Quilting bees

In an interview for this week’s article on the quilters of St. George’s parish and their charitable stitching, Lorie Goldsmith explained that the group’s donated blankets were “not like Quilts of Valor.”

These quilters often donate individually, sharing the fruits of what their personal labors brought them, from start to finish. Unlike those who take a quilt from design to filling to clipping the final thread the parish group likes to split the labor up into steps, in a model of efficiency Ford himself couldn’t have improved on.

St. George’s quilts are community gifts that were truly community-born, with each member contributing their piece based on interest and skill, utopia-like.

But it’s funny. If you’re surprised to hear it, as I was too initially, you probably shouldn’t be. American quilting has a long history of community production, one that still continues here and there in small pockets of close-knit populations (at least, I like to think of them as close-knit).

The term ‘quilting bee’ after all, isn’t about proximity and coinciding work. If you want to get strict about it – and as a linguist, I live for that – a true bee only happens when folks gather to actually work together.

Rather than keeping company, they form one. By the same magic that guides worker bees to weave and interstitch themselves in ordered chaos to build kingdoms, the flurry of their buzzing stitches and snips somehow coalesces into a finished blanket.

Well, we all knew a handmade blanket was really magic, one way or another.

So when Goldsmith modestly explains the production method behind their donations, it’s all the more endearing.

Any handmade work is a thing of magic and love. But when it’s also a thing brewed by a multitude of careful hands determined to take all these little pieces of inert material and fashion it into a veritable embrace of cloth, it’s even more so.

And it’s really in the spirit of the quilt itself. Historically, quilts were economical ways to use and reuse every scant inch of, well, anything.

Even old, worn quilts themselves have been found beneath now-ancient examples of yesteryear. Threadbare frays were just the thing to stuff a new blanket with, and a good opportunity to repurpose the scrappings of a newly made shirt, socks beyond repair, and baby clothes well past their use.

It’s not just pretty words. Quilts are about breathing life into old, unwanted, and funny pieces. They come together and find purpose together, fused into something beautiful and ready to pass that warmth on to someone else. Like the hands that often assemble them, all sorts of different voices knit together to make something new.

So when those like the quilters at St. George piece their quilts together, it’s hard to see the “assembly line” with too much cheek. Even when the motivation is out of efficiency and the simple need to delegate tasks by abilities, it just doesn’t take away from the magic. Or the love.