Piecework

The special vocabulary of sewing can be confusing –– as with so many skilled fields of endeavor, needlework has its own way of using familiar words.

I freely admit to not paying attention in Home Economics. I was obliged to attend it in high school (girls WERE allowed sign up for Wood Shop, but only those from the first half of the alphabet in my year. Dash it all.). 

Being fortunate in my friends, I skated through most of Home Ec with minimal hands-on work. Cooking –– well, there was no escaping the assignment to make from-scratch biscuits. 

The biscuits I made were used as pucks in a hallway floor-hockey pickup session. And they made it undented all the way back to study-hall. A proud moment for me then as I was determined NOT to buy into the traditional gender-role responsibilities of home and hearth. 

But later –– a decade or more later –– a friend patiently showed me how to sew a straight line without attaching my hand to the fabric. Later, my sweet mother-in-law took me under her domestic wing, providing a sewing machine and some gentle tutelage. The language came to me slowly, with nothing meaning what I first thought: basting, batting, bearding, blocking, backing, taking a tack (plus bar-tacking!).

Anyway, all this dithering on the way to something like a point (a word which also has a sewing-based meaning, natch)...Quilting.  

Technically, "quilting" is the process of stitching fabrics together with some sort of fluffy middle layer. Like anchoring the layers of a big fat club sandwich with a frilly toothpick.  Quilting makes the difference between a down pillow and a down vest. 

I am not particularly interested in the frilly toothpick part of making a quilt. Instead, I like the part known as piecework (not the same as a union-organizer's "piecework," oddly enough) where a person gets to pick colors and figure out designs. 

Despite this u-turn toward the domestic arts, I didn't budget much time for the hobby: the first quilts I made took ten years start to finish. 

Such is the mystery of human nature: when faced with a big writing project a couple of years ago, I took up a couple of ambitious sewing projects. Why not an outdoorsy hobby instead? In a word: summer in Florida.  In a word: heat-stroke. In a word: avoidance.

I shuttled to the sewing machine as a break from working on revisions to that novel. Two hours of rewriting, a cup of tea, two hours of piecework. Repeat until both "The End" and a 96 x 76-inch fabric creation were achieved.  It's astonishing, really, what a bit of stick and carrot can make a person do.

I completed the revision (that story another day) but after finishing the piecing, and sending it to a talented mother-son-operation to get quilted to some cotton batting and a backing, I didn't take the last step: binding. (Ironic vocabulary choice for an aspiring novelist). 

Closure is another word with a variety of meanings.  In sewing, "closure" might refer to buttons or zippers.  

In mourning, it's the (alleged) last step, when the loss somehow ends.The desire for closure –– to finish things –– is part of our basic human aversion to ambiguity, so they say. 

My subconscious sends up this vision on the subject of closure: 
Mumsie, holding a paperback splayed in one hand, holding open the spring-loaded screen door with an elbow, saying in an exasperated tone, 
"Yes or no! In or out! Shilly-shally, dilly-dally!"  

Anyway, the quilt –– among other projects, o novel of mine! –– has been lurking around unbound. So I sat myself down this summer and started stitching. I achieved closure in roughly the same couch-time as four World Cup matches.  

If only a bit of red thread and attention could stitch shut all the open doors in my life...