GENREALITY

Last year I wrote, sold and published my very first dangerous book; this year I’m going to write one just for me and a small circle of friends who are not writers. I’m not submitting it anywhere; my agent will never see it, and the only people who will be able to read it are those non-writer friends of mine.

Why would I do that when I could instead spend my time writing something that would earn me another nice pile of money? For the joy of it.

It sounds selfish, and in some ways it is, but there is more to writing than publishing, and more to this writer than selling everything I create. Although I occasionally write blog posts about my restoration work or a new addition to my collection, the fifteen years I’ve been working on it simply isn’t for sale or public consumption.

I’ve written a couple of quilt-making books (glorified chapbooks with pictures demonstrating techniques, to be honest) for my guild friends, but aside from some hand-written notes in my quilt diaries I’ve never written a book about my quilt collection, and I think it’s time I did before I drop dead and no one knows or remembers why the heck I owned fifty of the same pattern quilts. 

Along with being a serious quilt maker and conservator, I’ve also been a dedicated collector of double wedding ring quilts for about fifteen years.  Each of the quilts in my collection is a bit like one of my novel characters: it has a name, a personality and a backstory. Despite the fact that they’re all made with the same pattern, they’re all unique and very different from each other.  

I fell in love with the double wedding ring because my grandmother used that pattern to make the quilt I slept with every winter when I was little.  Yes, it was my security blanket, my very first wubbie, and I adored it. I would stretch out on that quilt and look all the little colorful patches and wonder what sort of clothes they had come from (Grandma never threw out any old garment she could cut up and use in a quilt.)

That first, wonderful double wedding ring quilt got very ragged over the years, and while I was off in the military, my mom threw it away (she’s not a quilt person.) And it broke my heart, so from that day on I searched for a double wedding ring quilt with a soft blue background made in the thirties. I also started making quilts myself around that time. Eventually I found one that is probably as close to my grandmother’s quilt as I’ll ever find:

It’s a bit too old to use on my bed now, but wherever I live, this quilt is always hanging on display somewhere in the house.

I know the stories involved with the wedding rings quilts that I’ve found, restored and collected aren’t going to set the world on fire. I imagine that unless you’re a quilter they’re pretty boring.  But I’ve always wanted to photograph my collection and put down on paper the stories that go with the quilts — not because my collection is important, but because it is important to me. 

Not all of my quilts are beautiful. I have a half-dozen in the collection that I take to shows and conferences to demonstrate just how much ugly you can make with this pattern:

There’s the rare antique wedding ring quilt with 72 small rings that I spent six months restoring, and that our dog chewed a hole through in fifteen minutes; that taught me that nothing is sacred to teething puppies.  I also have a great story about a rather homely-looking old gray and yellow quilt that my sixteen year old fell in love with and has me patch now about every six months so he doesn’t have to give it up.  In another five years I think it’ll be a completely new quilt.

Writing a book for the joy of it means telling stories and documenting things that have made life on this planet a little more bearable for you during your time here. Although some writers have no problem publishing that kind of personal book, to me it’s not something I can slap a price tag on and toss out to the world. I don’t believe everything we are has to be sacrificed on publishing’s altar.

Quilting is an old art, and traditional patterns and techniques will gradually be lost as the craft of making them inevitably fades from popularity.  You can buy beautiful quilts in any department store now, not that you should — the imported ones are made in sweatshops for pennies — and with the convenience of longarm quilting machines, hardly anyone hand quilts anymore.  In another fifty years quilt-making will likely be viewed something quaint but silly, like handmaking smocked dresses and tatting lace. 

I don’t think this book I’m going to write will exist much longer than my collection will, but you never know.  Maybe one of my great-great-grandkids will discover, as I did, a great love of quilts and their patterns and wonder about the people who used to make them.  Maybe they’ll dig through some old computer files and find the last e-copy of this book, and chuckle over the cheeky title I gave it:

And then I will have a chance to tell them all about the day I found our puppy under my sewing table, quietly chewing a hole through the binding I’d just hand-stitched on . . .

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