I’m heading to my daughter Chloe’s apartment to help her put the finishing touches on the Caftan she’s making for me. I saw this dress in a catalogue a few weeks ago and loved it.
“Wow, look at this cool caftan, Chloe,” I had said while lounging around the pool one day, showing her the photo of the breezy, ankle-lengthed, color-blocked dress. “$128? I bet you could sew this.”
“Sure,” she said. “You just need to pick out four fabrics that look good together and I’ll make it for you.”
As I drive over the Hollywood Hills to Silverlake where I will try on my dress for hemming, bringing Chloe the small white buttons I stopped at Hobby Lobby to purchase, I reflect on her superior sewing skills, and marvel. This year alone, she has made me a pair of linen pajamas, a pair of shorts, an A-line dress (which I also saw in a catalogue and was too cheap to buy). She has made Nick two linen short-sleeve shirts which he wears any time they’re clean. She made her boyfriend, Josh a terrycloth Onesie and a Halloween-themed shirt and every time I see her, she’s wearing something new and cute. When I ask her where she got it, I am no longer surprised when she answers, “I made it.”
My friend, Thomas is super pissed about her meteoric rise to sewing super-stardom, because it was our idea, his and mine, to start the Quilting Bee. Omar was in his junior year in high school when I got the idea of taking all of the uniforms I had been saving in bins since he was five years old and making a t-shirt quilt out of them. One day while dragging our trash cans in from the curb, Thomas and I got to chatting in the driveway. I told him about my vision of creating a keepsake quilt for Omar using every single uniform he’d ever played in — from Tee Ball to basketball to softball to soccer to baseball to flag football to tackle football, three or four teams a year — and Thomas said he’d been thinking about making a quilt for his friend’s new baby, little Jackson. A Quilting Bee was what we needed. We both owned sewing machines. And how hard could it be? We’d get together at my house to drink lots of wine, listen to his RuPaul playlist on Spotify and learn to quilt. We agreed that the only people cool enough to be in our Bee were the two of us. Other interested parties would need to earn an invitation.
Who knew quilting took so much boring cutting? We started with a bang, Thomas making a big Thomas entrance on the first night of our Bee, bursting through the front door as if stepping onto stage, somehow making his sewing tools look like accessories — sewing machine in it’s mint-green travel bag held up in his left hand and his well-organized suitcase-sized sewing caddy swinging from his right wrist, exclaiming, “Bitch, you better have my chardonnay poured.”
He parked himself at the dining room table with the wine glass he had given me for Christmas, the one that holds a whole bottle, and ceremoniously pulled out his spiral quilting notebook to map out a mathematically-correct schematic drawing of his baby quilt. I poured us each a glass, got our theme song (Sissy that Walk) going and then, returning from the guest room, plonked down a huge mound of haphazardly-folded polyester on my side of the table, then fetched another and just stood over the piles dumbly.
“Do you want me to help you figure out how many squares you need?” Thomas asked, bringing the punch bowl-sized glass of wine up to his face for a sip.
“Yes, please,” I said. Thomas tapped his calculator keys with a mock patient expression and then scribbled in his notebook. Turns out my moronic idea of making a queen-sized quilt meant I needed to cut fifty six squares of t-shirt. After a lot of whining, the cutting commenced. The endless cutting. Thomas, a lover of craft supplies like every grade school teacher, owned every item invented to succeed in quilting. I felt like the underprepared seventh grader I had been in art class when I had to ask every few minutes, “Are you done with that cutting board?” or “Can I borrow those round cutters?” or “Where’d you get that square from?”
By the end of the night, Thomas was alternating efficiently between steaming his seams open on the ironing board in the kitchen and pulling up Youtube videos to learn how to best execute a stitch. I was slumped drunkenly in a chair with a pile of wadded up fabric sitting in front of me, a puddle of scraps surrounding my feet, yelling, “Oh my god, I will never cut another square again in my life! How do we get this over with?”
Luckily, my mom came for a visit. My mom is an expert seamstress. When my sisters and I were little, she sewed all of our clothes and even opened a tailoring shop for a few years after the divorce. She must have taught me how to sew although I don’t really remember it. The thing that stands out in my mind is the C I earned in middle school Home Ec class when I sewed my nightgown wrong side out. Sewing is more difficult and aggravating than one imagines. I vowed never to sew again, until I bought my first home in North Carolina. My mother-in-law gave me her old sewing machine and I, forgetting that my temperament was not suited to sewing, proceeded to make every single muslin tab-top curtain for every single window in the house. Chloe was in first grade then. She witnessed the weeks of sweating and cursing, me pulling my hair out and then the culminating moment when I perched the sewing machine on the second story window ledge trying to throw it out the window. I couldn’t get the screen unlatched. She sighed and said, “Mom, why don’t you just buy the curtains next time?” Before I gave up sewing completely, I taught her how to sew a few rudimentary stitches and we worked together on a couple of little tops for her.
“Okay, Mom, our Quilting Bee is tonight,” I said to Mom after she’d been here a couple of days. “Are you ready to work?”
“I don’t know, Leslie,” she said. “My sewing days may be behind me.”
“Nuh uh,” I said. “You have to earn your keep around here. And Thomas is bringing his famous banana pudding.”
The promise of dessert and a bottomless glass of White Zinfandel from the box in the fridge hooked her. I told her all about the long, tedious few weeks preceding her visit in which I had spent a little time every day cutting 12-inch squares out of Omar’s t-shirts. She clucked in pity when I told her I’d discovered that each square needed a reinforced backing ironed onto it to make the fabric stable enough to sew. So I had to cut fifty six squares of that too. So, by the time she arrived, I was finally ready to piece it all together. Thomas was already putting the finishing touches on his tiny quilt, though it also took him longer to make than we would have guessed.
“Luann, have you ever made a quilt before?” Thomas asked, setting a big blob of yellow pudding on the table in front of her, his special recipe using those Pepperidge Farm Chessmen cookies.
“No, I haven’t Thomas, but I remember sitting under my grandmother’s quilting frame when I was a very young girl. They quilted by hand back then on this big wooden frame and I loved to sit underneath there and listen to the ladies talk.” Mom and Thomas and I worked and chatted and drained the box of White Zinfandel as Thomas finished his quilt and mine started coming together. I finally had the brilliant idea of setting Mom in front of the sewing machine to stitch the squares into rows while I ironed the seams open and kept her wine glass full.
When she started to get up out of her seat a couple of hours later, I said, “Stay there, Mom, I’ll get your wine.”
“Well, can I go to the bathroom, Leslie?”
“Doesn’t your mom get a union break?” Thomas asked.
For the three weeks of Mom’s visit, she and I worked together to get the rows done and then to sew the rows together. We had a frustrating false start putting the batting and flannel backing on because it made the quilt too thick to maneuver in my machine. I briefly considered flying my white flag and finding a professional to finish it for me, but by that time, I was determined to bring it to completion on my own. Mom and I picked out some fleece which didn’t need the batting filler and I was able to roll the huge and heavy monster up and get it through my machine. Mom watched as I did the final leg of the quilt and then we stood back and admired our work. I thought it was beautiful and was very proud of what we’d accomplished together.
But I had received another gift from the Quilting Bee, sitting with Mom all those nights over the sewing machine, drinking wine and listening to music. I’d put on Hits from the Fifties on Spotify and ask her tons of questions.
“Did you and Dad dance together when you were in high school?”
“Your Dad would only slow dance. So when we went to the sock hop, I’d dance all the fast dances with his friend, Wendell. You know he’s gone now, don’t you?”
About the time I retired from quilting (immediately after Omar’s t-shirt quilt was finished), Chloe decided she’d like to try her hand at it. Her college roommate was having a baby and Chloe wanted to make her something special. She found a cool pattern and some vintage fabric at the store down the street and in no time, whipped out a professional-looking baby quilt. Someone would have paid hundreds of dollars for that thing.
Then, if that wasn’t enough, she followed it up with a throw-size quilt, complete with circles that looked like a work of art.
Thomas didn’t take it well. “Bitch…what a show-off,” he said. “As soon as I perfect baking, she comes along and makes homemade marshmallows and graham crackers. And now she’s outdone us in quilting. Does she have to be better at everything?” He cut his eyes and turned his head away. “Girl better watch her back… Just sayin.”
After making half a dozen amazing quilts, Chloe grew bored and switched to making clothes. I donated my sewing machine to her and she took it home and parked it on her dining table. Sewing is now her major stress relieving activity. It satisfies her analytical and methodical left brain tendencies and balances her overworked right brain when its overwhelmed by her full days of comedy script writing. It was a godsend during the shutdown, when she was trapped inside her apartment for eighteen months. She has stacks of fabrics surrounding her table these days and when I see her at the sewing machine, it warms my heart because what I see is a enduring genetic line stretching all the way back to my great grandmother Betty, her quilting frame and the little girl sitting underneath.
I guess Thomas is over his snit now because, last time he was at my house I showed him the picture of the caftan Chloe’s making me and now he wants one too.
“Maybe in a sheer, flowing, black fabric,” he says, turning in slow circles and waving his arms like Stevie Nicks.
“I’ll make it for you,” I say. “It can’t be that hard. I made a whole quilt.”
“Girl, stop lying, your Mom did all the work!” He says.
“What? Shut up! Do you remember how much cutting I did?”
I miss our Quilting Bee. I think I’ll talk to Thomas about starting up again, but this time with no sewing.
