Interwoven and Unfinished
July 2023
My quilting story begins when I was ten years old and my sisters and I each made a baby quilt in anticipation of the birth of my youngest sister, Jenna. My mom’s good friend Beth, an avid quilter, taught us how to make a simple 3 x 3 block patchwork at her house over the course of several Saturdays. We pieced together the quilts on her basement floor.
Recently, I have been deeply immersed in thinking about quilts. Motherhood has catapulted me into a kind of alternate universe of time, expanding and contracting at unexpected and unpredictable intervals. I have many things to do and many things I want to do, but most often I find myself sitting on the floor or the couch or the rocking chair, Charlie lying beside me or sitting on my lap, and I am unable to do much but just think. And quilts have been on my mind.
This summer I have had the privilege of taking an online course, called “Liberation Sewing Bee” with artist, activist, crafter, and educator, Rachel Wallis. The course is centered around textiles as a radical form of making, both in historical and contemporary contexts. Our first reading was the introduction to Fray: Art and Textile Politics, by Julia Bryan-Wilson. In it, Bryan-Wilson references philosopher Roland Barthes’ conception of textiles, in how “he eloquently described the shared etymological roots of textiles and texts (from Latin texere—to weave) as ‘at once interwoven and unfinished.’”
The phrase interwoven and unfinished, which I have chosen for the title of this missive, felt very true to me. Both words and textiles feel formative to my way of being, they feel like my right and left hand, always there, helping me make sense of my life. Barthes’ conception of textiles being both interwoven [intrinsically connected] yet also unfinished [still yet coming into being] resonates deeply, giving shape to the seasons and patterns of my creative, personal, and domestic life.
A text I continually return to is textile historian Elizabeth Wayland Brown’s book Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. She describes an experience of trying to replicate an intricately woven textile based on a three-thousand-year-old remnant from the salt mines of Hallstatt, Austria. Taking diagrams and photographs of the scrap along with her own know-how of weaving, she details the complicated task of warping a loom with her sister, a day’s worth of carefully threading, counting, measuring, and organizing the warp (the vertical threads of a woven fabric). When she begins to weave the weft (the horizontal threads), she realizes that the pattern was so complicated to warp because she had set the warp and weft the opposite of the design (because it was a remnant of cloth, she could not distinguish the warp from the weft). What took fiddly hours would have been addressed with ease had it been set up in reverse. Yet she was only able to reach this eureka moment through the act of making, and for that discovery, she was elated.
The secret of knowing is in the making. In another etymological turn of phrase, chef and author Tamar Adler describes the origins of “instinct” in her book An Everlasting Meal, writing “The word instinct comes from a combination of in meaning ‘toward,’ and stingeure meaning ‘to prick.’ It doesn’t mean knowing anything but pricking your way toward the answer.” So here I am, closing the door of my basement studio, a diver underneath the surface where all is quiet, the daily noise is deafened, and it is only when I come up for air that I can (sometimes) see what I have made.
Sources:
Adler, Tamar. An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace. United States: Scribner, 2012, 63.
Barber, E. J. W. Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. United Kingdom: WW Norton, 1995, 18.
Bryan-Wilson, Julia. Fray: Art and Textile Politics. United Kingdom: University of Chicago Press, 2017, 4.