Fiber

How growing up around my mother's 40+ years of working as a professional art quilter, teacher, and textile-designer influenced my own creative process

This essay was originally written for The Believer in 2015, but never published.

It’s strange the way a child learns to love a quilt. At first it is given as a thing that wraps around you, keeps you warm inside its private dark. Certain things about your body you give back: you breathe into the fiber, you touch and touch it. It accumulates and seems the same and it is there, a thing that waits regardless of what the world does. Over time, the surface takes on its own kind of personality, at once familiar and unwaveringly silent. It is an object, but you know it like you don’t know you. For a younger version of me, the blanet was often the most important thing inside a room, a place where when wrapped up in it the world seemed distant and incapable of infiltration, like nothing could hurt me or even see. Over time, though, we learn to understand that no matter where we hide the world goes on regardless; and still the quilt is always there in time for sleep.

Before she was even pregnant with me, my mother, Barbara Butler, made the quilt I’d sleep with nearly every night into my 20s. She made the quilt from a pattern while she was still learning how to sew. She picked out colors that she liked for no clear reason besides the feeling of them: a flat bright yellow like fresh butter and the white of paper without words. Where in its original construction Mom stitched the letters of the alphabet in decoration, those characters today are well long gone, her novice needlework resulted in such large strokes, I pulled the lines free with my fingers, ate the thread. Its length is roughly two-thirds of my arm span now, wide as the window I sit in front of most days while I am writing. When I was sad or sick, the quilt was there, when I was happy the quilt was there. It could calm me just by being. I would wield it as a weapon against monsters. I would wear it like a cape and run through rooms as if actually flying. Even now it feels immensely reassuring even now to press it against my face, though of its two primary fabrics, only one has held up over time; the solid blank squares big as my hand now form only a lattice around disintegrated sections where the white-and-yellow checkerboard has worn away, framed by an outer edge frayed into layers from endless chewing, rubbing, nuzzling. Looking at it feels like looking at a kind of skin pulled out from the hallway of the days I lived through with it.

“I wanted you to learn everything,” Mom says, her hands busy now with today’s work, thirty-something years and many hundreds of compositions down the line. On her work-table this afternoon are a couple dozen brightly-colored rectangles of heavy felt that seem to gather the room’s light, a room that once had been my sister’s bedroom as an infant, and now is where Mom does most of her sewing and all the laundry, the focus of all fibers of our family’s, in the world. Some of the felt squares are neon pink laced with an algae-green; some are royal purple or candy purple; some sky-blue. They resemble little fields seen from above, though dyed like LSD, with straight or blocky lines that break their field. Mom explains the blocks are saved from pieces of an argyle afghan she knitted in her knitting club in the sixth grade, which she found and then shrunk down inside the dryer and cut up. Each square here is a product of her learning how to stitch a certain way alongside a group of other young girls in a room neither of us will go inside again. Even as she’s begun to stitch some of the blocks together into bigger sections, she’s still unsure of what they’ll make. “It could be anything: a table piece, a handbag, a scarf, a vessel. It’s all like working puzzles,” she explains. She holds up two more loose patches of the felt toward me. “Aren’t they pretty? They’re going to go together someday.” Behind her, a ceiling-high cabinet full of other kinds of fiber stands, packed to capacity with the fabrics she’s collected for forever, which when opened to the room’s intense fluorescent light always seem somehow to have been waiting to appear, to be worked into something larger. She sets the pieces down back on the table among the other extant sections, plays with arranging how they might go. “See, look how that can just fit right into that,” she says in pleasure, almost as much to herself as to me. She sits back down at the machine and sews two together into one. Her act of stitching forces joining, a creation of terrain between two lengths that otherwise would have likely always remained apart.