Mending Fabrics/Mending Hearts

Sometimes the two are awfully close.

 

I was asked to mend the quilt that had belonged to the beloved of a friend who had died suddenly, tragically and far too young.

 

The edges of the quilt had worn away. If this were just a quilt, then it could have been given away to  one of the many charities in the neighborhood. But the beloved one had slept under this quilt, so it was to be somehow preserved.

 

My task was to remove the worst of the fraying and to create a stable edge. The fraying was distributed unevenly around the edge of the quilt. The quilt needed a strong edge that would protect the remainder from disintegrating. the edging needed to visually take a back seat to the quilt itself.  A solid color would overwhelm the quilt visually.

I decided to use an edging I had learned about from  the brilliant quilter Bird Ross. You sew squares of fabric to the edge of a piece and then madly stitch over those squares. It’s a nice way to bind a piece if you are like me, slightly math challenged. I also love this edging technique because you can fine tune the colors along the edging using the colored threads of the stitching to get the color close to what it really needs to be.

I knew that I needed to get the mood of the edging to exactly hit a moment in history, the late 1970s and early 1980’s.

I had recognized some of the fabrics used in the central motif of the quilt. I had a skirt in one of the fabrics. I had worn it to a dance I had attended in  when I was fifteen or sixteen, in the late 1970’s.

 

Like most people who sew, I often buy fabric.  The truth is I often buy fabric not for practical reasons, (“This will make an excellent Shabbat dress.”) but I often select fabrics because they remind me of a particular place or a particular person at a moment in time. I have bought fabric because it reminded me of a sophisticated skirt my mother bought my sister for the start of seventh grade. I have chosen fabric for no other reason than it reminded me of the dress that Mrs. Levin used to wear to synagogue in the 1960’s, or the dresses my chic 6th grade Jewish studies teacher, Mrs. Wachstock used to wear in 1971.

Since my mother died earlier this year I have found myself helplessly drawn to the fabrics and dress shapes my mother wore in the mid 1970’s. I find myself drawn not only to the sorts of garments my mother wore, but also garments and textiles we saw on our visits to “Hippy ‘stores from the early 1970’s. I am loving Indian block prints, Guatemalan hand-wovens,  central European embroideries, Hmong reverse applique, the sorts of things we admired in the stores that lined Harvard Square. 

 

Over the past few months I have purchased fabrics that evoked the late 1970’s and early 80’s for me. Some of those fabrics have been turned into garments for me or boxers for my sons. Some of those garments have been successful, others have been what my sewing friends refer to as wadders, things you wad up and put into a corner because they have failed.

 

So I had an array of fabrics that I knew evoked exactly the moment that the quilt emerged from and in the correct colors.  I cut strips from left overs from garment making and cut up a dress that had gone wrong. I cut the fabric into roughly three inch squares and sewed all of the squares to the edge of the quilt on a diagonal so it appeared that the quilt was edged in triangles.

After the fabric squares are attached to the quilt you stitch randomly and densely over them. This does several things. It means that those squares are going no-where and are really secure. by using several different color threads you can push the color to read closer to what you want it to read. I wanted the colors to blend with the original quilt so I used threads  that appeared in the quilt. You can sort of play Seurat in thread and let the eye mix the colors.

 

As I stitched and stitched I thought about the nature of grief. I remembered how after my father died I felt as if every cell in my body was in the wrong place. I felt that the only thing keeping me from dissolving into a puddle on the sidewalk was my skin. During those months anything would dissolve me into a puddle of tears, a look, a verse of Psalms, a color, a taste. Eventually, I was less fragile. I felt like I had solidified into a new shape. I wasn’t exactly the same as I was before. My grief and formed/deformed me into a new shape but I was once again solid.

 

I thought about how this quilt was being made strong again. It wasn’t exactly the same. It was mended.

My friend came this morning to pick up the quilt. It was not exactly as she had imagined it. It was no longer the way it had been before.

More importantly, it did not bring back the beloved one. My work didn’t really make things right.

 

My friend took the quilt. My friend was in tears.

She left and I cried as well.  I couldn’t mend what really needed mending. That is beyond my abilities.

SAM_5298

 SAM_5299SAM_5300SAM_5301

Comments

  1. I pray for your friend, may she find some comfort in the mended quilt. It looks... mended with lots of love.
    A long time ago I used to wear all black. After my parents died, way too soon, I find myself drifting towards the colors and styles my mom and my grandma wore when I was a child. It is strange how a humble piece of fabric can make us feel at home.

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  2. Sarah, I'm confused, did your friend dislike the way you mended the quilt or was the cry from sadness, which would be expected. I often rescue and repair old quilts if she would prefer a different look and I would be glad to look at it while I am there! Martha Ann

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  3. MAM, I have been thinking about your comment. for many years, i coordinated how our synagogue met the needs of mourners. The work i did included organizing shifts of people to sit with the body from the time of death until the funeral, coordinating meals for the mourners, preparing the home for the influx of people coming to comfort the mourners being sure that there were enough people so services could take place at the house of mourning and also making sure that there were people to lead services if the mourner was unable to.

    Most people were hugely grateful for what we as a community did. There were on occasion people who were so devastated, so angered by the death that it felt easier for the mourner to get angry at me or at one of the other people who were helping out.

    This was a devastating death. I think that the dissatisfaction has more to do with the fact that fixing the quilt didn't fix what was truly wrong.

    It could be that I'm wrong and the tears were about fabric choice and technique...But I think that it's more about how death has ruined some things beyond being able to repair things to how they were before.

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  4. I suspect you are probably right in that fixing the quilt didn't fix what was really wrong. I thought your repairs were on the mark but who knows what was in her mind at the time?

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