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The Ugly Quilt
Ever take on a project designed by a relative you swear had a lobotomy when it came it choosing colors? In this case, my mother swears that relative was me, but I don't think so. I tend to blues and reds, clear primaries and geometrics. Whoever chose these muddy fabrics with clunky prints could not have been me.
I returned from visiting my family in Pittsburgh with a plastic bag full of 5" squares of fabric. My mother told me they were from a quilt I had planned years ago. I don't believe her. I think she just said that because she wanted to get rid of them and knew that I am helpless in the face of free fabric. However, when I opened the bag, I found piles and piles of the ugliest fabrics on the planet. I don't care how young I was, there was no way I had chosen these fabrics. Every fabric was a total disaster. The cumulative effect was...well, let's just say it wasn't pretty.
Usually when I get fabric I don't like for various reasons, I make a quilt and give it away. This tends to lighten my fabric stash, and make the problem fabric disappear never to return. (I have since discovered fabric swaps.) I hit upon this plan many years ago when some plain and printed fabric an ex- gave me (intending for me to make him something) kept jumping out at me yelling rude things every time I went through my fabric stash (it now lives in Illinois.) I figured it would work out fine here as well.
But, the pre-cut squares were so bad, I couldn't
work with them. I put them away in a box with my other smaller
pieces, but I kept coming back to them.
I toyed with the idea of throwing them away, but, as I'm of Scottish descent, I couldn't justify just tossing out anything, least of all fabric. Maybe, I figured, if I paired them with a darker fabric, it would calm down the brights and dissapate the effect the existing darks. I told myself that cutting them up into smaller squares would be doing the world a service, saving it from those ugly yellow butterflies and strange printed flowers.
So I made bowties.
And more bowties.
I got really sick of making bowties because I forced myself to make at least 5 every day. Five of anything is easy. Won't take hardly any time at all. No problemo. When at last the bowties were done and I lined them up to see what the quilt would look like and...
...it was ugly. Deeply. Madly. Truly.
I was sure that no one would want it unless I "fixed" it. Wouldn't I feel dumb if I gave it to someone and they handed it right back? And who could I give this monstrosity to? I actually like my friends and want them to keep speaking to me.
So I decided that the patterns of old fabric was too crude, the colors too muddy and cold. It needed something organic and green, like leaves. Time for a trip to the fabric store to look for green prints.
As I wandered about the aisles of the store, I pulled bolts of likely fabric off the shelves and, after glancing right and left to see if there was anyone who might witness my shame, surreptiously pulled some of the ugly bowtie blocks out of my pocket.
But every green leaf fabric I pulled from the shelves only made the ugly fabrics uglier. I flirted with flowers of several kinds, but they, too, made the old prints look even more unattractive and garish.
I needed a plan. I needed inspiration. I needed fabric!
I finally gave up thinking too hard and looking too close and came away with something that wasn't what I had envisioned, bigger and with more colors than simple shades of green. I still don't know why I bought it.
But, wouldn't you know it, separating those bowties of ugly fabrics with this strange organic one worked. In the odd way that children who are the most trouble end up being the most fondly remembered, this quilt started to grow on me. I still wouldn't say it was my favorite quilt, but it slowly turned from being a chore to being a challenge.
After piecing it together, I found that I actually liked it enough to quilt it instead of tying it to get it out of my house faster.
And somewhere, it changed from being an ugly quilt to "The Ugly Quilt," said with great fondness. I gave it to my friend Claudie who actually likes its soft yellows, browns and off-purples.
God only knows why.