like all conflicts, it is a blur

I think that my thesis will eventually turn out to be about the place of art in daily life. Blogs, I think, are a form of artistic expression, and are thus one way in which technology enhances the ability of normal people to produce art.


I don't know where all that's going to end up yet, though. Generally, I think that art has a place in everyone's life, and that everyone should strive to produce something artistic every week or so, if not every day. I will probably not take that stance in my thesis, because it does not seem especially academic.


But this got me thinking about my own life, +art. I'm quite lucky to have had my artistic inklings encouraged and supported, materially and spiritually, by both my parents and the person I ended up with. But during the semester it's hard to get up the energy and time necessary to embark on any large artistic projects. So I picked up my quilt again.


When I was a freshman in college, I had 3 classes on MW&F, and nothing on TRs. So I had a lot of extra time. On one occasion, I went home, and having moved everything to school, I ended up using a quilt that my great-grandmother had made. It was on my Mom's bed as a child, and one of the patches was worn off by where her dog had slept toward the bottom of the bed. It is a Sunbonnet Sue quilt, although I think my great-grandmother must have made this particular pattern herself. The colored material in her quilt was from leftovers, as far as I know.


So Mom and I got a bunch of calicos and embroidery threads, plus an embroidery hoop, and traced one of the Sunbonnet Sues on the quilt to use as a pattern, and cut a pattern out of a manila folder. And so I spent a lot of free time sewing (and sewing and sewing) during my freshman year.


I pick it up from time to time and work on it. I have a total of 6 finished to near-finished squares. Other artistic trends in my life find their ways into my quilt -- for instance, one of my Sues has a beaded hatband, and another has a bead-netted pocket. I have no idea how long those will last once it's finished.


I think about my great-grandmother making that quilt, and wonder about what she did while she quilted. Did she and her buddies have bees? Did she listen to the radio? Was she all alone, in silence, just sewing with her thoughts?


While I sew, I listen to the radio (This American Life, especially) and think about how much longer I'm probably taking to make my quilt than she took to make hers. Not just that I'm into my 6th year on it, but that every stitch I make could probably have been made in half the time by her.


I have no idea how the end of the quilting process works. I know there's batting, several layers, and I know there'll be the diamonds I'm working on now, and I know that all these layers are attached to one another by the process of quilting - that is, sewing up and down through all the layers millions of times, in a pattern - but somehow I can't see myself reaching that stage. And I wonder how much she did by hand, and if she had a machine to do it with.


And a lot of the time, I wonder if I'll ever get it done.