Nourish the Tree

I have always been ambitious, eager to try new things. There have been many times when I ended up to my neck in things, but everything is generally rosy with confidence at the beginning.

It’s been a lot of years now, but once I used to go to work. (No really! I didn’t always just sit here and write.) I worked in a fabric store. Me. In a fabric store all day. I barely broke even! One of the perks the store offered was that employees could make a design for display in the store, usually to show off new products. I can’t remember if it was my idea or the manager’s but I found myself with a project.

The new product was a fusible with a grid printed on it, ostensibly to help people make mosaic quilts that were all the rage. Or maybe that wasn’t it. I don’t know, but the grid fired up my vision.

I settled on the image of a tree, simple and natural, moderately easy to convey. Rather painstakingly I crafted a grid and used the eye dropper tool in Photoshop to fill each block with the correct color from my palette. Remember, this was in the old days. One by one, I mapped out brown branches and a variegated sky. Subtle differences in greens and blues gave the pixelated tree some depth. I was ready to begin.

The image I laid out was 40x40.

It would be a bit smaller once the seams were sewn on the finished project and I had made bigger pieces than that before so I began the process of estimating how much fabric in each color I would need. I began with the smallest, as one does, but it began to dawn on me pretty quickly that in a world where one can bite off more than once can chew, well, I had taken a bigger bite than I was ready for.

Sixteen hundred pieces.

One thousand six hundred. It took me a full day just to cut the tiny squares. Inch by inch, in layers and strips, I cut all sixteen hundred that I needed and then some because who knew if I had miscounted or missed something! By the end, I had heaps and stacks of the wretched things and never mind how often the blade slipped and whole rows were rejected as flawed. Still, it was straightforward work and eventually it was done.

The level of complexity I had manufactured for myself was becoming clear. I made a plan. With my ironing board adjusted to the right height, I sat myself down with my colors arrayed around me and began. Quadrant one, line one, blue three. It was tedious work but went along as I watched the television and lined up little square after little square according to the impossible map I’d designed myself. I would pause after a few lines and press down the carefully organized mess. I had to check and recheck because once it was ironed down there was no peeling it back up again. Occasionally the iron wasn’t hot or I didn’t press long enough; sometimes I just forgot which step I was on and moved the grid by mistake and sometimes, because this was the old days, I’d have to leap up and answer the phone causing my recent work to come fluttering around me like falling leaves. Instead of raking them up and burning them or carting them off to the dump like real leaves though, I had to pick them up and sort them out, laying them in the tidy piles with their color mates and begin the line or section again. It was gratifying to see the image emerge but it came ever so slowly.

When, at last, the final row was pressed down I was happy with my lush summer tree. It was pleasing to see my pixel print come to life in fabric. I embarked on the seam sewing with enthusiasm thinking surely it would be done in no time.

The idea of this grid product was that you could attach all your squares to it and then just sew all the long straight lines, first one way and then the other. Better suited to larger squares than I had planned, I had to use a very narrow seam allowance lest my one inch pieces disappear altogether. I sewed and sewed, thinking this was the perfect way to get all those tiny pieces corralled. When I finished all the vertical rows it became a stiff tube curling in on itself. The horizontal lines were harder to sew as they had to cross all forty seams forty times. The manufacturer recommended snipping the backing and seam allowances at all the intersections. I tried that but gave it up as a lost cause when the scissor handles threatened to excavate my poor fingers. Besides I didn’t want to cut through to the front by mistake.

I smoothed the image down with my hands but it sprang up. It was curly and lumpy, forced this way and that by all those seams. Every tiny jog or misalignment was painfully obvious as I examined my work. There were even spots where I had failed to catch the fabric so I had raw edges poking out. It was a mess and I was discouraged. This was not the process as I had imagined it.

I threw it in a box.

In the meantime, the shop closed, no longer able to meet the margins. With no one waiting for it, I was tempted to abandon the project and never look back. Grudgingly I pulled it out and considered what to do. The backing made the fabric stiff. There was no way I was going to be able to put a hand quilted finish on this, and as discouraged about it as I was, I honestly didn’t want to put in the time.

I threw it back in the box.

It surfaced on occasion as I rustled for other things in my fabric stash. I decided to try again. If I machine quilted it down, at least maybe it would be flatter and hold the stupid loose edges in place. I began sewing the grid lines. It was awful. I’d chosen the wrong thread, the wrong settings. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and the results shouted that out loud and clear. It was only getting worse the more I tried.

Into the box it went, yet again.

As time went along, I picked it up and painstakingly picked out the awful quilting. It stayed like that a long time, the back, the batting and the image unconnected, just folded up together. I tried to even out some of the seams but time moved forward and I really came to hate the project. I couldn’t see how to make it right so it just hung around, a reminder of a time when I had utterly failed.

It went into the box time after time. There was no solution.

This is the way ten years passed. Just catching sight of the fabric I recognized as the back used to make me irritable, but a day came when I could finally look on it with compassion, this unloved mess. In the intervening years I had gained many skills and upgraded my equipment. I had practiced and created other great projects using the technique I had once lacked. Perhaps it was time. I could do this.

I smoothed the lumpy incorrigible thing down and pinned the layers together. “Begin in the center” was a rule I had learned, so I carved and swooped some texture to give the sense of bark, drawing the trunk of the tree together from its disparate blocks of color. The sky was formed with fanciful swirls and a tiny leaf filled each green block. At last it was finished.

It still isn’t entirely flat but it hangs with pride of place in each house we move to. We just call it the tree but it’s actual title is “Yea, Nourish the Tree.” The passage goes on “yea, nourish the tree as it beginneth to grow.” The parable speaks of patience and endurance, of the necessity of work that is sometimes hard.

We often use the phrase “time is of the essence” when we mean that we must hurry, but sometimes time really is of the essence in that we have to grow into our plans and dreams. Sometimes things go back into the box over and over again, and that’s okay. The work is hard. There may come a perfect moment for that impossible vision you once had. Nourish the tree that is you.