[ This is a second installment to the blog post I wrote in the spring of 2022 about my project to make a quilt out of the T-shirts I wore during graduate school. ]
When I moved to Durham in the spring of 2022, I was excited for new experiences. My chapter in Boston and with my PhD was over. But I had also brought with me a few unfinished projects started in Boston. One of these was my anti-graphics hand-sewn t-shirt quilt. When I moved to Durham I had assembled most, but not all of the 4x4 quilt squares. However, I lost momentum once I moved because the light and seating situation at my first Durham apartment was not amenable to hand sewing. At the very end of 2022, I moved to a new apartment, and I thought that the time had come to return to the quilt. I did end up finishing sewing the 4x4 quilt squares over a short period the following September, but then I stopped. I looked into learning how to use a sewing machine to assemble the squares or paying someone to sew them together for me; sewing them together by hand felt like too big a task to start. The fact that the quilt wasn’t finished and that I wasn’t working on it hung over me.
I found my pregnancy to be more emotionally challenging than I anticipated. I spent the spring happy and grateful to be pregnant and also anxious about being pregnant; I also felt less happy about the rest of my life than I wanted to. I struggled to feel settled in my new house, and in a way that felt separate from my impending single parenthood, I felt sad about being single. And I was tired, in a new I’m pregnant way that was distressing since I have always been blessed with energy. In April, I started to make a real effort to take advantage of the longer days and run after work routinely, my go-to action when my mental health drops. It helped a bit. In late May I travelled - first to the Northeast for family events and then overseas for the first time since 2019. And then I came home with covid. When I finally recovered from covid, I experienced the promised 2nd trimester recovery in energy levels. This, combined with a visit from my mom that helped me reset my feelings about my home, as well as it being my favorite season (SUMMER!), helped lift me out of my sadness.
From this new place, it seemed possible to face some of the things that I hadn’t been doing, and I pulled the bag with the quilt squares from my closet. Over the next five months, I assembled the quilt top. First, I sewed together a row of four squares, and then I added the row to the quilt along the long edge. I repeated this six times! I found that as long as I pinned carefully before I started to sew a seam, my hand sewing didn’t look bad! This sewing reconnected me with what I had known, but hadn’t figured out how to access for a while, that it’s really good for me to have a creative outlet/project in addition to my job! It was comforting to have so much control, and to see a linear relationship between effort and result. In the rest of my life I constantly felt that there was so much I was supposed to be doing and failing to do, and to take just fifteen minutes before going to bed to sew was an act of prioritizing my current wellbeing.
As the assembled quilt grew, I became concerned about the timeline of its progression with respect to the timeline of my pregnancy. The quilt had taken over an entire large couch in my living room; I needed to finish the assembly before I had my baby. I also realized that if I didn’t “finish” (not just assemble the quit top, but connect it to the backing and batting also bind it) the quilt entirely before my baby was born, it would sit in a closet for at least (!) five years before I could work on it again. I also realized that this was not the quilt that I was going to hand quilt stitch. A friend had suggested “tying” the quilt earlier in the summer and after seeing a beautiful example of a tied quilt made from clothing fabric, I started thinking that tying was the answer for this quilt. But how? And when?
Then a close friend who has been following and supporting the progression of the quilt from its beginning suggested that maybe her mother could help me. I balked - Would I be sad to have not done it all myself? Was it too big an ask? What if the quilt was misplaced in transit? - but eventually I accepted that it was a perfect solution. The weekend before I gave birth to Doris, I went with a friend to an independent fabric store and chose backing fabric, binding fabric, and tying thread. I hadn’t thought very much about what I would choose ahead of time, and there were a lot of choices, but eventually I made my purchases. The quilt top and finishing materials were then mailed to my friend’s mom. After a lot of anxious checking of the tracking information, I confirmed that the quilt-top and additional materials had been safely delivered.
Not only is my friend’s mother incredibly skilled, she is quite industrious. The finished quilt was back at my house (and on my bed) before the end of November. I think it is beautiful.
I didn’t finish the quilt because I berated myself for long enough to work on it that I finally did, I didn’t finish the quilt soley because I was motivated to achieve a goal, I finished the quilt because the project ended up being a useful and joyful companion during a challenging period. Finishing the quilt stopped being about a chapter that I had moved on from and became part of the current chapter of my life. I do wish that I hadn’t felt so distressed by the stop-and-go journey. The quilt was finished in the end, and in a good way.
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