I never made a quilt.
I knew just a little bit about quilting from a friend whose mother was a very keen quilter. They had lived in Canada for a couple of years, and I think her interest stemmed from that time. When we arrived in the US, we stayed with a woman for a couple of weeks (a contact of a contact who very kindly opened her home to us) who was a quilting addict. It was a bit of a nightmare, as there were pins, needles and scissors everywhere, and I had a youngest who was two years old (the woman didn't have children). In those early days, I had time to kill in the house during the day. It was both strangely busy (sorting out bank accounts, driving tests, social security numbers, house hunting), and strangely quiet, because there were long spells when I was alone in a strange house, with my three children, knowing no-one and hardly able to go out because the weather was so bad and - as I was horrified to find - you couldn't walk anywhere. So I picked up a book about quilting.
The book was a series of short stories and reflections, and I found myself drawn in. So as the children watched rather a lot of the Disney channel and Nickelodeon and I began my lament for CBBC (a lament which would last five years), I would read short pieces about quilting. I began to understand some of the magic of it. It's not just the sewing, you see. It's the love that goes into the quilt. Women down the years have made quilts for their daughters as they marry, for their sons as they go off to a new city, for a cousin who is ill, for a friend who is bereaved. Quilts are an expression of love, of support, of caring. They are designed with creative excitement, stitched with love, finished with a joyful sense of completion, and given to their recipients as gifts from the heart. This all seemed a little over-the-top and too emotional to my newly-left-Britain ears, but I warmed to it. Perhaps it was the beginning of a new perspective on our famous British reserve and stiff upper lip.
The other aspect of quilting that caught my attention was the community of women it brings together. In the pioneer days, women desperately needed each other's support and practical help, and quilts would be - literally - pieced together from scraps contributed by friends and neighbours. The women would gather together to finish the quilt, filling it and backing it in one long session, that could last all day, all persevering together until the final stitch was done. If I remember rightly, this is called a "quilting bee". One of the stories in the book I read urged non-quilters to go along to one. "You'll find a warm welcome, laughter, and long-lasting friendship", it said. "Experienced quilters love a beginner to take under their wings." Alone in a strange land, that sounded like just what I needed. A ready-made group of older, wiser women, who would pass on their skills, and gather me up. I decided I would make a quilt, and then I'd be able to take it with me when we returned back to Britain, and it would be my American thing, full of American memories.
Reader, I never made that quilt. There was a moment when it came closer, when we moved into our own home, which had a lovely light-filled room that had been the previous occupant's sewing room. But for us, that room needed to become a child's bedroom. Life became busy with other things. I found friendship elsewhere, and I did find my group of older, wiser American women, but in a book club, not a sewing circle.
I enjoyed quilting vicariously through an English friend in Hertfordshire who took it up, and started blogging about it. Reading her blog, I could see how the old values of quilting are being practised in new ways made possible by the internet. Women are exchanging designs and techniques, helping newbies get started, sending each other packages of fabric through the post, enjoying competitions and challenges, and working together on projects. There are blog posts describing joyous real-life meetings of friends who have got to know each other online. The magic of quilting meets the magic of blogging!
Perhaps I will take up quilting when I retire. I'll have a table on which I can leave a sewing machine and half-finished projects, without having to clear them away before dinner-time; there'll be no-one wandering round the house in bare feet (those pins!); I'll have time to stitch away to my heart's content. Perhaps I will design a quilt called "American Memories". Perhaps I really will.
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Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Sunday, September 18, 2016
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Blogging and Margaret Thatcher
One of the things I love about blogging is how it’s really just an extended conversation with a bunch of friends. You see, I’m sitting here saying “now where were we? Ah yes. Margaret Thatcher.” It feels to me like we were chatting away over coffee, everyone chipping in, and I was just about to say a big thank you to you all for dropping by, and then the doorbell rang. It was an award being delivered. So then I had to show off the award, decide who to pass it on to, and just as I was rewinding to what I really wanted to talk about, there was a phone call, about a picture meme. I’d been dying to show off my mural to you all anyway, so I had to dig out some pictures and pass them round. So here I am, still drawing breath, and still saying “where were we?”
Perhaps this is why blogging is such comfortable territory to people with small children. Which of you hasn’t had a conversation along the following lines?
“It’s not the same as going out after work for a drink and chatting to someone all evening. Huh. Lucky if we get an hour before ‘someone’ gets tired and we have to head home.”
“Yup, and it’s not like it’s proper conversation anyway. [Sigh] I guess that’s just one more skill we all develop. The art of talking while chasing a snotty-nosed toddler round the room with a tissue. Come here, you.”
“Right. They never warned us how we’d have to talk in two-sentence chunks all the time. Share nicely please. I mean, it’s fine. You get used to it. I said ‘Share’. But it’s not the same. Anyway, what were you saying about your mother-in-law’s ingrowing toenails? If you can’t take turns, we’ll have to put that Postman Pat V-Tech learn your shapes and colours talking boomerang right away. Surgery?”
Those of us who are a bit longer in the motherhood tooth no longer even have the novelty of self-congratulatory awareness that we are doing new things. Get me. I’m so multi-tasking. We’re the ones who would now probably struggle to talk to the same colleague for a whole evening and would be thinking of a way to leave the pub politely. We merely furrow our brows, and search each other’s faces in companionable memory-lapse silence, until one of us says “Margaret Thatcher”, and the other slaps the table, takes a gulp of tepid coffee, and replies:
“Yes. Margaret Thatcher. Well, I loved everyone’s comments, and what an interesting read they made. As for my own opinion, well, it rather changed as a result of the debate. I’ll even confess to lying awake at night not being able to sleep for thoughts of Margaret Thatcher.
I started off with several of you, thinking she wasn’t a proper woman, because she got to the top by being like a man. Then I realized what a very unfeminist position that is. We women really are our own worst enemies. I mean, what would I want a woman Prime Minister to be? Someone younger, more attractive, more fashionable, whose choice of outfit would make the news alongside her policies? Or a mother of young children, so we could all smugly wonder whether she found time to help her children learn their spellings in between meetings at Number 10 and voting at the House of Commons? How we love to do down women who achieve. Yes, we are our own worst enemies. This article, put my way by A Modern Mother, says it so well. It’s about Rachida Dati, the French politician who took five days’ maternity leave when she had her baby. Five days. I can't even imagine... But I don't need to. She's not me. She doesn't have my life, I don't have hers. That's the point.
So I have shifted. I now think Margaret Thatcher was a proper woman (handbag and all). I think she found her way, fought her way, to where she wanted to be, regardless of her gender. She was a feminist without having a feminist agenda. And yes, I think it did make a difference. I don’t think she was exactly a role model, but having a woman PM did prove to us all that no sphere of life could any longer be considered the sole preserve of men.
I’ve just created a picture of her for myself (and this is pure whimsy) losing her thread, and scanning Geoffrey Howe’s face in a moment of silence, before slapping the cabinet room table and exclaiming 'The Single European Currency. Yes. I knew there was something else I wanted to talk to you about.'"
Perhaps this is why blogging is such comfortable territory to people with small children. Which of you hasn’t had a conversation along the following lines?
“It’s not the same as going out after work for a drink and chatting to someone all evening. Huh. Lucky if we get an hour before ‘someone’ gets tired and we have to head home.”
“Yup, and it’s not like it’s proper conversation anyway. [Sigh] I guess that’s just one more skill we all develop. The art of talking while chasing a snotty-nosed toddler round the room with a tissue. Come here, you.”
“Right. They never warned us how we’d have to talk in two-sentence chunks all the time. Share nicely please. I mean, it’s fine. You get used to it. I said ‘Share’. But it’s not the same. Anyway, what were you saying about your mother-in-law’s ingrowing toenails? If you can’t take turns, we’ll have to put that Postman Pat V-Tech learn your shapes and colours talking boomerang right away. Surgery?”
Those of us who are a bit longer in the motherhood tooth no longer even have the novelty of self-congratulatory awareness that we are doing new things. Get me. I’m so multi-tasking. We’re the ones who would now probably struggle to talk to the same colleague for a whole evening and would be thinking of a way to leave the pub politely. We merely furrow our brows, and search each other’s faces in companionable memory-lapse silence, until one of us says “Margaret Thatcher”, and the other slaps the table, takes a gulp of tepid coffee, and replies:
“Yes. Margaret Thatcher. Well, I loved everyone’s comments, and what an interesting read they made. As for my own opinion, well, it rather changed as a result of the debate. I’ll even confess to lying awake at night not being able to sleep for thoughts of Margaret Thatcher.
I started off with several of you, thinking she wasn’t a proper woman, because she got to the top by being like a man. Then I realized what a very unfeminist position that is. We women really are our own worst enemies. I mean, what would I want a woman Prime Minister to be? Someone younger, more attractive, more fashionable, whose choice of outfit would make the news alongside her policies? Or a mother of young children, so we could all smugly wonder whether she found time to help her children learn their spellings in between meetings at Number 10 and voting at the House of Commons? How we love to do down women who achieve. Yes, we are our own worst enemies. This article, put my way by A Modern Mother, says it so well. It’s about Rachida Dati, the French politician who took five days’ maternity leave when she had her baby. Five days. I can't even imagine... But I don't need to. She's not me. She doesn't have my life, I don't have hers. That's the point.
So I have shifted. I now think Margaret Thatcher was a proper woman (handbag and all). I think she found her way, fought her way, to where she wanted to be, regardless of her gender. She was a feminist without having a feminist agenda. And yes, I think it did make a difference. I don’t think she was exactly a role model, but having a woman PM did prove to us all that no sphere of life could any longer be considered the sole preserve of men.
I’ve just created a picture of her for myself (and this is pure whimsy) losing her thread, and scanning Geoffrey Howe’s face in a moment of silence, before slapping the cabinet room table and exclaiming 'The Single European Currency. Yes. I knew there was something else I wanted to talk to you about.'"
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
I have a question
All the excitement that the world has been feeling on Obama's inauguration day has got me thinking. I have a question for you. Now, it's not meant to be making clever comparisons, or drawing parallels, or grinding an axe or anything like that, so please don't get all upset with me. It's just something I've been pondering, and I would be interested to know what you all think, on both sides of the Atlantic.
When Margaret Thatcher became the first woman Prime Minister in the UK, there was a sense of excitement, surprise, achievement, history (I don't really remember, but I think there was, although nothing compared to yesterday of course). Women had had the vote only since 1928, fifty years before. My question is this. Did Margaret Thatcher's appointment change life for British women? Do we see ourselves differently? Do we have different ambitions? What about for British men? What about people outside Britain? Has it, three decades down the line, made a difference? Ah, that's more than one question. Alright. Just answer the last one.
My ponderings were extended by this post, on the blog She's not from Yorkshire, which is written by 3 American women living in Yorkshire. I love reading their experiences - the mirror of mine in some ways. I was intrigued to read what they say about feminism in Britain, backed up by other American commenters. I can't decide whether I agree with them or not. What do you all think? (OK then, 2 questions, but you can just stick to the first if you like.)
When Margaret Thatcher became the first woman Prime Minister in the UK, there was a sense of excitement, surprise, achievement, history (I don't really remember, but I think there was, although nothing compared to yesterday of course). Women had had the vote only since 1928, fifty years before. My question is this. Did Margaret Thatcher's appointment change life for British women? Do we see ourselves differently? Do we have different ambitions? What about for British men? What about people outside Britain? Has it, three decades down the line, made a difference? Ah, that's more than one question. Alright. Just answer the last one.
My ponderings were extended by this post, on the blog She's not from Yorkshire, which is written by 3 American women living in Yorkshire. I love reading their experiences - the mirror of mine in some ways. I was intrigued to read what they say about feminism in Britain, backed up by other American commenters. I can't decide whether I agree with them or not. What do you all think? (OK then, 2 questions, but you can just stick to the first if you like.)
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