When I knew I would go to Paris this year, I also knew I would take a quilt. Shortly after the moment I knew I would take a quilt, I also knew what form I wanted that quilt to take.
My dear Parisian friend is pregnant. I won’t extrapolate much on this particular life-altering event in her life because, well, it’s her life, and her privacy. But the word pregnancy alone is culturally significant enough — without any details of the particular life in question — for us to share a general understanding of the significance of the shift this word describes.
I am making this quilt, specifically, for my friend. When other friends have been pregnant I have made other quilts, ostensibly for their babies. (Even though gifts for infants — especially handmade ones — are always really tokens of love for their mothers.) But this quilt is not for my friend’s future child, not even in name. This quilt is for her.
The quilt back; all bedsheets and pillowcases.
Years ago when I asked her her favorite color she announced without hesitation in her signature singsong lilt: Marigold. (As a person with a somewhat acerbic nickname because of her color specificity I must own up, immediately, to the fact that this fabric color is most certainly not marigold. However, I thought a little color compromise to help this quilt come into being wouldn’t be the end of the world.) As I stated previously, I found this fabric when I was searching for something else; but the moment it came across my screen, I knew it was for her. I also already knew that I would be making a ring of stars. It was only when I began to plot out on graph paper exactly how I would place them that I began to see the significance of the choice, and the reason that this idea — which I had long held onto, but never made — felt so immediately right for this circumstance.
This quilt, this circle of stars, is a crown, a ring, a portal, a passage. An acknowledgment of the fiery door through which she is passing, and the change she will undergo. In color, in material, in design, in all of my choices — I hope that it also embodies buoyancy, brightness, a sparkling energy, a newness. But it is the enormity of this passage that is the central theme of this piece. I want to wrap her in light, in gold, in flowers, in a crown of radiance. I want to acknowledge her radical transformation.
There was a moment during the finishing of that top where I grieved a bit; I didn’t feel it had arrived where I wanted it to, and I worried that I had failed it. But when I took it down and held it in my arms — when the rigid, deathly “flatness” of an ironed-into-submission and not-yet-quilted-top, which is so wholly stultifying to my experience of quilts, was abated by touching it, folding it, and seeing it in bright natural sunlight — I experienced a deep relief. It has a long way to go before it becomes complete, but I believe it will become what I set out to make, in some way.