20. The Story of a Quilt

I taught school, once upon a time. I taught math to middle schoolers in a Catholic grade school, at least that was the last thing I did before I retired to have these kids. The year before I took the job, I'd had a student in my first grade class with Asperger's Syndrome. Very mild in comparison to some, but definitely in that spectrum. He needed everything to be the same. He needed to know what was coming next. And so I learned to be very, very boring. In a good way.

Math went like this, on a two week repeating cycle with no deviation: regular class Monday through Thursday. On the first Friday, we took a test, no matter where we were in the book or with lessons (7th and 8th followed the book, but 5th and 6th skipped around to build our own curriculum to suit). The second Friday, we worked on a project, which was year-long and themed according to year. Fifth grade did consumer math. Sixth grade was the math of sports (statistics, mostly, but some geometry and physics). Eighth grade was the stock market and economics. Seventh grade was 2-dimensional geometry and quilting.

The first quilt block the seventh graders made had to involve a mathematical concept--like the Pythagorean theorem or A=lw or something. Many were very very simple but they still got the idea across. The second quilt block they made was for a quilt to put together and raffle off at the school picnic.

The first year was, well, fine. The second year, they made enough blocks of a pretty 4-point star that we made two quilt tops to raffle off. I got the first one done in time and I remember being jealous when Olivia won it. But at that point I was hugely pregnant and tired and folded the second one up and put it away.

The school closed and life went on. The quilt top lived in my cedar chest with other unfinished projects. I liked it. I thought about that class a lot, who had been my first homeroom at the school, whose names were not lost to me even if I never saw them anymore--but I did, or at least parts of them. A few still came to church. A few had parents who came to church. I liked them. A lot.

This year, I found the quilt top in my cedar chest and felt bad that it had never been brought to the light. I thought about those students and how maybe I was betraying them by finishing it for someone else--but there's no school picnic and anyway, I did complete the first one and successfully raffled it off (earned over $500 on that raffle, too, not bad). I decided I'd done enough penance. And so had this quilt top. So I finished it. I backed it with a pretty celestial print and quilted it with little 5 point stars all over it. Gave it to Jake's sister. It's a twin sized quilt, not just a throw, although I don't know what she's using it for. In that deep blue with multi-colored stars, it could pass for Christmas if it needed to. I'm sure the class of 2002 would forgive me. It has a good home.

5. Bevin's Quilt of Shame

I hate double knit polyester. I don't like the feel of it, I don't like to work with it. It is a fabric of shame, something out of the tacky led-astray 1970s and earlier, when we were all told we'd be living better through science. I remember wearing double knit things as a child. My uniform skirt in 7th grade was made from the stuff. It is probably still a skirt somewhere in a diminished but still intact form. The stuff doesn't die.

When I was in college, I visited my friend Marita at her dorm and on her bed was a nine-patch quilt made of double knit. Suddenly the scales fell from my eyes. This was kitschy and almost cute. The jewel tones and the black made it almost Amish in appearance. It still had an awful hand (feel) to it, but it was heavy and never looked unmade or in need of care.

So in the back of my mind I thought to myself, someday I'll make one. Just for the fun of it.

And it stayed on the back burner because there are too many pretty quilts to be made. Plus I found denim and corduroy to be far more visually appealing and soft to the touch if I wanted a big heavy utilitarian blanket. I made several denim blankets in college and a few since then--I have plenty of old jeans in the basement to make more. I have a brown corduroy Rail Fence quilt that I use as the "I am so cold and it's 3 in the morning pull this over me" blanket at the bottom of my bed. In order to make a double knit quilt I would have to, you know, procure double knit. Back burner.

Mike's grandmother died in 2004 and sometime that summer Mary Helen gave us something from her house--Mike didn't have any real requests and, having lived through hideous arguments, bloody knife fights, and molotov cocktail parties over who gets what out of which dead person's house, I wasn't going to say a word. But finally on the 10th time she asked, I said if there was a quilt that didn't have a home, even one in really bad shape, I'd take that.

She brought me a double knit quilt, a rectangle Around the World. Each rectangle was 1 inch by 2 inches and hand sewn in the diamond pattern. Hand quilted. Perfect in every way. Mary Helen's aunt had made it. It was lovely and garish and everything I remembered from Marita's example.

Bevin, of course, saw it at some point and died of jealousy. She's not a quilter because she's too much of a perfectionist. That makes for good knitting but not for good home quilting (sure, if you want to be in shows, perfection is key, but the sampler quilt on the kid's bed does not have to be perfect, it just has to be done).

So when I made my plan for quilts for Christmas, I admitted to Bevin I was going to make her a double-knit quilt, mostly because I knew she had access to double knit, working at a vintage clothing shop. She brought me bags full of the stuff, which I sorted by color family and mostly ignored all year. I planned out my pattern. I liked the Around the World but was afraid of so many pieces. I found a pattern for a Streak of Lightning setting of nine patch blocks in a 1930s reproduction quilt book, making them radiate from the center like Around the World but in a hexagon pattern of sorts. I didn't want all the seams of a 9 patch in that, but I love the sneaky triangle setting that creates Streak of Lightning. I counted the squares, found the clothing pieces with enough open fabric to cut however many 5 inch squares. I watched Hotel Babylon on Netflix and put her Quilt of Shame together.

And I must admit it is the most visually striking quilt I have ever made. Kind of a lumpy picture here, attempting to get as much of it as possible, hovering above the guest bed with my camera. But yeah. I kind of really dig it.