Quilt Guilt

A couple of years ago, I started a quilt. It was supposed to be a Zaydie (Grandfather) Project with one of our beloved granddaughters in California. It had all the makings of a long-distance winner. We would do some things in Los Angeles, some things in Tulsa, and the result would be a reminder of my love: a soft, enfolding, flannel-backed quilt for chilly nights when we could not be together. It was so long ago, I can’t remember whether we started in on her birthday or in time for Chanukah.

It turns out that I was a couple of years premature. She has a wonderful eye for color and pattern, but it was too much to expect that she could manage a sewing machine. I imagined a quilt of big pieces and straight lines, but a sewing machine is a beast for a small child. It’s got too much power to feel friendly and obedient, more black stallion than Shetland pony. We tried to get the machine to calm down, but the only way to regulate it was the pedal on the floor. The problem was that she couldn’t reach the pedal.

The result is that much of it fell to me. She chose a beautiful array of batiks in seacoast blues and greens and purples. I cut the fabric to size in Los Angeles and she chose the sequence of colors that she liked. Since I am a highly opinionated and intrusive jerk, it took everything I had to let her do the choosing, but I’m proud to say that I made it through. It is amazing to me what a struggle this was, a testimony to the fact that, deep into adulthood, I have failed to learn the first things about maturity. When I grow up, I hope to be normal.

I also overestimated my skill. A few years before I started the quilt, I took an introductory class in quilt making. It fit my self-image as a maker of things, and the experience turned out to be enormously pleasurable. I made a table runner in black and white, and finished it off with an idiosyncratic backing that I managed to turn into the binding of the quilt. I know that the workshop leader saw it as a cheat, but I figured I could live with a small dose of disapproval. How hard could a full-size bed quilt be?

The answer, of course, is very hard. First the project got lost in the shuffle. This granddaughter’s superpower is loving patience. She accepts the fact her grandfather is an idiot who overpromises and underdelivers. Over two straight years she never said a word. Two days before every visit to California, I suddenly remembered that I had not finished the quilt. It took all I had to get on the plane.

Then there was the quilt itself: a complicated piece of engineering and construction that called for precision, dexterity, and problem-solving. I actually have a small measure of each, but I could have used a healthy dollop of experience. All the pieces were exactly the same size, but I still couldn’t get the squares to align. When I present the quilt in another day or two, I’m going to do it after sunset in Los Angeles. Maybe our granddaughter won’t see the wonk.

Quilting the “sandwich” was beyond the reach of my equipment. I relied on my new best friend, Mindy*, who farmed out the task to a craftswoman in Sand Springs who did a superb job of bringing the plies together. My binding, however, is actually a little better than expected. Over the space of a week in our basement in Tulsa, I cut the fabric on the straight of grain, attached each piece on an angled seam, and hand-stitched the band to the body of the quilt. Way harder than I thought. Way more demanding. It looks the part, but I know my secrets: the tangled threads, the irregular spacing, and the places where I nearly went blind with frustration. For the sake of records-keeping, I asked Alice to film me as I stabbed the fabric with my grandmother’s needle. To my enormous surprise, I look like Motl Kamzoil in a touring company production of Fiddler on the Roof. You can take the boy out of Anatevka, but you can’t take Anatevka out of the boy.

The real question is what our granddaughter will say. I know more about everything than I did before, like the complicated handwork of those who came before us, the demanding nature of traditional craft, the necessity of swallowing our appetite for perfection, the gifts of a child who understands her grandfather and manages to forgive him for his manifold faults. On the way, I reconnected to respect for the pre-feminist household arts that occupied our foremothers. They knew a lot, and they accomplished a lot.

I’ll be carrying a gift that stand for all of this, and hoping that my granddaughter is pleased with the result. But even if she’s not, I’ll never really know. The next thing for me to learn is her saintly acceptance.