I plead quilty: Why I inflicted a madcap, modern spin on an old-fashioned art

My cousin Annie and I have been collaborating on quilts for a few years now. It always seems like such a great idea. Old-timey, even.

But we’re modern quilters. We don’t repurpose old clothes; we don’t cut up our wedding dresses. Our artwork isn’t made from what the children grew out of, or the salvageable portions of threadbare calicoes. No ma’am. We are proper consumers. We buy fabric at 14 bucks a yard, and we’re well into three figures by the time the binding goes on.

But time was, women would gather together around a quilt. I have several quilts in my blanket chest that qualify as genuine antiques, because my mom, who also qualified as a genuine antique, made them. They’re 100 years old. They’re made of faded pastel prints that earned their softness through years of wear on a North Dakota farm. Those prints saw eggs gathered, potatoes peeled, bread kneaded. Outhouses visited, in the snow.

So when Annie proposed a long-distance collaboration, it sounded quaint, and carried a whiff of Mom’s modest grace and virtue. Let others squander their time on their phones: We were going to make art together the old-fashioned way! She proposed that we each send the other a colorful block, and we’d add to them in turn, back and forth, until we were satisfied with them. Or they were big enough. Or there was no fixing them.

Creation! Community! Coziness! What could go wrong?

Then I remembered my mom’s wedding-ring quilt. I admired it; I thought it was perfect. She’d pieced the top together, and the quilting of it – the sandwich of batting and backing – was accomplished by hand on a quilting frame. That’s where the other women came into the picture. And my sweet-tempered mom? I can still see that cross look on her face when she pointed out the section Betsy had quilted. “Tsk. Those long stitches!”

Annie and I live 100 miles apart. We slip our quilts in the mule’s saddlebag and send the beast plodding with a slap to the rump. Or we send them through the mail, whichever is faster.

Every time we get our newly expanded quilts, we gasp. “Wow! I would never have thought of that!” we say, which can be interpreted in more than one way. It might be a good thing we’re never in the same city at the same time.

Because we don’t have the same fabric stashes. We don’t even have the same taste in fabric. Annie likes big blue prints. I like small prints in every color that isn’t blue. My favorite blue, in fact, is green. So all our exchanges are a little alarming.

On the other hand, we end up with quilts we never would have made on our own. We are shaken out of our routines and complacency. But I know I have sent off contributions that hit Annie like a sharp yellow dart to the heart. And she has sent me blue puddles of gloom. Everything we add is an attempt to solve whatever the other person did before.

It’s been a fun challenge, though. We each have three pretty quilts out of it. The whole enterprise was going great. Until last year.

I was the one with the bright idea for a new challenge. “How about,” I said, “every time we get the quilt, we have to cut it up in some way before we add to it?”

“Interesting,” Annie made the mistake of saying. And we were off.

What I was visualizing was something almost geological. We’d have artful fractures running through our work, bright mineral fissures, a slab of veined marble in fabric form! Problem: It was scary. Here someone sends you her best artistic effort, and you have to slice it up? Not only that, but once it was cut, it was hard to square things up again.

Our efforts rather quickly went off the rails. It felt like trying to reassemble a whole tomato out of the sauce. By the third addition, we were each in possession of a chaotic, ghastly composition of material that we couldn’t imagine how to correct. There were bizarre geological cracks running through it, all right – and there’s no telling whose faults they were.

But that’s the point: to challenge us. To get us to the sketchy backstreets of our comfort zones. Finally, I punted on Annie’s quilt. There were colors in it found nowhere in nature and they were screaming at each other. I cut the whole thing up into little squares and reassembled them into a staid but well-behaved grid in a neutral sea. It’s not great, but it’s not an assault on the senses.

Meanwhile, Annie had a look at mine. There was a lot going on. There was nothing to do but throw a big river of hand-appliquéd salamanders through the center of it, so that’s what she did.

Now, once again, we both have quilts we would never have made on our own. Surprising! Anything but normal! This was a challenge made. A challenge met.

And a lesson learned: The next one will definitely be normal.