Quilting saved my life
A craft that demands that you live.
(CW: Childhood trauma, DV, Self-Exit)
It is Sunday, July 22nd. I sit in the park listening to my good friend Ian Finkelstein's Piano playing. My partner is working on the sound equipment for the concert, and I am sweating profusely through my t-shirt. I wish I had a quilt to sit on instead of these small blankets. I'm allergic to the grass penetrating through the thin thread counts. I wouldn't be itching if I had a quilt of my own.
It has been three years since I began quilting. Within my body, it has been a lifetime. I have pricked and prodded my fingers to the point of callus. I have bled into some of my most prized gifts, committed to seeing the complete transformation of the fabric. I scour thrift stores and come home to bags of donated clothing from friends on my doorstep: precious parcels waiting to mutate. The act of Quilting has transformed the fabric and my soul, providing a therapeutic outlet for my emotions and a means of expressing my deepest feelings. When I get the opportunity to see a quilt's metamorphosis, it is reflected to me that mending is possible- change is possible- and it is inevitable in the fabric of time.
This is the first contact that I can remember with a quilt.
When I was a child, my stepmother and father had a horribly abusive marriage. Emotionally, Psychologically, Mentally. My brother has autism, and they refused to get him therapy in those years. I developed a horrible case of ARFID (that I still struggle with from time to time) from food control in the household. Amongst nightly fights between the resident adults, my father repeatedly refused to give my sister and me our own room, which I now recognize as being because of their dynamic and my father’s desperation to escape. With my father and stepmother’s dysfunction and one self-protection mechanism of escape from my father's problems later, the prospect of having a private space in that house reached farther and farther into oblivion. In my mind’s eye, I wanted my room to be yellow and have a single twin bed. 'My room’ never came to be because of the sacredness of the ‘Computer Room.' The Computer Room will come up again- it is in this room that I have the most early memories of my father.
Anyways, I slept on my younger brother's top bunk when I stayed over that house. He would push my mattress up with his feet all night sometimes, refusing me any natural sleep. He would kick in an endless rhythm. He did it for my rageful attention. The point of this anecdote is that in this chaos, my stepmother regularly covered the thinnest and lumpiest mattress I've ever slept on with her grandmother's quilt. I can't quite remember what the quilt looked like; there are whispers of white, black, red, and green when I think about that quilt. It was falling apart, and the part where the worn batting was exposed made my skin crawl. My stepmother was not a kind woman while married to my father, but this was one of the ways I felt like she tried to care for me. She slept under the same quilt when she was a child. Allegedly. She was known to lie. I don't have the retroactive energy to determine whether or not she lied about this, but I hope her story is real.
I have always had an obsession with blankets. My school blanket from kindergarten is on my bed- it still lives with me through my everyday routine. The colors are still as vivid as I remember them, and the chemically dyed fleece has maintained its appeal throughout the 19 years I can remember having it. I plan to make it my child's first quilt one day (with the blanket as the back). I still have the blankets my mom kept in the back of her Burgundy Taurus- the car of my childhood. A red fleece with a bold black blanket stitch edge and a matted brown fleece with a piece of gum matted into it from the late 2000s. Saved plane blankets, the familiar gauziness of white starched hospital covers, the cozy pile of Amtrak blankets in the sleeper cabin train fold-out, or the blanket warmer before a surgery that is eerily similar to the massage table warmer blanket (perhaps they are the same device…) The smells they hold and the textures that each blanket creates leave room for a private, encasing, transportive home. The feeling of a cloak at the end of the day, just for you and invited dream-time passengers. I don't go a night without a cover. I can't sleep without one.
When enslaved Black people were in the possession of plantation exploiters [human traffickers], they were responsible for their personal spaces while surviving slavery. During the day, enslaved peoples made quilts under the control of their oppressors (and subsequently, those oppressors would compete with other oppressors about whose captive could make the 'best' quilt). In their quarters, Black people were responsible for securing their comforts, including housing, insulation, and bedding to keep them warm. Most were not given beds. In place, many used feed sacks, newspapers, and quilts if they had the time.
Quilts could be made quickly to create a mock bed from a large stack, often made from what Black people had available (recycled hand-me-down clothing, feed sacks, rejected cotton, etc.) This tradition followed deep into the lifestyles of Black people on this land as a popular tradition- a way of survival- as late as the 20th century in the South. Some still use quilts for insulation in the South during the colder months of the year, and many quilters often stack quilts on their beds so they remain aired out to breathe instead of storing them away to wrinkle.
The history of Quilting on Turtle Island is more than the reconstructed history of quilting as an older white woman's hobby. The very beginning of Quilting on this land is rooted in the survival and care work of oppressed Indigenous peoples.* It is a lineage of people who can alchemize leftovers into portals, turn waste and trimmings into treasure, and turn a cold night into a warm dream. It's a history that deserves to be known and remembered intimately.
* I don’t include a detailed history of Indigenous quilting tradition here because I am not Indigenous- and that history is not mine to tell from a perspective that interweaves my history. To learn more about Indigenous quilting traditions and how they tell the story of quilting’s foundation on this land, please consult this small sampling of resources:
Indigenous Textile History on Turtle Island/Abya Yala (Take this with a grain of salt; it’s a wiki)
Late 20th-century Children’s lesson plan for Indigenous quilting history/activities
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My journey with Quilting began in the library- a tapestry of stories and information. I was seeking an application for tangible care work, something that I could connect to when I was alone in a culture of apathy, confusion, and oppression. This day, I learned about Gees Bend, my friends, and North Star for meaningful quilting work. They said that quilting was a work of the soul. On that day in the library, I became a believer. Seeking relief from the terror of art school, I taught myself how to quilt by studying the construction of their quilts through their books.
When my roommates weren't home, I sprawled out the pieces on the floor: pajama pants, placemats, dyed pillowcases, and old lace pieces. There are two pieces here, one long circling strip around the center. Cuts of the same cloth turned around in different directions but still together.
It took me five days to complete my first quilt. I bought materials from the local Salvation Army- I couldn't afford the fabric store the teachers and other students recommended for apparel textiles- and used my grandmother's Kenmore sewing machine. My legacy project. It was a small, twelve-inch Housetop with blocks and stripes backing and a stained baby blanket for the batting- no border so you could see all of the layers overlapping, just like tradition. This quilt was in my bag at Butler Hospital and was intended for a trade with a friend. I borrowed it for an event or show later on, and then the friend moved out of state and went off social media around late 2021. I tried to find their phone number and failed. Somehow, it found its way back home.
If not for Quilting, I would not have made it through my last month in Rhode Island. My nights and afternoons spent sewing were my primary source of inner connection. When I quilted, I felt connected to a long lineage of freedom workers who sought to acknowledge their humanity when their environments denied it. When I walked to school at RISD, I could feel the weight of the souls of the enslaved in the air. It wept and sagged every day. In the market square, along the bay. In the foundations of every red brick building, every living entity, every droplet of rain. In every crumb of hope. I could feel the weeping of a family I could not name but could feel. And when I asked other people about it, they looked at me like I was an eviction bailiff. Their dreams are suddenly at risk of being chopped, stripped, and bagged up in bulk bags like rotted meat. I was excavating something forbidden, and it was their freedom. When I quilted, I could feel the dread in the air dissipate. I felt resilience imbued.
Since my first quilt, I have finished 17 quilts. Every time, I am amazed by the process and the result. I always anxiously anticipate what will come forth: The results, not just the artifact of cloth. Each rock of the needle changes the course of my life’s choices, waking me gently along with them. After years of separation, I reformed my relationship with my great-grandmother Lucille by making her a quilt. In turn, she shared with me that my ancestor Olsie (her mother, my Great-Great Grandmother) was also a career Quilter and that my late great-aunt (Her daughter) was a hobby Quilter. I organized a couple of quilt raffles to raise money for local grassroots initiatives. I have processed my pain and become an entirely different person each time I come in contact with the needle and thread. With this craft, I have been allowed to steward a legacy of profound, covert care- a stewardship that can only be understood by those who can see the entirety of me and what I stand for. I stand for us.
This fall, I plan to finish my first king-sized quilt- and it will be my first quilt for me. I plan to dream under it this winter. I want to have friends over and have dinner on it in the colder months, to have my loved ones embrace in the presence of this year's long labor of change. When I say that Quilting saved my life, I mean that it saved me from a missed opportunity to feel my humanity within my body- to see my humanity reflect and ripple throughout the invisible cosmos. To whom do I owe the honor? Fate. Thank you for that call to the library. It helped me find a home.
smc