Mistake? Nah, Just Self-Expression

by Sophie

MISTAKES

I'm hardly a perfectionist. I'm happy to take shortcuts, and the phrase "good enough is good enough" could have been coined by me.

Early on I came to understand that this personality quirk was beyond my control, something I was born with. How else to explain my mother's willingness to rip out a seam - several times if necessary - to get a fabric print repeat to line up right...when I viewed my own sewing projects as approximations, good-natured efforts whose flaws were not only to be expected, but inevitable?

Sewing became a fertile place to work out the meaning of mistakes - long before I knew that's what I was doing. Were they evidence of a flawed character, a moral deficit? This was back in the days when our main goal when sewing was to produce garments that could pass for store-bought, a notion that was hard to shed decades later when the publisher I was working for produced books on crafts that were meant to look unapologetically, intentionally home-made. In 1978 - a year when, at age fifteen, I sewed much of my wardrobe - each mistake had to be reviewed with a critical eye: could that skewed patch pocket, that bowed line of topstitching, that lopsided dart go unnoticed, or would I have to re-do it to avoid the dreaded home-sewn look? I knew what my mother would say: rip, re-do. Her own projects from that era - I remember a peasant blouse trimmed with navy jacobean embroidery, as well as innumerable plaid shirts with perfectly aligned repeat matches - were utterly above reproach.

I think one of the things that appealed to me about quilting, when I took it up seriously over a decade ago, was that there was room for both ends of the spectrum. Certainly there were and are quilters for whom the perfect stitch is an endless quest.

But while editing copy for quilt books for C&T, the publisher for whom I worked, I found out something marvelous: early American quilters viewed a pursuit of perfection as an offense to God. To ensure that their quilts would not be guilty of such an affront, it was common to pierce one's finger and bleed on an inside seam. That drop of blood was like a humility offering; by allowing the stain in the finished quilt one was admitting one was imperfect.

I find that notion beautiful. While I never bled on my quilts (despite stabbing myself so many times I had a permanent callus on several of my fingers) I did enjoy finding the errors and then - deliberately and almost rebelliously - letting them stay.

I don't quilt any more, because writing takes up all my free time. But I do love all the quilts I kept, and I have them hung throughout the house. I know where the mistakes are. I sort of love them.

Have you heard of the Gee's Bend Quilts? If not, take a look - they are unlike anything you have ever seen. They literally changed not just my understanding of quilting but of home-making and of life in its entirety. These poor Alabama women undertook to make functional, practical quilts to keep themselves and their loved one's warm at night - but they did so with wild, unfettered abandon, putting aside any notion of what a patch should be, or a block, or a quilting template or a color palette. Nothing was considered prescribed. None of them judged each other's work unworthy. From the site: "The women consider the process of "piecing" the quilt "top" to be highly personal."

I was blessed with an opportunity to see these quilts when the exhibit came to San Francisco. I'll never forget seeing them hung in the museum. I read stories of grief - a woman who made her dead husband's work jeans and coveralls into a quilt that she slept under to feel as though he was close - and joy, and I loved the women's words which the curator of the show had wisely made available alongside their work. There was no talk of "mistakes."

Some day, I'll return to quilting. I'm not sure what I'll make first. But I hope I can bring a fraction of the passion to my work that the Gee's Bend women possess. And I hope that I can take up my needle again without letting the thought of mistakes slow me down.