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Last spring, I took Marlee Grace's quilt class, a quilt is something human. When they asked us to share about our creative practices, I said that mine is domestic craft. It’s a phrase I’ve never used out loud before and didn't realize was true until after I said it. I knit, sew, cook, gather, arrange, soothe, garden, caretake, tend — the art of it is in the craft. Before quilt class, I was assigned a little half box in the local community garden to steward, full of mint and wild strawberries. Before that, I spent a month of my illness unable to do anything but knit a mindless pattern and tidy my overflowing sewing basket. Before that, my closest friends flew in from around the country to hold me, and we cooked feasts together in a rickety farmhouse upstate, in a turquoise kitchen with sulfuric running water and my favorite knives brought from home. Before that, I learned that a perfect Saturday night includes prosciutto and arugula sourdough pizza, a bottle of Finger Lakes red wine, Isabelle Allende’s writing on feminism in a hot lavender bath, and a gigantic bed made up with two kinds of pillows, linen sheets, and a handstitched quilt. I love domestic craft — or “women’s work,” but we’ll unpack gendered assumptions in a future letter — for its sneaky subversiveness, for its ability to pack the politic into the soft and embodied. The stories behind a skein of qiviut yarn and the book of Alaska Native lace patterns, or the list of emmenagogues in my dogeared books on herbal medicine. I’m reminded of this quote: “Why is it that women have chosen to sew such flags, and then to lay them on the tops of beds? For they make the bed the most noticeable thing in a room. And then I have thought, it’s for a warning. Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night’s sleep. But it isn’t so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed.” — Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (via)
I ended up ripping out the design I started in quilt class, and even that was a gift — a fresh start was as easy as a seam ripper and a hot iron. It wasn’t right, yet, and summer sewing is for light draping linen. Maybe this winter, I’ll find myself curled up with an earth-toned quilt, stitching through the evening Netflix binges. In the meantime, there are niecephews to feed, tea blends to steep, marigolds to arrange, linens to launder, a clean warm bed to make. a few medicines, or, how to make and mend:
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