The Giving Quilt (8 page)

“I'll keep that in mind,” Pauline said, but she knew it wasn't only her attitude preventing her from turning back handsprings across the ballroom floor.

Just then, Gretchen called for the campers' attention, and after confirming that they were ready to move on, she instructed them to cut even more strips, this time two inches wide, selvage to selvage, from their dark and background fabrics. Cheerfully the campers set themselves to the task, taking turns at the cutting stations, chatting as they worked, and admiring one another's fabric combinations. When they had returned to their places with their carefully trimmed strips in hand, Gretchen seated herself at the sewing machine at the front of the room. With the help of a strategically placed mirror overhead, she demonstrated how to sew a dark strip to each background strip lengthwise to make a strip pair. After pressing the seam toward the dark fabric with a hot iron, she took up her acrylic ruler and rotary cutter and neatly sliced across the seam to make a pair of contrasting squares joined along one side. “You'll need sixty-four square pairs, two for each Resolution Square block,” she told them as she deftly cut more from the strip until only a small scrap remained, trailing threads. “Be sure to square up the end if necessary so that your strips lie straight and true. We need perfect right angles, no slouching.”

The students laughed, and a happy buzz filled the classroom as they measured and cut with care. Pauline made quick work of her fabric strips and soon had all of her square pairs arranged in neat piles beside her sewing machine. She glanced around the room, certain she would be the first to finish and preparing herself to assist anyone who seemed to be struggling. To her surprise, she spotted another quilter at the back of the room who must have accomplished the last step even more swiftly, because she was already tidying up her work area. Karen, Pauline quickly recalled, thinking back to the Candlelight ceremony. Karen Wise. She was carin' for two young sons and was wise in the ways of quilting because she worked in a quilt shop not far from the Elm Creek Valley.

Pauline felt a quick, unreasonable surge of competitiveness, and she quickly turned back around and began to studiously organize her cut block pieces. Karen Wise must have made that pattern before, Pauline told herself, although she knew that wasn't possible, since Gretchen had designed the quilt especially for that year's Quiltsgiving. She sighed and sat back in her chair, impatient with herself. What did it matter who finished first, who chose the most harmonious fabrics, whose quilt was the most meticulously sewn? There were quilting competitions aplenty, but this wasn't one of them. The object of the week was to learn, make new friends, and sew quilts for children in need, not to outperform her fellow campers.

Sometimes Pauline wondered whether she was too proud, whether the true spirit of quilting eluded her. Sometimes too, she feared that it was that same foolish pride rather than a noble sacrifice that had cost her a cherished place among the Cherokee Rose Quilters.

Pauline had known the Cherokee Rose Quilters by reputation long before she befriended any of them. The most exclusive guild in Georgia, they were admired and respected for their talents; their superb quilt museum in Savannah, founded decades earlier with a bequest from a wealthy member; their diligent efforts to preserve the state's quilting heritage; and their charitable works. As a group they had accumulated an impressive number of awards, ribbons, grants, and other recognitions, and every Best of Show prize at every state and county fair for the past forty-five years had gone to a Cherokee Rose Quilter unless no one from the guild had submitted an entry. It was perhaps inevitable that their success evoked a fair share of envy, especially since they capped their membership at twelve and filled rare vacancies only after a lengthy application and interview process. Through the years, some of the state's most gifted quiltmakers had been denied membership for reasons their admirers could not fathom, and occasionally rejection inspired some disgruntled candidates to create similarly small, exclusive guilds of their own. But none of the groups that emulated the Cherokee Rose Quilters could match their success or acquire equal fame, and most eventually disbanded.

No one, not even their harshest, most jealous critics, could deny that the Cherokee Rose Quilters were tireless champions of the quilting arts, respected ambassadors for the state of Georgia in the art world, and dedicated benefactors of numerous worthy causes. Their annual quilt retreat at the Château Élan was universally acknowledged to be worth every penny spent, every mile driven, and every seam ripped out and resewn in order to impress their perfectionist teachers.

Pauline had been quilting for about eight years when she and two friends attended a Cherokee Rose Quilters retreat at Château Élan, humorously dubbed “French Finishing School” for that year's emphasis on borders and bindings. She returned home utterly transformed, a traditional patchwork scrap quilter whose eyes had been opened to the glorious world of landscape quilts, abstract compositions, and embellishment. Even Ray noticed that her work improved dramatically in the months following the retreat, becoming more evocative, complex, rich, and technically precise. Best of all, the entire quiltmaking experience became more freeing, more fulfilling, and more engrossing than she had ever dreamed it could be. Considering how stressful her job was and how busy her life as a wife and mother, this was an unexpected blessing she rejoiced in every time she picked up her rotary cutter or sat down at her sewing machine.

Three years later, when Kori was in second grade and Colton was an eager kindergartener, Pauline met Jeanette, the mother of one of Colton's classmates, a towheaded boy who shared Colton's obsession with plastic dump trucks and pea gravel. Almost every day after school, Pauline and Jeanette let their children work off their pent-up energy on the playground before walking home. As the semester passed, the women became friends nearly as quickly as their sons did. They gossiped about the other mothers and commiserated over the usual parenting woes, scheduled playdates for the boys, and occasionally met for coffee on a rare weekday off. Even so, Pauline didn't discover that Jeanette was a quilter until the spring, when Jeanette mentioned that the president of the PTA had asked her to make a quilt in honor of their beloved principal, who would be retiring at the end of the semester after thirty years in the district.

“I adore her,” said Jeanette, “and I'm happy to make the quilt. I just wish they'd given me more notice. Now I'll have to throw something together, and I'm sure that I won't be satisfied with the results.”

“You have two months,” Pauline reassured her. “That's plenty of time.”

Jeanette shook her head, frowned, and said, almost to herself, “Not for one of my quilts it isn't.”

Were her quilts especially complex, Pauline wondered, or was Jeanette exceptionally slow? “I'll help you,” she said impulsively, adding modestly, “I quilt a little myself.”

“Really?”

“Really, I quilt, and really, I'll help you,” said Pauline, laughing and squeezing Jeanette's arm reassuringly.

Jeanette hesitated. “I don't usually . . . collaborate on my pieces. I have more of a . . . solitary vision. I know that sounds arrogant—”

“No, no, not at all,” Pauline hastened to say. So Jeanette was an art quilter, or perhaps she thought of herself as a fiber artist. Either way, Pauline knew the type, and, admittedly, she had become something of an art quilter herself. She knew how to handle an artist's temperament. “Here's what we'll do. You can think of me as your assistant. I'll cut pieces, go shopping, thread needles—whatever you need. You focus on the big picture and dump the busywork on me. I can take it.”

After a moment's pause, Jeanette smiled and agreed.

The following Saturday, Jeanette invited Pauline to her home and led her upstairs into a spacious room over the garage Pauline hadn't known existed. “This is my studio,” Jeanette said with a grin, standing at the threshold and spreading her arms dramatically. “My sanctuary.”

Pauline nodded, muffling a gasp of amazement and envy. The two longest walls were lined with cubbyhole shelves bursting with fabric bolts and flat folds of every color and hue imaginable. Upon the shorter wall to the right of the entrance hung a design wall covered in cream-colored flannel marked with a grid, to which several meticulously pieced blocks were affixed, signs of a different work in progress. A cutting table covered in mats and racks for rulers and rotary cutters stood in one corner opposite an ironing station with both a standard iron and a commercial steam press. Skylights flooded the room with warm, natural light, and on the far wall was a sewing table boasting all manner of drawers and containers for thread, tools, and notions—and a gleaming Bernina that Pauline knew cost nearly twelve thousand dollars.

“I don't know how you can get anything done in such a cramped space,” Pauline managed to say. “And with so little fabric and such outdated tools.”

Jeanette laughed. “Oh, I know. It's a luxury, and the commissions I earn barely pay for it. I always feel like I have to justify having a studio, which is why I rarely bring anyone up here except other members of my guild.”

“An artist needs a workspace,” said Pauline staunchly, turning slowly in place in the center of the room and taking it all in. “If you were a painter, and a man, no one would argue that you didn't need or deserve the tools of your trade and a place of your own in which to use them.” Then her friend's last few words sank in. “You're a member of the guild? I've never seen you at the meetings.”

“Not the Sunset Ridge Quilt Guild,” said Jeanette. “I belong to a group called the Cherokee Rose Quilters.”

“No kidding?” She should have known. “Wow.”

Jeanette offered her a painful, uncomfortable smile. “Is that a good wow or a ‘Now I hate you' wow?”

“That's a good, very impressed wow. I went to one of your retreats a few years ago, and it was a revelation.” Pauline didn't remember seeing Jeanette there, but perhaps she hadn't joined the group yet. “Why the heck did you keep this a secret from me? I thought we were friends.”

“Of course we're friends.” Jeanette noticeably relaxed. “I didn't know you were a quilter. I didn't think you'd care about my quaint little hobby.”

Pauline heard the ironic emphasis Jeanette put on the last three words and nodded sympathetically. Her own quilting had been dismissed many a time by the ignorant and the uninformed. “Even if I weren't a quilter, I'd still care. You should be proud to be a part of something so special.”

“I am.” Then Jeanette shook her head and waved a hand as if her remarkable accomplishments were the most boring subject imaginable. “I've made a few sketches for the principal's quilt. Want to see them?”

Naturally Pauline did, and they were as unique and amazing as she had expected. Jeanette's design captured the most important events of the school year and the highlights of the principal's long career in a series of vignettes rendered in appliqués cut in the fashion of folded paper dolls or snowflakes. Pauline thought it was absolutely perfect, and she said so when Jeanette generously asked if she had any suggestions.

Throughout the spring, they met in Jeanette's studio every weekend to work on the quilt. Jeanette retained complete artistic control, altering the design as the spirit moved her and sewing every stitch, while Pauline took over the responsibilities of transferring Jeanette's meticulously crafted patterns from paper to fabric and cutting out the appliqués. Sometimes they chatted as they worked; sometimes Jeanette needed complete silence as she wrestled with a particularly intricate motif. But even then, their quiet companionship relaxed and invigorated them both.

Together they completed the quilt on time, and when it was unveiled to thunderous applause at the principal's retirement party, even Jeanette admitted that she wouldn't change a stitch—despite her confession to Pauline a few weeks before that she was never completely satisfied with any of her creations, that she never felt that any of them were entirely complete.

“My only regret is that the project's over,” Jeanette said as they left the party. “I enjoyed working with you.”

“The feeling's mutual,” said Pauline, suspecting that she would miss their collaboration even more than Jeanette would. “I guess we can always hope that the new principal will retire in a year or two.”

Fortunately, their newfound friendship endured even though another opportunity to sew together didn't immediately rise. At Jeanette's prompting, Pauline attended another Cherokee Rose Quilters charity retreat, and she was delighted to be invited to sit at the guild members' table at mealtimes. A few months later, an even more astonishing surprise arrived in the mail: a letter on thick paper embossed with the Cherokee Rose Quilters logo inviting her to apply for membership in the guild.

Safely alone in her kitchen when the invitation arrived, Pauline squealed and jumped up and down, alternately waving the letter triumphantly overhead and clutching it to her heart. But as the afternoon passed, and she awaited Ray's return home from work so she could share the good news, the sober realization sank in that her selection for the coveted place was far from certain. It was entirely possible that she had been invited only because she was Jeanette's friend and not because of her merits as a quilter. She had won a few awards and ribbons, and a few of her quilts had been juried into prominent national quilt shows, but surely every other quilter vying for the vacancy could boast of similar accomplishments. She knew she ought to content herself with the invitation, and she mentally rehearsed telling Jeanette that it had been an honor just to be considered.

But her rehearsals proved unnecessary when, after an interview and a second, follow-up interview, Pauline was invited to join the guild. As she reveled in the unexpected honor and celebrated at the initiation party held at the guild's Savannah museum, Pauline nonetheless harbored secret doubts that she was truly the most deserving. Did the other quilters really want her, or had Jeanette advocated for her so relentlessly that they had eventually surrendered and agreed to choose Pauline out of sheer exhaustion?