Patchwork Poetry

The story and the song of stitch and cloth

I have always loved a good story. And a good storyteller. Both offer the possibility, in spoken word or song, of being carried away for a while into another world, another time, another life. Patchwork, done well, done in the old way, can be both the storyteller and the story, the singer and the song, carrying something of the creator, as well as all the folk who have snuggled under it, onwards. So that even when they are dust, some story or song or essence of them stays.

Its been a while since I started a new quilt, with most of my quilting work over recent months being the finishing of projects begun lifetimes ago, but this year, I have begun what is already shaping up to be a really beautiful, heartfelt housewarming quilt for a friend who actually moved house several years ago. It’s a simple scrappy triangle pieced affair, and is helping me in my eternal quest to use up waste fabric from my huge stash. I have a gorgeous wool batting waiting for it, and every piece I cut and stitch is filled with hope - that it will be lovely, and loved and cosy. And that it will be finished before the winter comes!

I first learnt the art and story of patchwork as a teenager, in the sitting room of a dear family friend. Well travelled, she was full of stories that she would tell me as we cut and stitched patch after patch together. Her home felt almost entirely constructed from books – every wall was a floor to ceiling bookcase, like log cabin quilts, just created from piles and piles of carefully placed stories. She had pots of knitting needles and bags of wool and fabric embracing every available surface and if she wasn’t stitching, she was knitting, or weaving, or sewing or spinning. Sat in my school uniform on her hearth rug, in front of her tiny gas fire, I learned the importance of the basic twist in spinning and while it was another 35 years before I learnt how to actually spin, the seed was planted that day. Granny squares, embroidery stitches, and how to keep kittens off your knitting were some of the lessons in session and I have such strong, happy, vibrant memories of time spent in her company, with her cats and her quilts and her colourful crochet covered sofas. She was the crafty, earth connected, wise old woman I aspired to be.

Beyond the technicality of patchwork construction, and past the passion I felt for the creation of new pieces of cloth fashioned from old scraps – was a connection with the story telling of quilts. The life of the women who held and stitched the cloth, who snuggled babies beneath the layers, who imprinted their stories and songs, weaving them softly in between the fibres.

There were whole cloth Durham quilts at my Gran’s house when I was tiny that I remember the feel and the weight of. With their unfurling leaf designs, tiny stitches and soft, worn edges, it was not so much the designs that captivated me, but rather the memories of all the women whose hands stitched threads through the layers of cloth. Who had they been, what had they loved, what conversations had flowed over and around the cloth as they worked on it - questions with no real answers, save the feelings of connection it brought to tiny 4 year old me, snuggled under its warmth, in the bed my mother had dreamed all the years of her girlhood away in. Somehow that connection with her, and my grandmother, and all of those women whose blood still flows in my veins still strong, and despite the worn cloth and fraying edges, a gentle, comforting, continuing presence.

I held those memories of safety and connection with me when I made my first memory quilt – constructed from a huge bin bag full of clothes and fabric too precious to be thrown away when we cleared the attic at our old family home. Dresses we had worn as children. The pyjamas my brothers had worn when they were small. Mum’s handmade bridesmaid dresses and my Gran’s aprons. My Great Grandmother’s armchair covers. Dad’s favourite golf shirt. Fabric with a lifetime of memories like invisible threads woven through the warp and the weft, holding everything together.

A quilt made from memories to that kept her warm until her last breath curled out of a hospital window into a frosty Winter Solstice night. A quilt that keeps my children warm now when they are unwell, and need extra, snuggly cosiness and a handful of stories about all the people who came before them, as a small sliver of respite from feeling grim. Tiny patchwork poems that help them connect with who they are, and who they came from, the ghosts of their ancestors dancing through the colours and patterns of the cloth, still here. Still here.

I think, when I am making quilts - whether memory quilts from clients clothing or scrappy ones from cloth once destined for the bin - the hope I stitch into them, is that they will last as long as this beautiful Durham quilt has and maybe carry the story and song of me, and all the women I was, and all the women who made me, out into the wide, wild future.

Love, Kate