Quilters are patching together hope through sewing effort
Once again, it’s the quilters’ turn to save America.
Doctors, nurses, EMTs and caregivers all need face masks. And while production ramps up to bring the official, virus-filtering N95 respirator masks to frontline medical staff, quilters are coming to the rescue with unofficial, ick-filtering, home-sewn masks similar to surgical masks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains the difference on its website.
Turns out that high thread count, tightly woven cotton fabric keeps out about 74% of airborne gunk. Home-sewn masks won’t keep out viruses such as the coronavirus causing the current COVID-19 pandemic, but they keep out other things, and they’re better than bandannas. They also help prevent a coronavirus-infected person from spreading the contagion if they must travel to a doctor’s clinic or hospital.
The challenge is on to America’s quilters! Who has fabric and knows how to sew it, quick, into millions of masks?
Yes, we do, and yes, we can, and yes, we are.
Thus opens the next chapter in Quilting Saving Lives. Since before we were a country, quilting as a craft has supported mental and emotional health, not even counting the literal warmth that finished quilts have wrapped around millions.
Quilting has saved me, over and over again.
In 1974, my mother sewed for thrift, not for pleasure. This meant that over the next couple of years, when bicentennial fever intersected with the still-new women’s movement, my 15-year-old history buff self discovered that women’s history was written in fabric and stitches, not on parchment with quill pens.
Colonial women, and women since, expressed themselves through what they had on hand. Back then, I had neither access to new fabric nor the money to buy it. That made patchwork all the more an exercise in channeling creativity through the filter of the possible. The library stocked newly published books about quilting as a prism for women’s life experience. Applying sophomore geometry, I engineered patterns from photos of museum quilts and found a key for my voice.
When your medium is salvage, you can experiment without fear of waste. My Baptist upbringing was a black-and-white checkerboard of right and wrong. Quilting was a rainbow of gray. All was process. That is how I powered through my very first quilt, an eightpointed star that I later learned was an advanced technique. When I hit bumps of fabric as I pieced the diamonds, I simply did what I was learning in driver’s ed: it was sewing machine pedal to the metal.
Making something of nothing is healing, especially when your world falls apart and nothing is what you have. When my husband and I left the church where we’d been members for 27 years, I cut fine Liberty of London prints into inch-and-a-half strips and sewed Irish chains of pastel flowers. Our lives would come back together in the same way: still us, just in a different design.
There is always someone who needs to be wrapped in a fabric hug. A close friend runs an early-intervention program that helps families in distress weather crises.
Quilts for beds of the host families, quilts for the families in need and a few showcase quilts for fundraising; there have been weekends when empty spools pile up in a basket on my windowsill like beer cans after a frat party.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, veterans sewed tiny squares into bed quilts as a form of therapy and as a way to occupy themselves as they slowly healed. In the Great Depression, mills printed pretty designs on flour sacks so that mothers could have free fabric for baby dresses and lots of scraps for quilts. In 1985, the AIDS Memorial Quilt helped transform fear to grief and understanding.
I have now been quilting for 46 years. Despite surgical repair, my eyes cannot see fine detail as they used to. I am in the wings of the waterlilies stage of quilting. As his eyesight faded, Monet painted as brightly as ever, just bigger. I will soon have the perfect reason to pivot to the sharp contrasts and intense, flat colors of the modern quilting movement.
I had to create scraps for the masks I sewed this past month. To create inserts of a nonwoven filter fabric that might block viruses better than plain cotton, I peeled apart vacuum bags left over from a machine that long ago sucked its last.
But for the fabric that would be doctors’ faces to their world, I pulled from my best Indonesian-made batiks: ocean blues and pink flowers on the finest, tightest cotton. Thousands of quilters are giving their best too, many of them connecting through the Facebook group Relief Crafters of America. If anybody can patch together hope in this moment, it’s the quilters.