What the ‘Julya Quilt’ Taught Me

I made my first quilt sampler when I was pregnant with my third child in 1993. It was a crazy time to be quilting, as I had an executive job and two little boys under the age of four (Marek & Kyle).  I knew there was something vital about this new-found passion, as I was staying up late into the night to work on the piece, and actually found myself rifling through fabrics at the Country Quilt Shop just a few hours before my daughter Julya was born (suspecting that perhaps I was, indeed, in labor but irresistably drawn to the endless colors that filled me with joy).  When she was ‘complete’, and my quilt was complete, I started referring to this wall-hanging sampler as my ‘Julya Quilt’.

Several years later, thoroughly exhausted by the demands and pace of what could have been any day during that phase of life, I was lying peacefully in bed with young Julya reading a bedtime story to her. I looked up at the Julya Quilt hanging on her wall, amazed that I had produced anything so intricate amid the hurricane that was my life at the time.  As I looked at it more closely, my eye caught one tiny corner of a quilt block where I noticed some of the hand-quilting that I had done. I realized that only I would ever know of the detailed work that had gone into that little section and was fascinated that I had taken the precious time to do something so invisible to others. 

I was riveted by that concept, until in that moment I finally understood…The power of making this piece was that it allowed me to focus with full integrity on the thing itself, simply because it needed to be. Producing not for anyone else, just responding to its intrinsic demand to be created.  My entire life was swirling around me – my children, my marriage, my work – yet this outlet allowed me to focus solely on the thing itself and what it quietly asked of me.  Not to mention, unlike raising children or executive management, it was bounded by a discrete beginning, middle and end, and offered me the gratification of a job well done with crisp, clean edges to its boundaries.  

I have been creating textiles my whole life, yet as I spend more time on this work, I marvel at the power that creating has in centering me in the here and now as I explore the infinite possibilities of color and texture, binding fibers and threads together into a singular expression.