Scraps

This past week, I was thinking of cleaning up the top of my quilting cutting table and decided to do so by gathering up all the blue scraps (random choice of color), cutting them into squares, strips, and rectangles as indicated by size, and then sewing them all together into a nice little lap/nap quilt.  It didn’t really get the table top cleared up, but it was nevertheless a very satisfying project.  It took about three days to get all of those newly-cut shapes sewn together, and I’m now halfway through the hand-quilting.  Nothing really so comforting--indeed so virtuous--as gathering up scraps of fabric and turning them into a new wholeness.

I was thinking about this today while at the monthly quilt guild meeting.  I was actually doing the hand sewing on my blue scrap quilt while watching two ‘trunk shows’ (a showing of a variety of quilts a person has made).  At some point in each presentation, both quilters commented how much they liked scrap quilts, how drawn they were to making them.  That’s not unusual, of course: the notion of scrap quilts is what initially draws most quilters to this joyful craft and art.  But why?

Quilting is, in part, built on nostalgia, an unreal yearning for the time when we made things with our hands out on the frontier or some such place, even the very blankets that kept us warm.  Hardly anyone in my circles actually yearns for the opportunity to make their own shoes and blankets and clothes, or even their own bread and butter, but the nostalgia for the time continues.  Just watch the use of quilts in Hollywood movies: no respectable hero/heroine owns a bed that is unquilted, testifying to their downhome authenticity.

 There is also a secondary nostalgia that quilts hold: they are made of pieces of one’s life.  I am not of the generation that used old, worn-out clothes as the material for quilts (very green!).  As a kid, I made small quilted pieces using leftovers from my mother’s sewing, but it was new fabric.  Nevertheless, those quilt pieces had a sentimental quality, even for an 8-year-old, because they were composed of leftover bits of  my clothes, of my sisters’ and mothers’ clothes and, occasionally, even of my brothers’ clothes, all of which my mother made herself.  So, that is a third thing about scrap quilts’ attraction and maybe its most important nostalgic quality.  In some way or another, we are sewing together bits of our lives to make them new and fresh and whole in perhaps a more interesting way than they seemed to have when we were living through those parts of that life.  This may also account for the enormous growth of interest in scrapbooking, as well: bits and pieces--scraps, after all--that show us our lives in a way that definitely makes us feel good about them.

So we like cloth scraps, but strangely uninterested in most other kinds of scraps.  We don’t particularly care about wood scraps: we just burn them in the fireplace, useful but no big deal.  And we definitely don’t like food scraps.  They are leftovers, grudgingly to be used or, more likely, to be left to develop a green covering in the back of the refrigerator.  At best, they are adapted to another meal, less honorable because made of leftovers, or made into compost, a useful but not an aesthetic or otherwise particularly meaningful product: merely back to from whence it came.  Scrap dealers are generally seen as people dealing in the unwanted.  Those kinds of scraps may well be what we call garbage or trash.  

But all that may change now that everything has changed:  scraps may be all that we are left with and the challenge will be how to turn them into something larger and meaningful and whole, once again, because the parts themselves remind us of something.  At least, that is, if quilts are a guide.