Do you call quilt tops patchwork or piecing? These words both refer to the stitched together quilt top. And yet… they carry interestingly distinct connotations. Patchwork intones repair - to patch a torn garment, to fix a cloth that has been rent. Piecing evokes an imagine of making one thing out of many. It occurs to me that each of these terms align with two psychoanalytic terms. The major category of the human condition that Freud spelled out is neurosis and this is divided into two categories - the obsessive and the hysteric.
We aren’t divided perfectly between these two categories but most of us will fall into one or the other. Just like piecing and patchwork are both the quilt top, the obsessive and the hysteric are both neurotic. The obsessive reminds me of piecework. The urgent desire to repair something broken, handed down to us, used hard. Here you can already see the whole thing but with clear marks of holes and rips that have to be connected. Piecework is making something out of scraps and pieces pulled together from many but often the big picture eludes us. What is quilting? Or for that matter, what is life? A work of repair, or the work of building from many disparate pieces?
Most people refer to this process of stitching together the quilt top when they say “quilting.” Quilting is a synecdoche for the whole process of making a quilt. Quilting is just one part - the act of sewing the layers together. Quilting stands for cutting, piecing/patchwork, basting, quilting, and finally, binding.
Each of these steps can be approached with an obsessive mind. Seam alignment, correct measurements, pressing just so. Attention to the details. Perfectionism. You know what it should look like. Now we must find a way to fix everything in place just so. Snipping every stray thread. Almost as if trying to repair something that must be stitched just right to heal.
There is comfort in this repetitive act of repair. The act of making a quilt is often just that - an act of comfort. Our lives were torn apart a few years ago in the pandemic. A tear that our family has been working to repair over the last year. I wake up some nights with a jolt of fear.I got to know this fear well during the pandemic. When these feelings overtake me, it’s nice to fall into the repetitive motion of the patchwork. Each stitch, making a mend in the torn cloth of my mind.
Other times I come to the quilt in a more hysteric mode. Questioning, questioning, questioning. This is my natural state. Hysterical. Do I like this? Where should this piece go? What color should I use next? How should I lay these pieces out in the final composition? The picture of the final quilt only a vague vision. But it is this vague vision that holds me together when I look down on a sea of disparate pieces of cloth.
Most people fall into the category of neurotic. It’s a technical term, but it means the mind is always repressing something. We relate to reality with something missing. We live in a space with a gap in it. The obsessive and the hysteric each relate to that gap in slightly different ways. These words - patchwork and piecing - represent these two categories. The obsessive tries to fix the tear. The hysteric constantly questions. Trying to see the whole. Trying to make a whole.
I have experienced the obsessive side of things. The need for perfection. But I am more prone to the constant questioning of the hysteric.
For years I was so hysterical that I couldn’t find purchase. No room to act. Only sitting in these questions. I thought about quilting for 12 years before I started. For 12 years, I asked, what if? What would it look like? What quilt should I make? Paralyzed by the worry that I couldn’t make the pieces fit together in a whole.
As a hysteric, I have to find a way to act. To commit to something before I understand it. It’s a courageous moment to act into the unknown. To begin to piece the quilt together before I know where it will lead.
When I finally started quilting I didn’t know where it would lead. Where is this going? Will I make something beautiful? Something that matters? I still don’t know. But if I hadn’t started I would be without these quilts. Without piles of hand dyed linen, colored with natural dyes. Without the quilters I’ve met from around the world. And I would be without this writing. I didn’t realize that this quilting had to start for the writing to start. The writing is the place I go to try to speech my feelings into meaning. Taking all those desperate things and stitch them into something meaningful.
It’s hard to be a hysteric. Always asking how to start and where we are going. Always feeling afraid to commit to a project I don’t understand.
For Freud, the hysteric was essential. It is in this place of indecision that we have to learn to act. A free act comes only when I don’t know the answer. I don’t know how it will turn out. No one is there to tell me what to do. Not my teachers, not my parents, not my friends, not logic, not even a pattern. Even if I try to follow my “authentic self”, I will find that that self shifts and changes in front of me. There is an old Swedish phrase that I love, “The mind is like the butt. It is split.” I live in that split.
Its hard, but this is the way to do something new. To bring something new in the world. New in our lives. New in a quilt.
This orange and black quilt feels like a big question to me right now. What colors will I use? What size will it be? Should I keep it simple or add new patterns? Many questions must be answered between today and the last stitch. I will have to make each one on my own.
So what is the difference between patchwork and piecing? Simply, we say piecing on this side of the pond and europeans tend to say patchwork. It probably doesn’t mean anything but I do like the idea that the countries with remembered histories who remember who they once were might call it patchwork. Perhaps the need to repair is a stronger impulse. In America we don’t remember the history of this land. We look to the future and aren’t sure where we are going or what it will look like. It probably doesn’t have anything to do with these thoughts, but I like the poetry of it.
I am on the side of piecework and patchwork. Who knows what will come from all these little pieces?
I love this poem about pieces by the Northern Irish poet Padraig O’Tuama. He wasn’t writing about quilts, but to me, this poem has everything to do with quilt.
Benediction
a poem by Padraig O’Tuama
the task is ended
go in pieces
†
our concluding faith
is being rear-ended
certainty’s being amended
and something’s getting mended
that we didn’t know
was torn
†
we’re unravelling
and are traveling to a place
of
new-formed-patterns,
with delusion as a fusion of
loss, and hope, and pain and beauty.
†
so,
†
the task is ended
go in pieces
to see and feel
your world.
Beautiful musings!