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Sew Happy in Strange Times

A story about a collaborative quarantine.

By Zara BellPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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This is a story about collaboration, about creativity during quarantine, and about finding joy making for loved ones with loved ones. Spoiler alert: it involves scissors.

By way of introduction I will confess to you that I am an art school junkie. I recently earned a MFA from one and I took eight years to do it. I’ll further qualify ‘junkie‘ by adding that I was raised in an artist’s colony in the American Southwest, my folks are artists, their friends are artists, and I have been making stuff with my hands since I was a child. I do not believe a person needs to go to art school to be an artist but I love to learn and art school allowed me to pursue a variety of tools and media in state-of-the-art facilities. And I want to teach art and for that I need a degree. But to make art, what you really need is to give yourself permission to make your work. There are all kinds of ways to learn how to do and make things and just as many ways to view and interpret art in the world. I call myself an art school junkie because, degree now in hand, I suspect that I have been guilty of denying myself permission to follow my heart and make what I want and instead appealing with my attendance and (borrowed) tuition dollars for someone else’s permission. I am obscenely shy about sharing my work, degree or no degree. But that is another story.

Don’t get me wrong: I had a fabulous time in school. I didn’t feel stifled or oppressed by any expectations other than my own. Quite the opposite, in fact. There were so many techniques to try and mediums to play with, I challenged myself to do a little bit of a wide variety of things: printmaking, painting, digital collage and digital printing to name a few. There was always more to do, always a new technique with new tools and equipment. A creative smorgasbord. And then it was over.

As the world learned of the pandemic and collectively hunkered down, I had just completed a terminal degree from a prestigious art school which included a gallery exhibition and a thesis document that left me with a lingering sense of arrival fallacy—the realization that after all that work, I didn’t actually love what I was doing, or didn’t love it any more. In any case, I was burned out and now I was stuck at home.

During quarantine, I learned to sew by watching YouTube tutorials. I wanted to sew masks but I discovered a lust for fabrics, a strong attraction to the colors and patterns available on fabric—and the fabric sources available for sale online, and I found I wanted to make things bigger than masks. (I will add to my confession, above, that I am now also a fabric junkie. Can’t. Get. Enough.)

I learned just about everything I know about sewing and fabric from the internet. I learned about quilting through the internet. From Craftsy I learned to piece together log cabin blocks. Theresa Down Under on taught me to appreciate the design virtues of the simple half-square block: take a bunch of squares, cut them diagonally, rearrange them, and be astounded at the many ways you can recombine the basic shapes to sew them into surprising patterns.

I became a member of SAQA and discovered an expansive and vibrant art world that somehow, in my adventures through the annals of academia, I had missed. One of the things I love most about this (new to me) art world is that it is dominated by brilliantly resourceful, creative women. The art quilt world is also characterized by a welcoming spirit and an abundance of helpful advice, and free (or comparatively inexpensive) tutorials.

A tutorial on the tumbling block pattern caught my attention. It is a process of joining triangles of fabric in a way that produces the optical illusion of a stack of cubes. The key is to choose fabrics in a specific range of values.

My partner, J., is a 20-year veteran of the film industry; his job is to make anything look like anything else. He is a rigging grip which means he deals with lighting, staging and fixing things on movie sets. Like almost everyone else on planet earth, he was out of work, so I appealed to him to help me make a tumbling block quilt for my dad, who had recently had health issues and was about to turn 81. When I showed J. the tutorial, he absolutely lit up. From this stack of floppy fabrics emerges a field of geometric forms, it’s the kind of visual magic that is right up his alley.

I should mention here that my dad’s art work involves color and geometric shapes, (although he works in glass) so the design of the quilt had significance as it was a kind of tribute to my dad.

We chose fabrics in a range of blue tints and shades. J. did a lot of the cutting and pinning and I did most of the sewing. Because of our combined work ethic, and the fact that we are both accustomed to working under pressure, we completed the full-sized quilt top in less than a week. Later, it was quilted by Debbie of Juniper Quilts. My parents love it and J. and I are proud of our first quilt. It wont be our last.

That could be a lovely ending, but it’s not the end of this story. Still confined to our home, which in short order became a home studio, we spent the next several months making things side by side or together. J. taught himself leather crafting from YouTube and I continued sewing quilt tops and made a few garments for myself—but my favorite project (after the quilt) was sewing a flannel shirt for J.

I will not go on about the frustrations and the learning curves (buttons, flannel) but I will tell you that J. was so happy with the result (he calls it his favorite shirt) that he asked me to teach him how to sew his own shirt. And that’s what I did. He chose the fabric and the buttons, and we made another shirt. There is no better way to learn a thing than to try and teach it. And there is little that is more rewarding than seeing a loved one beaming with delight over something you made with your hands.

self help
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About the Creator

Zara Bell

I’m a writer and an artist from the southwestern United States currently living in Savannah, GA.

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