Like Cracked Porcelain

Hannah stopped brushing her silky brown hair and put down her brush. She was supposed to be getting ready to go to the movies, but had suddenly decided to make a crazy quilt. The idea came out of nowhere, but like many of her ideas, once it came to her, she had to follow the path, or - more precisely - paths an idea always laid out for her. She insisted on doing things as they should be done. The only drawback was her tendency to overdo some things. Nothing really major, but still she could get caught up in her ideas.

It was the attention to detail that could cause problems for Hannah. She had to take words and definitions as far as possible. She wanted to know things, be able to connect them, tie them all together. No matter, since she was exceptionally good at following little threads until she had accomplished what she set out to do. 

The best thing was to hope the threads wouldn’t turn into something beyond her control.

There were so many threads in this case, unfortunately, because of the project that had been chosen. Maybe deep down, or somewhere in the back of her mind, Hannah knew she was going into a minefield. She couldn’t help herself, though.She would work as long as it took to accomplish her plan.

Hannah could have started her project which was also a major investigation when looking at it from her perspective, could have started at several points. She wanted to be cautious and thus decided to think about getting all the fabrics together. She would go slowly, not grab swatches that had been stuffed in a bag and were all wrinkled. They needed to be ironed if she were going to audition them when making the blocks.

Fabrics for quilts came come from many sources, but she knew the traditional ones for a crazy quilt had their origin in the Victorian period. There were many remnants from imported, luxurious, well-made fabrics, all different weights and colors. Some had gilded adornments or lace. Beads were readily available. Hannah had to decide if she had the willpower to select the colors or if she would need to grab fabrics blindfolded! 

The task of making up her mind seemed insurmountable. What would happen if she chose the wrong types of fabric or the wrong colors? That would be disastrous. She would have to audition them carefully. Every color block in its place, in the right place.

Because it was no longer the era of silks, brocades, and velvets, Hannah mostly had to resign herself to regular materials. She only had a small but precious assortment of more elegant fabrics from her grandmother’s belongings and would try to integrate them into the contemporary assortment.

That was a problem, because while her grandmother had gathered remnants with meanings they had for her, Hannah the granddaughter had no knowledge of the original sources nor how or when they had reach her grandmother’s hands. On the other hand, the pieces that had been extracted from her own life were a challenge. This created a conflict for Hannah that she didn’t expect to resolve.

A crazy quilt had been a good choice because Hannah had been storing many of her own pieces of cloth, but also because her sister had given her so many remnants left over from her sewing projects. There were lots of bright colors and children’s motifs that wouldn’t fit, but there was a good assortment remaining once the offenders had been removed.

Still and all, assembling all the cloth in one spot in her sewing room had been an arduous process. She stuck with it, but she lost sleep over the possibility that one item would clash with another and make her look incompetent. It was quite a while before Hannah felt ready to take up the needle and thread it. Even choosing the color of thread had been a challenge, but she went with black.

Each remnant had a memory attached to it. And often, a question as well. She stopped and wondered about these attachments. Stopped and wondered very often, as her mind raced toward answers she had to have. Each piece brought with it a summer of riding her bike, picnics with her parents, perfectly-made jumpers that made her slender body resemble that of a fairy. The jumpers were way too small after so many years, but they were in perfect condition. 

Could Hannah bring herself to cut some of the garments up? She paused often, lingering over an article of clothing made for her by her mother. Some she could not bear to put under the sharp-edged scissors and had to set aside. Others were less resistant and she readily slashed them into pieces for her project.

She wondered where the fabrics that had sparked the crazy quilt fad had been made, hoping they hadn’t all come from a polluted little city in China with slave labor. She had read an article about how Christmas decorations today were being manufactured under those conditions and had been horrified at the photos of red ‘stuff’ all over everything in the small factory, including the machines and the workers. It had looked very little like holiday cheer and a whole lot like a massacre. 

This was a more recent phenomenon; surely the elegant fabrics once used had been produced in a more ethical manner? Hannah couldn’t be sure. She contemplated the colors before her on the table and wished she had the answer.

While she was worrying about the possible sweatshop labor that had produced her own remnants, Hannah continued to think about less disturbing things by way of distraction. One thing she kept asking herself was the history of the word quilt, the original meaning of the word. What language did it come from? When did quilts become a thing? Easy enough to look that all up online, except the internet didn’t exist when Hannah started hers. 

[Narrator’s note: Etymonline says: c. 1300, "sack stuffed with wool, down, etc. used as a mattress," from Anglo-French quilte, Old French cuilte, coute, quilte "quilt, mattress" (12c.), from Latin culcita "mattress, bolster," a word of unknown etymology.]

It would have been comforting to Hannah to know this history of the word when she first began her task, but eventually, after a few years, she found it online. Sometimes it seemed like she was spending more time looking for answers to her questions than manipulating the needle and thread. Her work was progressing quite slowly.

She couldn’t help that.

Hannah kept thinking about the types of quilts that were usually listed in the books. She looked at countless how-to books and started memorizing the names. She wanted to make every one she saw. 

After she had been working on hers for some time, the internet did come to her aid and she could follow all the threads that kept popping up as she sewed. There were many articles and color images of quilts. She wished she could see the Tristan quilt of Sicily, one of the earliest examples, from around 1360. Some histories went back to ancient Egypt for the origins, though, based on artwork. Hannah thought she agreed with the Egyptian theory, although those pieces were far removed from the ones made by pioneer women on the frontier.

Scraps were important then.

Hannah thought as she was reading mostly about art quilts and crazy quilts, which she felt stood apart from the traditional idea of a quilt. In fact, she remembered that she had thought about making an art quilt before she’d decided on a crazy quilt. She decided it wasn’t easy to do what most people called an art quilt and since she’d never taken an art class, it seem pretentious to think she could produce anything decent. That was why she had ruled it out and chosen the crazy quilt that was finally coming to completion after such a long time.

All quilts take longer to be finished than their makers hope they will. Often life intrudes and the quilter is drawn away to another activity. Returning can be a slow process.

It’s important to note that Hannah was not untrained nor completely inexperienced. No, clumsiness was not one of her defects at all. She was skilled at stitching She had been taught to sew a little by her great aunt Lillian, who was still as good as a professional seamstress despite having become very near-sighted. Even with weak eyes, no detail ever escaped the older woman when it came to using a needle and thread. She had been the best teacher a little girl could have asked for.

Other aspects of how Hannah made her crazy quilt - and she had learned that the name derived from the way it resembled the cracked porcelain glazes that had become popular - included: checking to see how the reproduction fabrics had first been made and how they were produced now; whether the envelope method or binding was preferable; how to clean the quilts with the combination of fabrics that could not be washed and their copious adornment; how to hang it on the wall. Things like that, all of which she had to look up because she was determined to do things correctly, follow the tradition.

She hadn’t paid the least bit of attention to the distractions, the searching for the history of the process. They were necessary to the sewing, to the process of creating the piece. They were time-consuming, to put it bluntly. Each fact was like a stitch in the cloth.

Hannah thought, no understood, that the crazy quilt was alive with all the information she had gathered. It was also the repository for all the memories that have been glossed over here because they were too many to be told. Years sewn into the seams, adding texture and strength.

Years of sewing, because a person can go mad trying to do a quilt in a day like one company says you can. If you hurry, your cutting will go awry and your stitching will be sloppy. Each piece may have a story, but the makers must assemble them carefully for it to be a good story. 

Hannah was sitting in a comfortable chair in her living room. Her silvery hair was illuminated by the moonlight that entered the room through a large window. It was late November, but she seemed not to notice. She just kept stabbing away at the pieces of fabric in front of her. It was hard to tell if she was making embroidery stitches or trying to keep the fabric from getting away from her.

Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to choose this project. Hannah didn’t realize this, though, nor did she think it.

 It had been a demanding process, the slow progression through what was now a forest of hearts and minds, a maze of facts and fictions. It felt like she’d been working for years, or forever, on the crazy quilt that had appeared in her thoughts one day, asking to be made. 

Asking Hannah, who had never made one before that, but had decided she must try. Who had tried for so long. Who had learned so much as she marked all those paths. 

Maybe more than memory could hold.

Hannah would stop now. Her vision was blurred, the memories were blurred, her fingertips were callused, her knuckles were stiff and bulky.

She had finally run out of thread, and years.