Picking Up (& Sewing Together) the Pieces

After Jim died, sewing was the activity that gave me the most comfort. Several projects using Jim's clothing and other sentimental fabrics took shape in the months that followed. This series will explore six of them.

Jim was dead. Our parting was sad, but his soul was now liberated from a 92-year-old body and brain that had been exhausted. And I was liberated to move beyond the tight "circle of care," able once again to occupy the full house.

When we moved to the lake in 2015, I designated a corner of the finished walk-out basement to be my craft and sewing workshop. But as Jim grew more dependent, I brought my projects upstairs so we could be together. Over the years, my workshop became my warehouse.

Now, in my grief, I resurrected the workshop. Getting it reorganized was just the sort of absorbing busy-ness I needed. Although I had some writing and drawing projects to finish, anything that took focus and imagination felt like too much.

The workshop feeling fresh again, I settled in at my sewing machine. Transformation by cutting apart one thing and stitching it back into something else was a perfect metaphor for my state of mind. Hang on to the past, but turn it into something new.

Project 1

Back in the '80s when Jim was in bachelor mode between marriages, he bought a worn quilt top to cover the threadbare back of his old blue couch. It was sad. But it was one of those things that refused to be thrown away. When I got into quilting, I saw that it was hand-stitched and made from a variety of old clothes. Its indigo and taupe palette made me think it might be vintage Japanese. The textile people said no. Maybe washing it would brighten the colors. It only weakened and separated some of the seams.

Pulling it out three weeks after Jim's death was a random act, part of reviewing piles of stuff to see what could be tossed. What did the wreckage have to offer? Nothing, except the stubborn persistance of a woman's handiwork that refused to thrown away.

Captivated now, I cut it apart, into 5-inch squares, avoiding the tattered seams. I wanted to brighten it up by sashing the squares with more colorful fabric. But everything in my stash of cottons clashed. The only fabric that blended well was wool rescued from thriftstore sportscoats. Another memory: in February, 2014, I decided to teach Jim to sew. We bought the old sportscoats together at Goodwill, and we made a wooly, masculine-looking lap quilt. Now the scraps from that project were back in business.

Piecing it all together was a breeze. But I had no ambition to make it any larger than a lap quilt.

This brought me to the question of the backing. Buying new yard goods for these transformed old fabrics seemed like a sacrilege. I pulled out a piece of linen I'd used for some dyeing and batik experiments in 2019. Another memory: playing with Procion dyes, hating the colors, doodling with melted wax over the cloth, overdyeing, then throwing it into the indigo pot, wondering what to do with the result.

Here now, it was a chaotic, swirly contrast to the careful weaves and patterns of the pieced top. And the right size. I decided to make the design more complex by placing a square of chicken wire underneath and running a Shiva oil stick over the surface to create a grid texture. Then I added a few geometric shapes with stamps I carved in 2018.

But soon I realized that the backing could not be exactly the right size. It needed to be larger than the pieced top because the quilting process often screws with precise dimensions. And linen didn't lay flat like quilting cotton. It squirmed.

To solve that problem, I sliced the fabric down the middle and added more pieced squares. An aside: being unafraid to cut a project in half to correct a miscalculation is one of the lessons in boldness that sewing has taught me.

This solution was not an abomination. However, when I machine-quilted the sandwich of top, batting, and backing (stitch-in-the-ditch with a walking foot), this geometric spine developed scoliosis. Like Jim's.

After stay-stitching around the perimeter of my new-old quilt, the final task was the binding. It was early September now. My grief found comfort in the loving sacrifice of Jim's cotton clothes, cut apart to prepare them for their next life in a new form.

For the binding, I used the leg of an old pair of chinos, cut into 2-1/2" strips, and sewn together end-to-end.

After my paint on the back was fully dry, I heat-cured it with the iron, then threw the quilt into the wash. The laundering melded it all together and gave it that crinkled quilt-y look. Some of the original quilt-top seams weren't up for it, so a little careful hand-sewing mended the gaps.

Fabric holds memory. Don't ask me how, but it does. A quilt becomes a journal, a travelogue about a time and a place. A quilt isn't only about the prettiness of the final result, but it is also about the myriad little creative decisions along the way.

This little quilt will always hold the story of my emerging from one life into another.

My sewing-as-grief-therapy continues here>>>