Cloth of the World

I’m not sure whether it’s an ordinary stage in late life, or the stage of finally facing up to all the stuff one has gathered up over the years, but whichever, I’ve gotten to that stage. For you, it may be shoes or clothes, but for me, it’s fabric for quilts. For years, I’ve been buying more than I needed, because I eventually would need it. But at this point, with about 10-15 average years left to me, there’s no chance I will ever use this all up. So, I’ve sort of decided to work on using it all up.

Part of that work has been roughly to assess what’s around. In that search, I came upon a nice group of relatively small amounts (less than a half-yard each) of ethnic fabrics, primarily from Africa, Indonesia, and India. The reason they’re in a drawer together is that they don’t blend well with American fabrics, but they do very nicely with each other. I took them all out, cut them up into pieces that would work in a traditional pattern called ‘square in a square,’ and when i had about 250 of them, I turned it all into a queen-sized quilt top. Now it has to be quilted, but because I am primarily a hand quilter of large quilts, that will take some time and, in any case, that is evening work.

So, in the daytime, I took all the pieces left over and sewed them together more or less randomly and finished up a second, though much smaller quilt, a nice size for putting over your lap on a cool fall day. Looking around, a month later, of course, I see no sign that anything has been used up, but I suppose one day I will look around and it will all be gone. That’s hope not a plan, I’m pretty sure, but I like to pretend it’s a plan.

What struck me about all these beautiful ethnic, hand-made fabrics (printed, painted, batiked, whatever, all show the sign of somebody’s hand) is that they represent something we no longer really have in the U.S.—hand-made fabrics that arise from local design traditions. I thought about calling this quilt ‘Third World Beauties,’ but it seemed somehow less than complimentary to refer to these countries' and their peoples’ work as ‘third world.’ Not like wonderful us in the first world. Well, it’s true, of course, these people are different. They know how to make marks of beauty on cloth and most of us in the West haven’t a clue how it’s done and certainly don’t have any local traditions to help us along in the process, nor, of course, any particular desire to do such laborious, time-consuming work even if we did know how.

U.S. fabric is beautifully designed, but it’s designed in the ‘modern’ way that leaves no room for the designer to leave her touch. The designer was a long way away from the American fabric that I use; American fabric is machine-made all the way. And it looks like it. Yards and yards of it pour out of a giant machine, every yard exactly like every other yard. The ethnic fabrics, not so much. They are strangely irregular, their designs surprising and beautifully irregular, simpler in a very compelling way that actually makes them more complex, whereas U.S. fabrics just appear complicated.

Some American quilters are reaching out to the spirit represented by these 'Third World' artisans, these artists, though, and are increasingly making quilts whose every piece of fabric has been designed and colored—painted, dyed, stamped, written upon, all the methods by which you can get marks and color on cloth—by their own hand. We would never think to call their work ‘ethnic’ because it does not come out of any cultural base, any ethnos, I guess. So we call it art, instead. But would we call their quilts ‘First World Beauties’?