Launching

I am launching my second novel of 2021 this summer, The Summer After, and while it feels amazing to see Juliet and Dean and their kids and their complicated, suspenseful Caribbean love story find its way into the world, I am also launching my oldest kid. After a pandemic pause and a year at the college in our backyard where we were both able to don our masks and walk to school together, Hayden is headed for Cornell this fall. (GO BIG RED)

I have a thousand feelings around this—excitement, nostalgia, love, pride and a bittersweet heaviness about him leaving, so I am pouring it all into a creative project.

TRANSITION QUILTS

Quilts are a natural part of transitioning at our house. When I moved each of the kids to their own beds, they got incentive quilts, something that we designed together and talked about as I worked on it, and that when the quilt was finished, they would sleep under it in their own bed.

You can read the story of Piper’s painted pony quilt here:

Around that same time, I was working on the story that became “What Pretty Gets You” and I was totally captivated by the overlap between my writing process and crazy quilting, and which rules of each craft I want to follow, and which I would prefer to ignore. See: Writing the Crazy Quilt

QUILTS FOR HEALTH

I have also used quilts to welcome new babies and to create healthy distraction. One year, Piper was in traditional school and rotavirus ripped through her classroom. She got so sick she couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks, and when she did, her hair was a bird’s nest of tangles, she was a wisp of herself, barely fifty pounds, weak and wary of germs. I decided she would stay home the rest of that year, tagging along to the barn and in the garden, nipping in the bud a fear of getting dirty/sick, and many afternoons while she homeschooled, she went to my fellow writer and master seamstress/quilter friend Lori. Lori writes a post in support of relationships every single day, teaches and coordinates all the costuming for high school theater, hosts free-form sewing classes for children and creates dozens of quilts every year. At Lori’s, Piper made a quilt for a baby cousin, and started sewing a queen-sized turquoise quilt to go with her vision of a room that would no longer be little girl pink.

I had always wanted to try hand-sewn hexagons, so I jumped into stitching two hundred of them for the center while Piper worked on a postage stamp border and a brick pattern she designed herself. Lori and I estimated there were over 1,000 pieces in Piper’s project, and it came out beautifully. By the time she slept under it a year later, Piper was healthy, strong and totally addicted to her current passion, rock climbing.

In 2018, Lori and I also partnered on a quilt weighted with 24 pounds of smooth black river stones to aid Hayden in his recovery from a brutal year of surgeries and hospitalizations, which he said felt like ‘sleeping under dragon’s scales’. In a good way.

He’s recovered now and we use it not only for cuddling at home, but on horses who need to rehab — they love it.

Now it’s time to launch Hayden again, not just into his own bed and new passions and pursuits, but into a whole new future.

QUILTS FOR THE FUTURE

There’s so much to say about Hayden, and much of it is summed up in his own college application essay “Small But Mighty” at the end of my post honoring the Class of 2020. I am beyond proud of this kid, and this summer, we are practicing for the fall as he volunteers with friends on an organic farm in Hawaii.

This text came through the other night at 3 am, to let me know he’d arrived on the Big Island:

I know it’s time to let him launch. But not without frenetically sewing all the love and history and home I can into one textile that I hope will do more than keep him warm in Ithaca’s winters. My wish is that it will remind him where he comes from, the rich and storied adventures of his past and how wrapped he is in love and support.

For once, I am not crazy quilting, though there is still beauty in colorful chaos.

I don't only crazy quilt because I'm too lazy to iron before I sew--I do it because I am attracted to this style more than perfectly symmetrical calico stars. I feel inspired by the beauty in layering and odd angles and textures and riotous colors. I am drawn to Murano glass, and cherish J's aunt's miniature layered collages.

Maybe this is true of my writing too. I cringe every time I feel myself edited towards chicklit, pat or formulaic writing. I demand that my characters be messily three-dimensional, with ugly, wobbly, secret underbellies and defining backstories and childhood friends and ex-boyfriends and snarky coworkers and things they do when they think nobody is looking. Maybe I write this way because I am attracted to the beautiful chaos of real life? 

If I can learn from my mentors in writing and craft, to distill, simplify and shape my stories to stand on their own, then I can iron 344 pieces of interfacing to a childhood of cotton jersey to make a keepsake that doesn’t rely on embellishment and embroidery. See below Hayden’s Launching Quilt in Progress:

Here’s the ironed, interfaced layout. Stay tuned for the final result…