y-joint and learnt that it can be used to machine piece hexagons. According to the Craftsy site, most eight-pointed stars, tumbling block designs and machine-pieced hexagon quilts require the Y-seam construction. https://www.craftsy.com/quilting/article/easy-y-seam-tutorial/
It was a completely absorbing workshop. We were all so determined to construct that difficult star that we forgot about any cares or woes. Who needs a holiday when you can spend a day making a star with Doortjie Gersbach!
Here are photographs of quilts I made during two previous workshops. On the left is a double bed quilt called Patched and made using Doortjie’s “beerbox” method. For the Circles from Africa workshop I did not follow the guidelines of using bright African prints for the circles. Jammer [sorry] Doortjie!
It came from
a book on African art,
this yearning
to visit the temple,
to stand barefoot on that cold marble,
to see the diamond mosaic,
to feel the space and antiquity
From the familiarity
of my workroom
I went there,
stood and cut cloth
to match the marble,
sat and stitched
one inch blocks of fabric,
pointed and neat cornered,
one to another
to echo the pattern
and still my heart.
Mariss Everitt
