A Modern Moirai

A Modern Moirai

I know it is a little bit crazy to spend hours and hours at my cutting table, turning a rainbow of colors and patterns of perfectly good cottons into precisely crafted strips and pieces, wild shapes and harmonious images. Crazier still to think that somehow assembling them into meticulously sewn blocks and squares and rectangles and circles will result in something better than existed before I took scissors and rotary cutter in hand and sliced and clipped my way through the stacks of fabric. And yet, who is to say that cutting and shaping, stitching and blending fabrics is not an echo of the acts of the gods of old? The three Moirai, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, do the same thing with our lives. Clotho and Lachesis spin and weave our stories until Atropos takes up her mighty shears and clips the thread, ending our time here with a single snip.

Children are blissfully ignorant of the world around them. I grew up sleeping under a quilt that was beautifully appliqued and hand quilted by a friend of my grandmother. It was covered in pastel flowers and all I remembered about it for years was my Mom fussing at me to never sit on the quilt. Little did I know at the time it had been commissioned by my grandfather for his beloved granddaughter because he wanted her to be surrounded in beauty while she slept. I am grateful for my Mom’s admonition – half a century later the quilt remains pristine and beautiful, a tactile reminder of love from a heart long stilled.

My grandmother was “old school”. She believed every young woman should have a hope chest filled with linens to start her life as an adult. Her older sister believed the same thing. The two of them and my mother embroidered a glorious quilt top of pink and red roses nestled in green leaves that was sent to that same friendly quilter to be finished with perfect, tiny lines of cotton thread woven between layers of fabric and batting. It was another “don’t sit on that quilt!” quilt given to me on my thirteenth birthday tucked inside two pillow cases. I adored it. I still do. Hundreds of hours of love to cuddle under when I miss them. There are times I can almost hear the three of them chattering away, clouds of the cigarette smoke that eventually killed them wreathing their heads, telling stories and stitching in love with every dip of the needle and snip of the scissors. Life and death in a perpetual dance, the balance shifting moment to moment, never sure when the last snip will come.

Now, decades away from my quilting bat mitzvah, I find myself creating works of art in totally different ways with cut out shapes of fabric layered one atop the other that over time have illuminated milestones in my life. I traveled, I worked, I married and raised children, made and lost friends and loved ones, lived a fairly ordinary life filled with joys and sorrows, triumphs and disasters. And then my world was rent asunder, irreparably torn by the claws of disease that had plagued me from my teenage days. No longer could I do the work that filled me with passion without risking my life. All the expressions of love and light I had poured into my teaching career had to find another outlet, and quilting whispered to me from the depths of memory, kindled by sewing programs on public television and flamed into fire by local guilds and amazing classes. Snip. Snip. Snip. My old life was cut away and a quilter was born.

One of the first quilting classes I took taught me how to work from a photograph to create an art quilt. Meticulously chosen and cut pieces of fabrics melded with free motion machine embroidery to create a reasonable representation of the home in which I lived and slept under those quilts growing up. My scissors were busy on that one, seeking the perfect bit of fabric to show early morning sunlight reflecting on ice kissed windows, or to call up the shades and tints of blue and gray and cream in snow caressed by dawn and shadowed by mighty oaks and tulip trees. This is the house where I learned about love and service, about the Moirai, about the spinning and weaving and cutting of lives. About the need to be a person who weaves light into the lives around me any way I can. About beauty that comes in a million forms and springs from a single Source. About the joy of starting with a pile of raw materials and finishing with a concrete realization of an image from my mind, enabling me to share with others the flashes of Light which pulsed in my inner eye.

Fabrics flew from my growing stash to meet a dozen quilt guild challenges. In one, the creation of a deck of cards in fabric, I pulled the Queen of Hearts. Doreen Speckman, one of my first inspirations in the quilting world, a woman who lived life out loud, bright and bold and exuberant, had died from a heart attack while traveling with students in Ireland only days earlier. “The Queen of Quilters’ Hearts” was born. Assertive yellows and reds and blues, a body shaped after the Venus of Willendorf and filled with water, earth and sky, I surrounded her with her famous block made of two triangle shapes called “Peaky and Spike” and a frame of dancing angels, calling up her vibrant dance through life with every cut and stitch. It was my first memorial quilt; it would not be my last.

Fabrics that represented the state flowers from all the places my Dad lived in his 84 years of wandering were turned into blocks and joined others signed by friends and loved ones to create a frame around a wall hanging which was filled with photographs from his life. I made it for his 80th birthday, and as a guard against encroaching symptoms of Alzheimer’s. I read somewhere that having those kinds of memory prompts around helped a person stay grounded, helped them hold on to their history, held off the decay of time. It hung in his office until the day he died, and he looked at it, touched it, laughed and smiled and cried at it in turn, or so I was told.

Fabric purchased at the shop down the street from where my Mom lived added to the piles. We had selected it for a quilt for her bedroom, filled with hummingbirds and cacti and desert flowers. I ran out of time on that quilt when she ran out of time. Pieces of those fabrics have wandered their way into many of the quilts I have crafted these ten years past, as if to weave her into them and thereby keep her in my life. Time. There is never enough time with those we love when Atropos closes her shears. Snip. Snip. Snip.

Fabric is paint and canvas all rolled in to one. The same yardage can show up as a cactus or a tree, a building or a feather. Life is a lot like that – more about the way we understand what we see than what is actually there. Is a rainstorm a blessing or a curse? In the middle of a drought, it is life itself. After a hurricane, it is another disaster in the making. Sometimes I dance naked in the rain, glorying in the droplets of joy from heaven. Sometimes I huddle under a quilt with my little dog, shivering at the power and intensity of thunder ripped from the throat of God. We all grieve when death steals away the ones we love. And yet - if a woman is in excruciating pain from incurable metastatic bone cancer, is it really wrong to want to see Atropos cut the thread of her life, bring surcease of agony and lead her to a better place? At times like those, a handmade quilt may bring temporary respite or a reminder that even when she is alone she is loved. It will not fix that which can only be fixed one way.

Fabrics carefully cut and hand appliqued to black called forth the rose windows of mighty cathedrals seen in my travels around the world, the entire quilt stitched by hand for the first time, an adventure in going “old school” and eschewing the machine for needle and thread and patience. The panes of glass glow with light against the shadows, a constant call to be the light for those who are trapped in darkness. There is so much darkness in our world. The need for bright shining acts of grace and kindness only grows and grows. Snip, snip, snip, and another mote of light is born from fabric and the love that abounds in my heart and the Universe.

And then there are events which stop the flow of time, turn the world upside down, break open the tiny boxes in which we huddle against the vastness of the world.

Snip, snip, snip as tears poured down my cheeks. Little had I known when I purchased the novelty yardage showing the skylines of New York City and Washington, D.C. to celebrate the turn of the millennium that less than two years later I would be sitting in my studio, weeping. The long, pointed bills of my golden stork scissors flashed through a haze of tears as I trimmed the buildings away from their star-spangled nighttime backgrounds and repositioned them against green grass and sunny skies and concrete before adding billowing smoke from the Pentagon and the crater that had been the World Trade Towers. Those I had clipped from the skyline with shaking hands and tears that left me aching inside, the screams and silences of the dying and the dead ringing in my head. I wrapped the image in angels, scattering them around the scene like the ash that fell for days. No one died alone in those brutal hours – the hosts of heaven held the hand of every soul who passed from this life to the next. Snip, snip, snip. Atropos was busy and another angel spread its wings, gathered another life, carried it away in a strong, protective embrace. My quilt found its way to Houston, Texas that year to hang at the International Quilt Festival in memory of the devastation that had hit that bright September morning.

Two snips and the Towers were gone. It had not taken much longer to lose them in real life.

Fabrics in every shade and tint of browns and pinks and greens splashed together to create a different skyline, that of the Santa Catalina mountains turned to flame by the setting sun. “When the mountains are pink, it’s time to drink!” my parents would cheerfully call out before fixing a cocktail and settling on the porch to watch the cosmic light show in the desert they loved so much. They are still there, together, in the sands of that serene wilderness, forever watching the mountains blaze to life each evening, toasting each other as they dance through the life that comes.

Fabrics pieced into quilts go to comfort babies born too soon, to give a moment of colorful joy to those suffering from abuse or loss, to lonely forgotten people who have little else to bring them warmth. Quilters donate to charities who care for the broken and forgotten, those in desperate need, and children who have seen far too much far too soon of the darker side of life. Tiny drops of light scattered by my tiny pieces of cut and sewn and cut and sewn fabrics sparkle in the night. It is not much. Every bit of radiance helps.

And so I continue to snip away pieces from whole yards of cloth and stitch them back together. Where the Moirai spin and weave the warp and weft of our lives, light and dark, the shuttle flashing side to side until Atropos snips off the days of each person born, I snip and clip to stitch together something new from the broken threads of existence. No one lives without tragedy. No life lived is without joy. It is finding the balance, celebrating them both and moving forward towards which I strive with my tiny mosaics and collages of fabric. Memorials. Disasters. Births and weddings and graduations. The simple joy of capturing the image of a flower or a bird and giving it long life instead of the fleeting moment it knew in truth. Snip. Snip. Snip. Let the light shine.

Without her shears, Atropos could not bring life to a close, and close it always must. Life unending would be a horror; she saves us from that.

Without my scissors, I could not bring life back together to heal through my bits and pieces, my stitching disparate slices of fabric into entirely new existance with beauty that is totally new.

I will take my scissors over hers any day.

Susan Imbs

06-11-2021