one patch quilts

My hands ache from stitching.

My feet ache from ageing.

My heart aches from continuing on, 

through all the sadness and uncertainty.

I make textiles using just one patch.

(the technique is explained here)

I select one square of cloth and sew it to another one. 

Once I have a field of one patches, I make them stronger by quilting the seams.

The squares are all the same.

The squares are each unique.

Some are organized into rows.

Others appear random, but don't believe it.

They are also organized.

I feel powerless, unable to start the new textile pieces that flood into my brain.

I feel that if I can just finish these two simple cover ups, I can move forward.

I am calling this one Sunshine and more Sunshine

I wonder what is the urgency?

These quilts are not going to fix the war.

I am calling this one Lamentation

They do not protect against the illness.

They do not save beloved children who die.

But they are not a waste of time.

Rather, they are evidence of a time.

A time that we are living through.  

A time that we are grieving through.

All of us.   

Each unique.

Lamentation:  an expression of sorrow, mourning, or regret

quilts as women's art: a quilt poetics

The body of the quilt is the work of coming to like in yourself what was only adored or ignored by your mother, or other objects of your love or your lovers;

The body of the quilt is the work of coming to like the work of another woman, and the passing through of all rejection and neglect by another woman or man;

The body of the quilt is the work of coming to like yourself as a little old lady and an old little girl and a new little sister;

The body of the quilt is the work of going over all your mistakes and lost dreams liking yourself all the way all over inside and out and all around the whole border not knowing where to start and not knowing where to stop;

The body of the quilt is the work repeating all your moves and liking the fact that you did it all, did all the moving;

The body of the quilt is the endless search, your endless search, but as your companion as you go through the motions of work, as you work your way: by focusing, waiting, turning, twisting, aligning, matching, fitting, pulling in the faraway, visiting with the absent, drawing out the ineffable, amplifying the vestigial, leaving well-enough alone, enduring the unendurable, practicing readiness for the other, learning the lesson late and liking yourself for forgetting it again, and you’re finally looking up and seeing the body of your quilt behind your cat, behind your potted plants, up to your neck, coming out of your ears, and before the body of your quilt you see the people you want to see the body of your quilt and they like it, more than anyone every liked your body, and said so, and you know now it does not matter whether you did because you’ve come to like yourself even more than the body of the quilt, and you can look at it and like it by yourself.

Radka Donnell

The Quilt's Body by Radka Donnell is on page 113 of Quilts As Women's Art:  A Quilt Poetics.  

I read this book at age 40.  It gave me the foundation of my career as an artist/quiltmaker.  I copied many things into my journal at the time, including this entire poem.  

New Beginning, the other side.  I speak about making it in the lecture my pandemic summer.

"Quilts are to mainstream art what poetry is to prose".  Radka Donnell

studio work

I went into my town studio on Friday.

I pinned Medicine Earth on the wall.  It didn't seem right anymore.  I turned it on its side.

At home, I started a new pieced cloth.  I used up all I had of some soft wool cloth.

It's extremely simple.

Walnut dyed.

I've been sewing a lot of squares together lately, and I can't really explain why in words.  It just feels best for me now.

The textiles I make are documents.   At the same time, they hold me.   Also time.  Also touch.

Time is my obsession:  Not to waste it, not to lose it.  Time is an object to me, something you can almost take hold of,  if I could just collect enough of it in one clump. Anne Tyler (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant)

my ordinary yet dramatic life

The life that I am living through right this minute tumbles forward, all around, and is stitched into the work in my lap.

Fabrics from a challenging project become mixed in a personal lived way with my present. 

I spend quiet time with them, hours of time, using my body in gentle gestures,

to make something forever mixed with my ordinary yet dramatic life.