The fabric arts are not necessarily a topic with a lot of bluegrass content but I am an admirer so let’s talk about them. At many bluegrass festivals you will see the fabric arts in action if you look hard enough. The generators of this industry are overwhelmingly female. At many festivals you see groups formed for quilting or other fabric arts.
Most guys, including me, have no idea how cool these processes of creation really are but maybe we’re catching on. I saw a comic strip in the paper yesterday which listed a number of famous male celebrities who were supposedly quilters. The gals have a monopoly on the fiber arts mostly because because moms teach their daughters but not their sons. I used to own a tiny sewing kit to repair my clothes but I’ve sewn more stitches in human skin during my career as a physician than I have in cloth. Still I admire the skill it takes to make a finished piece of fabric and I was reminded of that admiration when I read this passage recently from Paul Horgan’s history of the Rio Grande:
“In weaving, embroidering, rug making, quilting women contributed to the idiom of American crafts. The richly colored and vine-like designs of Crewel embroidery derived from Jacobean England were succeeded by plainer patterns in hard homespun cloth. Weaving tablecloths and bedspreads and coverlets, the housewife developed simple geometries that repeated variations based on squares and triangles, frequently in colors of blue and white. Her most personal style appeared in quilting. Here was an exercise in thrift, for she used patches of cloth saved from every which source; and in ingenuity, for her hope was to achieve symmetrical patterns out of scraps that came along with no rhyme or reason; and in patience, for a quilt was big, to fit on a man-and-wife bed, and to make only one sixth-inch-square patch out of the ten dozen or so needed would call for thousands of stitches. But she persisted and produced an original work whose simplicity and modesty told much about her life and the joys of her labors throughout many hours made up of a few minutes here, a few there, when in repose she was not idle.”
Look at somebody closely while they are knitting. How does all that needle movement make a sweater, sometimes with fancy cables and cords? The mathematics of making a knot is complicated. I have no idea on a basic level how all that beauty is possible by pushing yarn around a couple of sticks. Knit one pearl two. It’s probably like muscle memory bluegrass’s use to play tunes.
You should see some of the stuff my wife has created in her “spare” time by use of the fabric arts. She just made a very complicated sweater for our daughter. She’s made fancy smocking, quilts, whatever. You name it, she’s done it. While I’m out at bluegrass festivals hacking away at a botched mandolin solo she’s ripping out stitches that weren’t quite right so that she can redo them so that they’re perfect.
I know that every festival I go to there’s somebody out there using the fabric arts to make something useful. As our music drifts into the air never to be heard again that’s a comforting thought.
