Alchemy

Before I went to my quilting group last night the sky over the river in my backyard rushed suddenly red. It was a red too heavy for the sky. It bled out of the blue and hovered over the river holding the water hostage.

That red sky fell through the window and into my house, onto my dining room table where piles of fabric lay in all the colors of sunset. Not just any sunset, but a blood red sunset and colors from the minutes before it: a saffron sun that cast a peach hue on trees so that the edges of the bark stand at attention. It’s a vision as unexpected as seeing Tony Martino, your car mechanic, dressed up in a tuxedo.

These strips of sunset fabric are assembled, cut at odd angles, reassembled into squares and then rounded at their edges into circles. As if without hands, a work of art appears. The art grows over minutes, hours, days. The house quiet around me. A slick razor cutter that wasn’t invented when I started to quilt twenty five years ago races quietly through the fabric. In the beginning of my quilting time, there were Gingher scissors that took loud, delicious bites out of fabric and made my hand cramp with the effort of cutting.

My first quilt had almost 4,000, two-inch squares in it. All were hand cut after I had marked out lines on the fabric in ball point pen. People consider that quilt a work of art

when I take it out on picnics. I try to tell them it was my baptism by fire. A project not quite thought out. A bigger bite than I could chew. It took me four years to finish and it’s where my first son was conceived, where our first dog passed on, where my youngest son, now a man, dreams at night. That quilt is twenty five years old and some of the bad fabric I used has all but evaporated. I’ll have to think creatively about how to replace it, but that’s a question of engineering, not art—how to let something you love not buckle under to time the way Bobby, one strongman in my new gym, won’t let his knees buckle under a bar weighted with three times his body weight.

“It’s all in your head,” he says to me, his gaze strong as the sun in my eyes. “And here,” he finishes and taps my chest the way a mother or father would.

While I gaze at the sunset it slips into the river and floats away. While I gaze at my fabric I see which strips should be placed next to each other so that they blend and yet each piece stands alone. The colors to either side call the center strip out, the way the sunset calls out tree bark and the bark stands at attention, its whole head and heart in that split-second moment at sunset.

Letting go to create art is a feat of strength. It’s breaking wide open and taking a risk, like I did when I chose the fabric that inspired this quilt. The fabric was a sea of aubergine with waves of kale green and currents of raspberry and yam. That would be my background I said to Tammy, the fabric store clerk, who hovered nearby uncertainly, looking over her shoulder as if she were looking for someone to save me from drowning in all that color. Then I started to pull sunset off the shelves, bolts of bold hues.

“Should we go this far?” Tammy asked caught in my undertow.

“Oh yes,” I said. “Of course.”

Twenty quarter yards later, 160 strips later, the nest of sunset on my dining room table is too bright for even my cats to nap in. I’m between sunset and quilt class now, not sure of what comes next and as if without hands my wicker sewing basket is packed and closed and my sewing machine is ready to travel. I realize I know the way even in the dark. Even though the sun has moved on and taken the blood red sky, my inspiration, with it.

Our quilting group meets in a home built by a woman’s hands. Our inspiration is that woman’s daughter: a woman who smokes too much and sleeps too little and creates works of quilt art. Women come and step out of the box here. Step out of themselves here. Sometimes feel free to lose their minds here like Jeannie, a new woman, who said “Kuwait is the place to be! Men keep their women and let them shop all the time! Women don’t get to vote, but they get to shop and that sounds good to me.”

“No politics,” says the woman who smokes too much and sleeps too little as her coffee cup castanets on its saucer and she shoots me a wide-eyed look and I smile and put my eyes back to the sunset in my lap. I look directly at this sun and don’t go blind, but instead see a pattern developing, so I follow it the way Tammy followed my lead when she asked if we should go this far. Tonight the fabric says go farther and I do, sewing more strips into squares into circles and I see shapes emerge vibrating and reaching to infinity the way reflections in two mirrors held facing each other do.

There is no explanation for what I do. For when I do it. For what results. As if without hands sixteen squares are suddenly a work of art. The woman who smokes too much and sleeps too little looks my way and is suddenly bright as bark at sunset. She comes over and loses herself in the possibility of the sixteen squares. She folds and auditions more fabric that might finish the piece. She reaches for the yard of bold orange I bought on a whim and folds it like a first border.

“After that,” she says, “Anything is possible.”

She stoops to fish in the trash at my feet for bits and pieces of fabric I cut and left behind.

“I wonder what you could do with these?” she asks opening another door and pushing me through.

That’s how, as if without hands, works of art appear. It all has to do with seeing what is not there. No, it’s more than that. It’s about believing in what is not there. Like believing that plants can become fabric and that strips of that fabric can become art in the same way one can lift three times their body weight and hold it over their head. It’s not about what’s in your hands. It’s all about what’s in your head and heart.