Have You Always Made Slabs?

After inviting open questions on today’s Quilters’ Playcation Adventure Sewalong, someone asked me if I’ve always made slabs (hi Gail). The obvious answer is no, but at the same time it feels like I always have.

I can remember the first ones I made. The girls were babies playing in the bath. I needed to watch them, but they managed their splashing about without me. So I took my plastic baggies of scraps and sorted them on the bathroom counter into little piles of colour. It was so motivating that I put the girls to bed quickly (and early) so I could go to the dining room and sew. I took one pile and sewed all the pieces together. Then another. My first slabs. That was in December 2009.

Slabs have become a life-force all their own since then. That first blog post initiated a conversation with Amanda Jean Nyberg. That conversation sparked a collaboration and then a book. That book launched our careers. Thousands of people have made slabs for themselves, for charity quilts, for joy. They’ve become a go to block for many, for many reasons.

More than 15 years later, yes, I am still making them. I love them. They are a perfect way to use your scraps as they are. No need to force the fabric to do something it doesn’t want to do and you don’t want to sew. I love the meditative aspect of sewing slabs. I wouldn’t say that I could do it in my sleep, but it does not require a lot of thought anymore; just action, muscle memory. I really like using my scraps, period. Slabs use them, really use them. I love the design possibilities of this made fabric and have not run out of ideas for their use.

Case in point, I’ve never quite used them like I am this year, on the Quilters’ Playcation Adventure Sewalong. All solids, for one. More importantly, truly as a fabric. Paired with Kona Snow they are one of the two fabrics in one of my sample quilts. And I am loving the way it is turning out! Quite a few others are also making and using slabs, and also discovering/embracing the possibilities.

So, no, I haven’t always made slabs. But I don’t forsee ever not making them.

Unquilting

Sigh… Big sigh.

Last week I was all excited because I gave myself a day to quilt. It’s been a stressful few months and I needed a day to myself. I also needed a quilt finish or two in order to clear my brain. So I booked a day on the long arm, got a few quilts all prepped, and went in to My Sewing Room to hang out with Emily, who runs the long arm department there. She helped me load my first quilt and thread the machine - the two tasks I always forget how to do. Otherwise I feel pretty comfortable on the long arm. I started up and went along merrily.

Yes, I checked my tension - once - at the very beginning. Admittedly, it was hard to see as it was yellow thread on a yellow part of the backing, but it looked okay. And so I rambled on. Nothing fancy with my quilting, just loops and stars all over. I was listening to some upbeat dance music and in my groove. Emily was doing her thing and left me as I felt more than confident.

Overconfident.

About halfway through I noticed that the tension was off on the stitching. I saw the blue fabric of the background as it wound around the bars and I could see my tension was off. I made some adjustments on the computer of the long arm and continued. Folks, it did not get better. Finally, I conceded to my mistake and called Emily over. I should have stopped there but I decided to proceed, after she made more adjustments. Bad move. Long story medium, we never fixed the problem. I pulled the finished quilt off the frame and set it aside. Maybe it will get fixed with a wash? I foolishly thought to myself.

Emily tinkered with the machine - the bobbin casing was a bit off - and we loaded the second quilt. This time I pulled out an extra bit of fabric and tested the tension before I touched needle to my quilt. Much better! I proceeded to quilt the second quilt without any problem and in the course of those few hours accepted what I needed to do on the first quilt. While waiting for me to finish Emily graciously started the job of ripping stitches for me.

It’s been a long time since I made a mistake like this. I don’t blame Emily, even though I was renting and she was technically supervising me. I know enough, and made that clear when starting that I should have caught this myself. It would be easy to get really frustrated and beat myself up. Or I could get angry and blame Emily too. Neither action is going to help. The only thing to do is let out that big sigh, find your favourite seam ripper, and sit down to rip. It’s just a mistake on a quilt, it isn’t life threatening or even life changing.

Ripping stitches when the tension is loose on one side is actually quite easy, just very time consuming. This quilt measures over 60” square and I have a tendency to quilt things to death, so there was a lot of ripping to do. Thankfully, my son and I have been rewatching Ted Lasso so I sat with him and ripped, and ripped. He would fiddle with the pile of thread that grew with each episode. Therapeutic for both of us in many ways. It took me the entire third season and almost all of the Netflix series One Day to finish ripping. I only put one hole in the backing so that will be an easy fix.

It was all just a mistake, it happens. I know many of us would get ourselves quite worked up over this. Maybe call ourselves a few names? Cast blame and shame? Perfectionism is a nasty beast. Of course we want to improve, not feel like we are wasting time, and get things finished. That’s normal and understandable. But making ourselves feel bad over quilting? Totally uncalled for and unnecessary. Shit happens. Acknowledge it, clean it up, and move forward.

Time to rebook in to the longarm. This time I will remember to bring an extra piece of fabric for testing tension. I will also not be so cocky and use the resources there (Emily) to make sure I am doing things right.

Rest

Truth be told, I’m not very good at rest. I want to be, I try to be, but it’s hard. I’ve come to realize that this is because I would generally consider rest as sitting on my butt and doing nothing. Stop me if this sounds familiar though, you can’t sit and do nothing until everything is done. Everything is never done, right? Which means you never rest.

We thus need a new definition of rest.

At one time in life (when I was younger) I was a competitive athlete. Back then rest meant two things. One, just like above, rest was simply not doing the training. Two, within a workout there was active rest. So not the hard training pieces, but the easy strokes in between the hard sets. As a professional quilter I see the benefit of the latter. As a parent I realize the former is impossible. So that has led to me understanding that I need two unique forms of rest.

Active Rest

When you are working on deadlines and contracts quilting can feel like a chore, let alone actual work for some. Quite often the quilting becomes hard and full of drudgery. What once gave us joy and energy drags us down. It’s one thing to be pushing to meet a deadline like a wedding or show entry. This is why I am a big fan of Active Rest.

This is about, in many respects, mindless sewing and play. It’s the sewing that doesn’t challenge you or push your creativity. It might be creative action though. So maybe sewing snippets of fabrics in pairs, making HSTs, aligning strips, binding a quilt, stippling a quilt. The kind of sewing that allows you to catch your breath after a hard run. That’s why it is called Active Rest. You are still doing something but giving yourself the opportunity to slow down, gather thoughts, and be mindless for a little while. Because creativity begets creativity your juices will eventually start flowing again and you will be ready for the next challenge.

Escape to Rest

While running away to the beach or the mountains is many, many people’s idea of escape (myself included) we can’t do it that often. That’s why we need to find daily or weekly moments of escape. For me, this often includes long walks in the forests not far from home, a ski trip for the day, or maybe camping in the summer. It might be a hot bath, curling up with a great book, or binging a new show. My best advice when on a physical escape like this is to lean in to it. So no stitching while watching TV, no podcasts on your walk, leaving the sewing at home on a trip out of town. Let escape truly be a mental break.

Don’t want to give up your creative pursuits, even for a moment? Then switch it up! Escape to Rest also means exploring other creative interests. Trying crochet, taking a watercolour class, learning embroidery, even reading a fashion magazine. Your muscles and brain are still working, but in a different way. This alternate firing of brain cells gives your quilting brain a rest, your conscious mind an escape, but you are still pursuing creativity. It can be both relaxing and liberating.

In truth, this is what Morning Make has been for me over the last two years, on the months I am not sewing, that is. Trying weaving and embroidery and painting and poetry is an Escape to Rest for my creative brain.

The last few years have been rough for everyone. Indeed, rough is an understatement. While there were long periods of time where we were home, languishing, we weren’t still resting. Doomscrolling, cleaning, stressing, eating, teaching our kids, working on the dining room table - all of it added up to HARD WORK. Watching Tiger King at the end of the day just didn’t quite give us our energy back.

Resting is not easy.. I don’t want to be roped in to the mess of toxic positivity either when I say rest is important. Rest is a choice. It’s taken me a long, long time to see that and thus make it priority. I thought not having to drive my kids all evening was going to be the rest I needed. Nope, not even close. I puttered and wandered and zoned out but I did not rest. Since choosing to make rest an important part of my life I can feel myself catch my breath a little quicker, like I am getting in shape. The more I rest the better I feel when I am doing the hard stuff.

Full confession: I just spent the weekend in the mountains with my husband, just my husband. I brought crafty things to do and read but, in the end, read a thriller, took 5 baths in 48 hours, ate room service, and walked in a snowy forest. Now that’s an Escape to Rest! Then I came home ready to sew!

Social Justice Sewing Academy Anti-Racist Guidebook

Last fall, after a summer of Black Lives Matter protests, the Social Justice Sewing Academy set out to do some different kind of work. This, on top of the amazing lessons, memorials, and community work they already do. They’ve just published a guidebook for the sewers of the world, An Anti-Racist Guidebook.

What is Anti-Racism?

I came to the term through Ibram X. Kendi and his book How to Be an Anti Racist. Essentially, it is about doing more than saying you believe all races are equal. Saying you don’t see colour isn’t the answer. It is about examining the systemic racism that we all participate in one way or another, then actively working to dismantle it.

When the call for volunteers came out I signed up immediately. As a quilter who works almost exclusively in cotton, as a white woman who only learned more than pop culture civil rights history in the last 10 years, as a human, I wanted to do some of the anti-racism work for myself and our community. Ever since my trip to Alabama and seeing cotton fields for the first time I’ve wanted to dive deeper into its production. Hand in hand with that is the deep dive into the role cotton has played in systemic racism.

My essay in the Anti-Racist Guidebook is the result. I looked into the ties between slavery and cotton production, which most of us know about. But it also examines the growth of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism as tied to cotton production, and therefore slavery. It also examines current cotton production, including how those links aren’t really gone.

The process was eye-opening for sure. I hope it is for you. It has me hanging on to every scrap of my cotton, not wanting to waste a bit of effort that went into making it. I won’t lie, it also gives me mixed feelings about using cotton at all. This discomfort is good, its going to force me to dig deeper. The next step is to talk to the fabric companies that make our medium of choice and ask them about their current supply chain. The more we all know, the better.

I highly recommend checking out the entire Anti-Racist Guidebook. There are some incredible pieces on everything from code-meshing to political quilts, from housing to resiliency. Each essay is written by a volunteer. They place themselves in the work, to show the work rather than centre their story. Each essay also includes recommendations for self reflection by the reader, to do their own work on the topic.

For my part one of my resources was this book: Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert. I pulled from multiple sections but now I am sitting down for a good read. It is fascinating and disheartening at the same time, illuminating and depressing. But we can’t walk away from the thick, the ugly, the hard just because they are so. People live this still and it is up to all of us to move forward for all.

And for those of you who might want to tell me to keep politics out of quilting, I hope you read this guidebook. If anything, to know that cotton, our material of choice is inherently political.