Zen and the Art of Quilting by Sandra Detrixhe

Author:Sandra Detrixhe [Detrixhe, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Adams Media, Inc.

STITCHING TOGETHER

Quilters have known for a long time how important it is to have the backing of other quilters. Quilting bees in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provided an isolated homemaker with an excuse to socialize. Fabric scraps and patterns were swapped along with the neighborhood gossip. The gatherings also served as support groups since the women were so often facing the same hardships.

The term bee was not intended to illustrate how busy the women were. Bee comes from ben, an Old English word meaning “help given by neighbors.” Interestingly, ben can also mean “prayer,” indicating the connection between spiritual thought and neighborly deeds, the spirituality of right conduct.

A true quilting bee worked a little like the threshing bees and husking bees in which everyone came together to get the harvesting done. It might have been an all-day affair. The hostess’s quilt, waiting in the frame when the women arrived, would most likely have been finished when they left in the evening.

Out on the prairie, where neighbors were separated by many miles, men dropped the women off in the morning and came back to collect them in the evening. This made a fine excuse for the men to do a little socializing, as well. The hostess and another woman or two might leave the quilt frame a little early and prepare the food that each of the women had brought for the occasion.

A couple of superstitions that relate to social quilting during the nineteenth century involve problems that can still arise when you’re quilting. If your thread broke, one superstition goes, you would have bad luck. Well, having the thread break is already bad luck. You have to pull out enough stitches to give yourself some thread to tie a knot, thread the tail back onto the needle, and bury it in the batting. Not fun.

The other superstition said that if your needle broke, you would be the next to have a baby. This seems particularly funny to us today because we picture quilting bees consisting primarily of older ladies. Remember, these were women of all ages, including young mothers and adolescent daughters. By the way, I broke two needles quilting my last hand-quilted project and it didn’t get me any grandchildren, so it must not work if you skip a generation. Or maybe it didn’t work because I was quilting alone.

During the Great Depression, quilting clubs were popular. These groups met for a few hours on a regular, sometimes weekly, basis. The location of the gathering rotated among the members’ homes. If the hostess didn’t have a quilt in her frame for everyone to work on, the women would bring their piecing to do as they visited.

The Persian Pickle Club, a novel by Sandra Dallas, uses one such club as the backdrop for a story about sisterhood. The husband of one of the members had bought a bolt instead of a yard of paisley fabric, which was also known as Persian pickle. Every quilt that any of the members make has some of that cloth in it.

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