You fall in love with a specific patchwork pattern. It's perfect—the only one that will do.
You start drafting your pattern. You draw a 15-inch line on your paper and realize, lackaday, that the design divides into 4 equal parts across, and 4 down. That's not so bad. Each division is 3.75 inches. It's awkward, but it's not bad. It could, after all, be fifths of an inch. That's bad.
But what about a quilt block 17 inches wide that must be divided in 3 equal parts? That's 5.666666667 inches (I'm rounding up. It's actually one of those decimals that goes on forever) in each division, and that's a pain. You'll never get an accurate measurement using your ruler. Nor will you get a nice even division if you're trying to make an 8-inch block with 3 segments: each division will be 2.666666667 etc. inches, and each division will be a little bit off. And, as we all know, a little bit off here and a little bit off there, and pretty soon you're way off. (Life's like that, isn't it? After wallpapering her switch plates to exactly match the walls behind them, a friend of mine once remarked, "It's amazing how close you can get and still miss.")
Back to your quilting measurements. What to do? This is primitive, but it works. Make a strip of paper as long as the side, and fold it into the number of divisions you need. Cut the folded sections apart, and make templates using your cut sections like a little ruler. Like I say, it's not perfect, but it does work.
You could use a shoelace in the same way. Measure the width you need on the shoelace, fold and cut the shoelace in the correct number of pieces, and use the piece of shoelace as a little ruler. This isn't perfect either.
My point here is that rulers are a human invention—just an agreed-upon and convenient way to measure things. After all, the first rulers, as we learned in school, were based on objects like the width of the king's thumb and the size of his feet.
But there's nothing sacred about a ruler. I was terribly shocked when I first realized that the foot-long rulers my quilting students were using were frequently SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT LENGTHS! Several of my students were using those nice wooden school rulers with the little metal strip down the edge. Others were using pretty multi-colored plastic rulers. It turned out that the first inch on their rulers was sometimes only three-quarters of an inch long! No wonder people become cynical about life and take up robbing banks.
Like I say, there's nothing sacred about a ruler. An object can just as easily be measured in terms of other objects. For example, your living room may be 21 feet 4 inches long, as measured with that wonderful yardstick you got free from the hardware store during their last paint promotion. But, if you've paced it out, it may also be 7 1/2 paces long. Or 28 of your husband's sneakers long, if you let them (they're filthy) into the house. Or your living room could be 64 widths of a can of water-packed tuna fish long—64 cans laid side by side. I personally would prefer to use a chocolate chip cookie as a standard of measurement, but it's rough on the cookie.
Why am I wasting your time with this? Because if you're a quilter trying to draft a pattern, you want to divide your quilt block into very easy, very even pieces, and if it doesn't come out even, you're in trouble. So measure your pieces with something that will come out even. You know, I wasn't going to mention it, but yes, you could even use a METRIC RULER! Eight inches divided by 3 is, as I mentioned before, a nasty 2.666666667 (rounded off) inches. But 8 inches is almost the same as 21 centimeters, and 21 centimeters DOES divide easily into 3 accurate and even divisions. Twenty-one centimeters divided by 3 is 7 centimeters, right? That's not so scary.
No, I'm not telling you to go metric—after all, I said you could use tuna cans. Or chocolate chip cookies. But I'm being a pal and looking out for your best interests here, trying to save you from hardship and frustration and numbers that end in eight places after the decimal.
Check out a metric ruler. Seven inches divided by 3 is 2.333333333 etc. inches. The same distance is also 18 centimeters, which divides with blissful ease into 3 even parts of 6 centimeters each.
Try a metric ruler. Some days, it's the only thing that will measure up to the challenge.
NOTE: Okay, I DID suggest using a metric ruler after all. But I didn't tell you you HAD to. Fair enough?
12/ Trouble Spots
In a small town like Spotsburg, everyone has to do several jobs. For example, Jim Dean, who owns the Five-and-Dime, is also chief of our volunteer fire department. Fred Murphy, a carpenter, is also our mortician and the police photographer. (History tells us this isn't such an unusual combination. Often the undertaker in small towns had some familiarity with making caskets.) And Brenda and Sam Pierce run Pierce's Auto Repair and Dry Cleaning, located across the road from the grain elevator.
The Pierces got into the dry cleaning business by the back (garage?) door. When Sam was just starting out as a mechanic, his auto repairs, as you might expect, generated a lot of dirty clothes. Sometimes the guck from his hands and shoes also found its way onto their furniture and rugs, and this, Brenda told me with great heartiness (she's a hearty person) threatened the very state of their marriage. Brenda, however, is also a resourceful woman, and she found it was significantly cheaper to take an extension course on stain removal than get a divorce. Before she knew it, she was dry cleaning for the whole town.
I was in Pierce's establishment one day, having my spare tire patched and picking up my velvet patchwork skirt, the one I'd worn to the Robert Burns Festival. As usual, I'd lost my receipt, but that wasn't a problem: I only had to give Brenda my name (which, of course, she already knew) and a description of the item I'd brought in, and in a jiffy she found it on her racks of cleaned clothes. She hung my skirt, neatly draped over a fat coat hanger and wrapped in plastic, on a hook next to the cash register. There was a small paper sack stapled to the coat hanger.
"You left a pair of earrin's in your pocket, dear," she said, peering over her half-glasses at me and pointing to the sack.
At some point in the excitement that evening, I must have slipped off my earrings and stuffed them in my pocket.
"That wasn't very bright of me," I said. "And I didn't even think to check the pockets before I brought the skirt in. . . ." I was about to launch into an apology, but she cut me off.
"Heck, honey, think nothin' of it! Earrin's is nothin'. You wouldn't BELIEVE the stuff I find in pockets! I could write VOLUMES about the stuff I find in pockets." She leaned over the counter and dropped her voice. "For example—" she said, chuckling.
There's a silver-colored bell at the top of the Pierces' door, just like the bell inside Graham's Bakery. The bell jingled, the door opened, Brenda stopped in mid-sentence, and Lyle Schultz walked in. In a jiffy, Brenda switched from being the purveyor of fascinating information to being the owner of the dry cleaning establishment. "That'll be seventy-five cents," she said to me.
I paid her, asked Lyle how his wife's lumbago was doing, took my skirt, and walked through the connecting door to the garage part of the business to see if my spare tire was fixed. (It took a few minutes more.)
I couldn't quite get Brenda's remark out of my mind. That night I went to Mike's apartment for dinner (he lives in the faculty apartments and we take turns cooking), and while I was tearing (and nibbling on) the lettuce, I told him what Brenda said. We spent a few enjoyable minutes guessing what you might find in people's pockets, items worthy of having VOLUMES written about them.
"Jewelry," I suggested, remembering my earrings, although I didn't see how you could write a novel about a pair of earrings a woman had stuck into her own pocket. "Or stolen jewelry, maybe?"
"Letters," said Mike, measuring oil and vinegar into a cup. "How about letters from a lover, when the person's married to someone else?"
That seemed like a promising subject for a volume or two. Probably already had been, in fact. "But," I pointed out, "you can only get so many letters in a little pocket."
"True," he said, shaking some spices into the oil and vinegar, "but the right letter could create a sensation."
Dinner was ready—M
ike's sensational grilled pork chops with a tomato chutney (that he made from scratch! It was scrumptious), green beans with almonds, popovers, and the salad.
(I freely admit that Mike is a far better cook than I am. I tend to get impatient and cut corners, which is frequently disastrous. Sometime I'll have to tell you what happened the day I substituted sweetened condensed milk and baking soda for buttermilk and baking powder in a waffle recipe I was making. Suffice it to say even the squirrels wouldn't touch the things when I threw them out in the back yard.)
I took a bite of the pork chop, which was heavenly, and simultaneously had a bright idea. (Food often does that to me.) "How about a secret code?" I said, still intrigued with the idea Brenda had given me. "Let's say you're a spy—an absentminded spy—and you've received a top secret encoded message, and you've just decoded it, and the phone rings, and you stuff it in your pocket—"
"Stuff the phone in your pocket?" Mike said, laughing. I made a face at him because he knew what I was trying to say. "No," he said, "I've got an idea that spies are trained not to be distracted by mere phone calls. On the other hand, the sight of a pretty woman. . . ." he said, bending over and kissing me.
That was the end of our discussion of pockets and their contents that night.
A few days later I was back in Pierce's Auto Repair and Dry Cleaning, this time with Mike's kilt and the burned-out overhead light bulb from my Studebaker. Brenda looked the kilt over and smiled broadly. "Hmmm," she said, "would this be the kilt of your Scottish friend, dear?"
To my profound annoyance, I blushed. I'm a hardened nurse, for pete's sake, used to seeing everything under the sun, and I never blush, and I BLUSHED!
No doubt egged on by my crimson face, she couldn't resist teasing me some more. "You know what they say when couples start bringin' each other's clothes to the dry cleaners?"
I couldn't imagine, and I wasn't sure I wanted to hear. I might even have bridled a bit, because she abruptly changed her tack. She patted my hand and said, "Honey, don't be gettin' all riled up with me. I'm real happy for you. Now let's look at this kilt."
She spread Mike's kilt across the counter, and we both admired the way it was sewn, and I pointed out to her what skill it took to make sure the horizontal lines in the plaid all matched up, and she pointed out to me that cleaning and pressing it would not be difficult, only time-consuming, so to expect it would be more expensive than "an ordinary garment."
"It's givin' a knife-edge to all those pleats," she said. "And it doesn't really look like it needs cleanin' and pressin'," she said, "but I never turn down work." She scrawled my name on a pad of paper, safety-pinned a number to the kilt, and tossed it into a bin underneath the counter.
"Mike said to ‘spare no expense,'" I told her.
Oddly (considering how curious I usually am about things), it wasn't until that moment that I wondered what event Mike was planning to attend, an event so important he was getting his kilt cleaned and pressed—even when it didn't need it.
Then Brenda said, "Can I ask you about somethin' someone brought in? It's got some funny spots on the sleeve."
"Sure," I said.
Brenda has consulted me before. As I've mentioned, people have this idea (mostly correct) that I know a great deal about sewing of all kinds, and quilting in particular.
She walked to the back of her store and into the little glassed-in cubbyhole that passes for her office. When she returned, she was carrying a hanger from which hung a quilted robe like a bathrobe, only far more elegant. A kimono, maybe. She hooked the hanger on a pole next to the cash register.
"What do you think?" she said.
"What's the question?" I asked.
I touched the robe. Silk, from the feel of it. Quilted silk. Exquisite to the touch. In a dazzling coral color— almost hypnotic, the color was so intense. Cotton and wool don't take dye the way silk does. You can only achieve such vibrant color in silk.
"Silk," I said.
"I thought maybe it was," said Brenda. "Here's the spots I was talkin' about."
She held up the right sleeve, and I saw it wasn't really a kimono: it didn't have long, rectangular kimono-style sleeves, and it was more fitted. There was a trail of small spots at the wrist. Not blood spots, I decided. (I'd become entirely too familiar with the appearance of blood stains on fabric over the last few months!)
The garment was very Asian-looking—Chinese or Japanese, with a high collar closed with those complicated fastenings made of knotted cord we call (for some reason) "frogs." More typical of Chinese clothing. Exquisite workmanship. Quilted in crisscross stitching, and all of it done by hand.
"No tags," I said, peering into the neck. "One of a kind. Probably made in China or Japan. Judging from the collar and the closures, more likely China," I said, although much Japanese art and fashion is a copy of Chinese art and fashion.
"That's interestin'," she said. "Now look inside."
Until then I hadn't opened up the robe. I unfastened the frogs, looked inside, and did a double-take. On the inside of the robe—on the inside, mind you—six or eight inches below where tags would have been (if there'd been tags) was a painting! An exquisite painting of tall white whooping cranes stepping majestically through a green marsh, with a soft gold background. The picture was neatly bordered in black, like a framed picture hung from a coral wall. It looked very much like a famous Japanese painting I'd seen once in a college Art History class. And then I looked again, and saw the cranes weren't painted at all, but were woven into the lining of the garment!
I could hardly believe it. But studying the picture closely (I have excellent eyes) there was no mistaking: each detail of the painting was composed of dozens of fine silk threads. You had to be very close to make that distinction. It wasn't embroidered, you understand. It wasn't crewelwork or petit point. It was woven.
"Wow!" I said. "I've never seen anything like this before. Who's is this?"
At that moment the bell jingled, the door opened, and in blew Parson Dargan Scott's son Art, the high school band's drum major. Art is a nice young man, blond, blue-eyed, plagued with dreadful acne. It makes me want to cry when I see a case as bad as his.
"Got it right here," Brenda said, scurrying to the back and returning with his drum major's uniform, a handsome jacket and pants in the Spotsburg Dalmatians' black and white, with red letters, gold buttons, and a red stripe up the pants leg. He stood there beside me, bouncing nervously on his toes.
"Now Arty—" she said, dropping her chin, her round, pleasant face looking quite severe over the tops of her reading glasses.
"I know, I know, Mrs. Pierce!" the young man wailed. "You don't have to tell me. Thanks a million for saving my skin! How much is it?"
Brenda said firmly, "That little adventure is gonna cost you all of six dollars, young man, and the next time it'll be more. Come to think of it, there'd better not BE a next time!"
Art looked grateful his problem—whatever it was—could be solved for a mere six dollars, pulled some crumpled bills from his pocket, dropped them on the countertop, and was out the door like a bullet.
Naturally, I was dying to know what the story was, but I imagined that dry cleaners, like nurses, have a strict code of confidentiality—the seal of the confessional and all that.
"Nice boy," said Brenda, not bound (it appeared) by any code. "But he went off after last Friday's game with a couple of the wilder members of the band," she said, "and one of them brought a couple of gallons of homemade hootch, somethin' made out of red berries, I could see, and he threw up all over hisself, and it made one heckuva stain down that beautiful uniform."
I saw the problem instantly. Even if Art had been old enough to drink—which he wasn't—his father, dear, quiet Parson Scott, is the Baptist minister, and would never have approved.
"Say, Barb," Brenda said. "You're medical and all. Can't they do somethin' about those awful spots?"
"What spots?" I said, turning once more to the quilted robe.
"His f
ace! He'd be a good lookin' kid, otherwise."
I was glad she asked because, as usual, I had an opinion. "Brenda," I said, "maybe someday the grand high panjandrums of medical science will get off their rumps and figure out how to keep young people from that affliction. But there hasn't been any progress in the treatment of acne for years, and I don't see anything on the horizon, either." She made a little tsk-ing noise.
"It's not fair, is it?" I said. "To have that kind of trouble when it's the time in your life to be so sensitive about your looks?"
We both nodded for a moment, remembering our assorted children and their complexions.
"So where was I?" she said.
"Telling me about this amazing piece of clothing," I said, looking again at the inside of the robe, and its exquisite woven picture. It was then it dawned on me that the robe had been quilted, and then lined with the picture, because the picture wasn't interrupted by rows of stitching. The lining was smooth and ran the full length of the robe, from the collar to the hem.
"Well—" she said, winding up for a long explanation.
And then I noticed something. "Just a moment!" I said. "Look at this!"
I removed the robe from its hanger and laid it out on the counter. Towards the bottom of the lining there were more spots like the spots on the sleeve.
"What's that?" said Brenda, peering over, under and eventually through her glasses.
"More spots," I said.
"More spots?" she said.
The door opened. It was Bill Shumaker.
Brenda looked up and the smile on her face evaporated. "A tan jacket, right?" said Brenda. She headed toward the racks of cleaned clothes, picked a jacket off one of the racks, and brought it forward.
"Right, ha-ha," Bill said, laughing nervously, and tucking his shirt into his considerable waist.
Bill is a loan officer at the bank, and is reputed to be the fastest man in four counties to foreclose. Certainly he saunters through life looking like he'd enjoy nothing better than repossessing your house, your car, and your kids, if possible.
The Name of the Quilt: Tales of Patchwork, Mayhem, and Murder Page 10