there is no efficient way to make a quilt

There Is No Efficient Way to Make a Quilt

There is something a little ridiculous about quilting when you really stop to think about it.

We buy perfectly good fabric. Beautiful fabric, in fact. Fabric that has already survived an impressive journey through growing, weaving, dyeing, printing, shipping, folding and finally landing on a shelf where we decide we absolutely need it. We bring it home, admire it for some period of time, and then take a rotary cutter to it.

We cut it into strips. We cut the strips into squares. Sometimes we cut the squares into triangles. If we are feeling particularly ambitious, we cut those pieces into even smaller pieces. Then we carefully sew some of those pieces together.

And sometimes, because quilting is apparently a perfectly reasonable pastime, we take the pieces we just carefully sewed together and cut them apart again.

Then we rearrange those new pieces and sew those back together.

Eventually, after enough cutting, sewing, cutting things we already sewed, rearranging and sewing yet again, we end up with one large piece of fabric.

Which is essentially what we started with.

This is apparently a hobby.

It is also spectacularly inefficient.

Most of the rest of my life is organized around trying to make things take less time. I order things online because driving around looking for them is annoying. I keep lists because I don't want to make three trips to the grocery store. I have machines that wash my clothes and dishes, a phone that can answer almost any question within seconds, and sewing machines capable of making thousands of perfectly respectable stitches in the time it would take me to make a few dozen by hand.

Naturally, I have recently decided to hand quilt.

I could put the quilt under the machine. I could send it to a longarmer. I could probably have the entire thing finished before I manage to get particularly far with my current hand-quilting efforts. Instead, I am sitting in my chair with a tiny needle, making stitches one at a time and occasionally stopping to inspect them as though they have personally agreed to become smaller if I stare at them hard enough.

They have not.

And yet I keep picking it up.

That has made me think about how strange making things has become in a world where we no longer have to make very many things at all. Quilts once had an obvious practical purpose. Beds needed covering. Fabric was valuable. Clothing and household textiles were used, reused and sometimes worked into other things. Sewing wasn't simply a pleasant way to spend an afternoon; for many households, it was part of the work required to keep people clothed and warm.

That isn't why I'm doing it.

I can buy a blanket. In fact, I can buy one for considerably less than I spend making a quilt, which is another detail we probably shouldn't examine too closely. I certainly don't need to spend months making one from hundreds of pieces of fabric when perfectly adequate blankets are available in nearly every department store in America.

So if the goal were simply to own something warm for the bed, quilting would be a terrible solution.

But the finished quilt isn't the entire point.

I think that's where efficiency becomes a funny way to measure a hobby. Efficiency makes sense when the objective is to get something over with. If I have to clean the kitchen, I would prefer to accomplish that without turning it into an all-day event. I don't particularly need to savor the experience of loading the dishwasher. There is no part of me wishing I could wash every fork individually by hand so I could feel more connected to the process.

Quilting is different because I don't actually want to eliminate the process.

I like choosing the fabric. I like cutting it. I like watching blocks accumulate and eventually begin to look like the quilt I imagined. I like the moment when something that looked questionable in pieces suddenly works once it is sewn together. I even like some of the repetitive parts, particularly when I don't have to think very hard about them. There are evenings when sitting at the machine sewing the same seam over and over is exactly what I want to be doing.

Lately, though, I've found myself choosing some of the parts of making that take the longest. I've been doing more embroidery, cross stitch, English paper piecing and Manx blocks, and now I've added hand quilting to the mix. I can sit in my recliner for a couple of hours and have remarkably little physical evidence of how I spent them. A few inches of quilting. Part of an embroidery motif. A handful of stitches that nobody but me is likely to examine closely.

But measuring those hours by what I finished misses most of what happened during them.

Handwork occupies my hands and just enough of my attention that everything else becomes quieter for a while. I'm concentrating, but not in the same way I concentrate on work or on a problem that needs solving. My attention has somewhere specific to go. There is fabric in my hands, a needle that needs to go in one place and come out in another, and a small bit of progress appearing underneath my fingers.

It doesn't require me to accomplish very much to be satisfying.

That may be why the inefficiency doesn't bother me. The time isn't merely being spent on the quilt. The quilting changes the way I experience the time itself. Two hours that might otherwise disappear into scrolling, mentally rearranging tomorrow's to-do list, thinking about things I cannot do anything about at ten o'clock at night, or simply wondering where the evening went become two hours in which I was thoroughly occupied by something I enjoy.

There is a different satisfaction in work that cannot be hurried very much. A hand-quilted line gets from one side of a block to the other exactly as fast as my hand can put stitches into it. There is no button that makes it go twice as fast. There is no particularly useful way to multitask it. My hands are occupied, my eyes are occupied, and enough of my attention is required that most of the other things rattling around in my head have to wait their turn.

I don't think slowness is automatically virtuous. I am quite fond of my sewing machines and have no intention of reenacting 1850 in my living room. I like modern conveniences. I like getting things done. I own rulers that make cutting faster, machines that sew faster and gadgets designed to eliminate practically every mildly inconvenient part of quiltmaking. If someone invents something tomorrow that makes trimming half-square triangles less tedious, I will happily investigate.

But I also like having something in my life that doesn't need to be optimized.

We hear so much about making better use of our time that it is easy to start treating time as though every minute should produce the maximum possible return. We combine errands. We listen to something while doing something else. We look for shortcuts. We buy tools that promise to save minutes. None of that is inherently bad. There are plenty of things I would happily spend fewer minutes doing.

But perhaps the question isn't always how much we can accomplish in an hour. Sometimes it matters what that hour is like while we're living it.

There are parts of life we make efficient precisely because we'd rather use our time somewhere else. I have no desire to make loading the dishwasher a richer, more immersive experience. I want the dishes clean so I can move on.

Quilting is different. I want the quilt at the end, certainly, but I also want the hours it takes to make it. I want the satisfaction of watching pieces become blocks and blocks become something recognizable. I want evenings in the recliner with fabric in my lap and a needle in my hand. I want what happens when my attention narrows for a while to fabric, thread and the next stitch.

Making all of that faster wouldn't necessarily make it better. At some point, making it more efficient would begin eliminating part of the reason I chose to do it in the first place.

Which makes my current hand-quilting project rather interesting. I can spend two hours working on it and accomplish only a few inches. By almost any ordinary measure of productivity, that's terrible. But those few inches aren't the only thing I got from those two hours.

Maybe that's why quilting doesn't really feel inefficient at all. There are parts of life we rush through because what we want is waiting on the other side. Then there are the things we willingly give our time to because of what happens during the hours we spend doing them.

I want the quilt.

But I also want the time I spend making it.