Aspiring to Be a Cut Above

“Don’t you dare use my good fabric scissors to cut that.” It didn’t matter what I wanted to cut. Touching Mom’s fabric scissors was akin to gazing at Medusa or touching the Ark of the Covenant. Do it, and die. So I would instead start playing with toys from my toybox.

It isn’t much to look at. The large, plywood box has a hinged lid and rope handles on the sides. It creaks loudly when it’s opened. My dad made the box when I was a little girl, intending it should hold toys. When my sister and I had outgrown toyboxes the box then became a place to hold our camping stuff. That’s when the rope handles were added, so it could be easily carried. Later, my Mom used the box to hold fabric.

That’s when the box made its way back to me. Three years ago, my sister and I were tasked with helping pack my Mom’s stuff, help her prioritize, downsize, and move her into a small apartment in a retirement community. She was going from a 3-bedroom house with garage and basement to a one-bedroom apartment with only a small kitchenette and no place for sewing or working on cross-stitch.

Mom had always stitched and sewn. Some of my most vivid memories include Mom, my sister, and me in our basement. Stephanie would invariably be playing some form of house. I would play at it but that was never my “thing.” Mom would sew away. Dad was an educator and as such didn’t make a ton of money though I never thought we were ever strapped for cash. They always made it work, and that included my Mom sewing a lot of our clothes. And so Mom would be seated at her graphite gray, Kenmore sewing machine in the dark brown, wooden cabinet, perched on the edge of a folding chair, leaning over and working. I would end up standing on the back of the chair and leaning on her shoulders, looking over her left shoulder while she worked. Now that I think about it, how annoying that must have been, and yet she let me stay there, watching the needle go up and down, up and down.

Mom seemed like a wizard on that machine. She could take any cloth and pattern and turn them into a masterpiece. We were avid church attenders, and Stephanie and I had several dresses to wear every Sunday. We always had a new Christmas dress and a new Easter dress complete with ruffly socks and little white gloves. Mom would make the three of us matching outfits to wear to mother-daughter banquets in the spring, and in my 7-year-old naivete I thought we were the most fashion-forward family around. (We weren’t).

As the years went on and my sister and I became too-cool teenagers, Mom stopped sewing clothes for us and shifted her focus to counted cross-stitch embroidery. She embroidered everything, and she did a great job. As a single, young woman, she had embroidered several tea towels, pillow cases, and table scarves, so counted cross-stitch just came naturally to her. Mom was always working on projects for other people. I don’t remember very many projects she completed for herself, but they were always small.

When she became a grandmother, Mom carried on the tradition of an embroidered animal ABC book for her grandkids. My sister and I have these books, made by our grandmother with animals embroidered on them, one page for each letter. We were the only kids who knew what an ibex is! When my older daughter was born, Mom decided that she, as Grandma, would need to make a book for her grandkids, and she did. Every. Last. Grandkid.

As the years went on Mom would purchase flannel by the bolt and sew simple baby blankets, grouping them with little hats, onesies, and cloth diapers with pins in layettes for women at a mission hospital in Sierra Leone. She was always making things for other people, giving of her time and her energy.

All the years doing secretarial work, and hours at typewriters and later, computer keyboards took their toll on her hands, however. Arthritis started to limit the amount of time Mom could spend on these projects. And another thing was happening at the same time. Mom was starting to lose her balance, and have trouble with fine motor coordination in her hands and feet. She stopped doing cross-stitch, unable to manipulate the needle and floss the way she wanted. The quilting hobby she picked up after she retired started to trail off, too. She still went shopping with Stephanie for fabric, kits, and other supplies, but never made much.

So that Saturday afternoon in Mom’s basement, I opened up the lid of the wooden box and heard it creak its familiar declaration that it would never ever really go away, and peered inside.

Fabric. Piles and piles of fabric. Fabric leftover from cutting and assembling garments. Fabric from my Grandmother’s stash. Fabric from shopping trips for quilting supplies. So. Much. Fabric. I just looked at my sister. We had already unboxed several unopened embroidery, cross-stitch, and other fabric-based kits. Frankly, it was overwhelming. We began unpacking the box, setting large piles of fabric aside.

Memories came rushing back to me. Some of these fabric pieces had been hanging around since I was a little girl. I am dead serious when I say there were scrap piles of polyester left over from clothes Stephanie and I wore in grade school! We began sorting the fabric, and I started to fall back in love with the creativity that fabric can spark. So many colors, patterns, and textures!

When my own girls were little, I had sewn dresses for them, and the window treatments of the house we lived in. The girls would play, and I would sew, just as had been a generation before. I would stand at my cutting table, fabric shears in hand, just as Mom had stood at her table in our basement. I would stitch the carefully cut pieces together to create a masterpiece, just as Mom had.

When I needed to go to work full-time, though, the machine, shears, and other sewing supplies had been tucked away, and then whittled down over time as other things moved to a higher priority. As a teacher, I had weekend grading sessions at school, and the girls were swimmers which took a lot of my free time. I worked hard to establish a perennial flower garden, then two, then three. We planted vegetables. We made short trips as a little family back to Michigan, where I had grown up, and to Arizona to visit my Dad. I would occasionally sew, but not much.

As my sister and I were packing, sorting, and working with Mom to decide about her stuff, I decided to adopt some of the many supplies Mom had acquired and take up quilting. The girls were grown and would be out of the house in a couple of years, and I was no longer a classroom teacher. I had the time, and I needed a creative outlet. We made piles, incorporating all the quilting fabric back into the big, wooden box. That’s when I found it.

I was holding a “flimsy,” which is an unfinished quilt top, made entirely of hand-sewn hexagons. I had never seen this project. I took it back up the basement steps to Mom, where she was sitting with one of the girls sorting through books. I asked her what it was.

Mom’s memory isn’t always sharp. She remembers most things from long ago but not everything. But she saw this and immediately recognized it. “That’s Grandma’s.” I thought she meant my Grandma, her mother. No, this was something that my great-grandmother had started, that had languished away in my own grandmother’s stash. I had never seen it before.

Carefully I unfolded the quilt. Each block had a center of blush pink solid fabric, then a ring of a solid, darker color. Some were purple, some orange, and some dark pink. The next ring around the solids was a collection of prints, and clearly some of the printed hexagons had been cut from garments as there were seams running through them. The blocks were joined together with a row of cream hexagons between them. Folded and tucked inside the quilt lay a stack of blocks made with blue as the central color, but only enough to go halfway around what had been pieced together. I’m not one who is usually at a loss for words, but at this moment in time I didn’t have any idea what to say. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. It was a connection that spanned four generations and I was holding it in my hands.

I resolved right then and there to finish it. Anyone who knows me well knows two things about me. The first is that I don’t have much patience for long, drawn-out, tedious tasks. Sewing hexagons together by hand seems tedious. The second is that when I make up my mind to do something, I do it. Back to the wooden box I went, to hopefully find some of the fabrics that had been used to make the quilt top, but was unsuccessful.

The rest of the day, and move, went smooth. We got much of Mom’s stuff sold or donated, and the rest moved into her little apartment. Since then we’ve moved Mom into an assisted care facility, and once again had to pare down her belongings. She’s in a large bedroom with sitting area now, and is tended to by medical staff daily. She has little use of her right hand and barely more use of her left. Writing is out of the question, let alone sewing or stitching, so my Mom now lives vicariously through me. I send her photographs of what I am working on. A quilt for my younger daughter, with embroidered botanical motifs at the center of each block, a Christmas tree skirt and wall hanging for my older daughter, a quilt for a friend who had a stroke. I made some stuffed fabric pumpkins on a whim for a couple of friends because I got a wild hare to give it a go. Very little of what I make do I keep for myself, which just seems like the way it’s supposed to be.

I found some vintage reproduction fabrics online, and have been using English paper piecing to cut and stitch hexagons together to finish the quilt. It’s going to be obvious that three different women worked on it, but I don’t care. As I carefully use my fabric scissors to cut each hexagon, I will feel somehow connected to my Mom, Grandma, and great-grandmother and the legacy they left for me. I may not have intended to become a quilter, but seeing this unfinished project, knowing the women behind it, how could I not become one?

The quilt tells a story about women using their time and talents for others, and finding a way to create beautiful things from ordinary materials. From something as mundane as a pair of scissors and an old shirt comes a beautiful symbol of the joy we feel when we craft things for others. It’s a practice I hope to pass on to my girls.