Patchwork and Art Quilts

Kristin Miller

My Strange Quilt
by Kristin Miller

	I made the strangest quilt recently, quite unlike anything I've done before. Sometimes, I'm not even sure that I like it, but it's an important talisman for me, reminding me visually of new insights and explorations, and of inner lessons learned. Making this small quilt was just one of many experiences at a five day creativity workshop called "Healing Stitches: How Your Art Imitates Your Life." Not a quilt retreat     Co-leader Mary Sullivan Holdgrafer, a well-known art quilter, told us, "This is not a quilt retreat--you can't stay up all night sewing ." Although there were few rules except those concerning confidentiality and mutual respect, we were strictly forbidden to sew more than three hours a day.
Convoluted Heart Quilt
Our mornings began with moving to music, followed by circle-drawings that symbolized our feelings. Co-leader Wendy Huntingtun taught us breathing techniques synchronized to movement, meant to energize and provide focus, and later offered us an opportunity to do "bodywork", a more intense and emotional experience.     Mary and Wendy encouraged us to write in journals, exploring topics such as "What do you obsess about?" and "How do your obsessions keep you from creativity?" The journals were private, and there was no pressure to share what we wrote. Thought, feeling, and remembrance     Both Wendy and Mary are counselors, but they stressed that the workshop is meant to be educational rather than therapeutic. Learning was experiential, not academic-we learned by doing, and by noticing the thoughts, feelings, and remembrances evoked as we opened ourselves up to our own creative impulse. And much of what we learned was reflected in our quilts, in the journals we kept, and in our discussions.  One afternoon, we sat on a grassy lawn with the foaming sea before us and the sun beating down, and did quick impromptu drawings, scratching our designs into the back of a paper with our eyes closed, picking up colours we couldn't see. I loved this process, because I've always struggled to draw things realistically and never felt I got them right. Now it was impossible to get it right, so I stopped worrying. The figures I made were lively, peculiar, entrancing.        Between activities, we enjoyed abundant cafeteria-style meals, and the serene, gardenlike resort setting of Haven By the Sea, home of Personal Development Seminars on Gabriola Island, in British Columbia. The workshop group, self-described as "an abundance of women," became surprisingly close through shared experience and a constant flow of tears and laughter. The women affirmed and cherished each other's ideas and feelings, and yet were sensitive to a person's need for privacy. No sample quilts on wall      We sewed only in the late afternoons, guided by Mary through a series of steps that built up the design of the quilt in layers. Unlike a quilt class, there were no examples on the wall, no sample quilts to admire or copy.  I was skeptical the first day, when Mary told us to lay down a background collage using fabric we would not normally be drawn to. The method seemed simplistic, too easy, and I didn't like the greens and beiges and burgundies that I chose.       But the next day, she had us overlay this background with another layer of colour and fabric and imagery-an added layer of meaning. I was a little uneasy about obliterating my design as I sprinkled my background with energetic yellow squiggles. Then I added footprints and dark, watchful eyes, symbolic of my path in life and my vision. The added shapes and colours transformed my disliked background. I began to get excited about my quilt. See beauty everywhere      The next afternoon, we were sent out on a long walk, instructed to "See beauty everywhere," and to honour and appreciate it. We were asked to write in our journals about what we had experienced in the past few days, and about what might come next. And we were asked to find a symbol for ourselves. Seeking beauty was oddly compelling. The trees glowed, the grasses swayed, the water sparkled, and indeed, beauty was all around. I sat down on a sun-warmed beach rock and wrote: What have I learned, gathered together  with an Abundance of Women, to do  healing stitches together? -to not be so guarded, to not be afraid of people I don't know -to shut up and listen, to wait with expectancy and respect -to see beauty and pattern and meaning everywhere -to be attentive, to share without talking -to recognize how much I need quiet and solitude and space -to not fight against learning from others -to realize that I need and prefer to puzzle out my own methods -to take what I need from a lesson, and integrate it with my own knowledge and creativity -to slow down, to focus on the most important task, to be single-minded -to learn all this again and again and again
	Valuable and ordinary      I closed my journal and looked out at the sea, and suddenly I knew what my symbol was. A plain, dome-shaped sterling silver button. This button was functional, solid, useful, and beautiful. It could hold things together or enable them to part. It could fit in or be alone. It could be seen as a bowl or a shield, as valuable and as quite ordinary.
When we gathered together after our solitary walks, Mary asked us to put our symbols into our quilts. I waited to do this till I got home, wanting to use a real silver button. I decided to add buttons to symbolize each woman at the workshop, and sifted through my collection to find one that "fit" each person. But after they were sewn on, I cut off all the buttons except my own,  feeling that I had offered my brief commemoration and now needed to simplify the quilt design My heart doubled      A few days later, I remembered one of the women describing an intensely emotional moment by saying, "My heart doubled." Wanting to add this image to my quilt, I cut hearts from a stretchy pleated purple satin, imagining the hearts being stretched and doubled as they were sewn down.         Then I thought—it is her heart that doubled.  My heartfelt different, more convoluted, less capacious. I scrunched and crumpled the hearts, twisting them into more abstract shapes, then I stitched them on, and named my quilt "The Convoluted Heart."      Finally, I sewed on a snake, in honor of the wild world, and of the garter snakes that keep startling me in my garden. This image bothers me, however, and I may cover it over with another twisted heart. It's a pleasure to realize that I can keep adding to the quilt, changing it, even hiding parts of it. Strange and yet familiar      But I did not hide the tangled snarls and loops of thread that had developed on the back of the quilt. The back of the quilt looks awful, and I left it that way, in honour of my struggle in creating it, and as a reminder to accept myself and my work  "as is" instead of tormenting myself with "how it should be".      My workshop quilt was in an art display last week, and people were surprisingly drawn to it. They seemed intuitively aware of its energy and depth, and were interested in how it was created. Several people seemed disappointed at the "not for sale" sign. But they understood that I needed to keep it. I'm oddly taken with this little quilt, this strange and yet familiar emblem of myself.
Mary S. Holdgrafer and Wendy Huntington also lead other Personal Development workshops and courses at Haven By the Sea, on Gabriola Island, B.C. Visit Mary's website www.exploringcreativity.com  or email her at mary@exploringcreativity.com Wendy's email is  Wendy03@aol.com .  The website of Personal Development Seminars at Haven is www.pdseminars.com