Just Around the Corner

🎨 Painting 🧵 Textiles 🌈 Community 💛 Care

🧵 Textiles - On quilts, middle motherhood, and the moments you can already see coming

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Ever since I came across it, I couldn’t get this quilt “Prosperity is Just Around the Corner” out of my mind.

The creator, Fannie B. Shaw, was a Texas quilter who, sometime between 1929 and 1932, went to bed one night unable to get Herbert Hoover’s relentless optimism out of her head. Every time she picked up a paper or turned on the radio, there it was: prosperity is just around the corner. She decided to make a picture of it. She appliquéd her neighborhood Americans — a housewife, a banker, a teacher, a ball player — all of them peering around the corner of a brick building, waiting for the better days that kept being promised. She put herself in the quilt, in her hallmark apron. She put her husband in it too — the farmer who, she said, “didn’t have no time to look around no corners. He just had to look straight down his row behind his old plow.” Janneken

It’s a quilt about waiting. About the particular ache of knowing something is coming and not being able to see it yet. About hope that is also, quietly, grief.

I am using this framework to create a quilt of my own. Mine is different from Fannie’s in one specific way: I can already see what’s around my corner. I’m not waiting for the thing to arrive. I’m standing at the bend watching it approach, and that — I am learning — is its own kind of ache.

My son starts high school in the fall.

He is days away from turning fourteen. He still laughs at things I say. He still loves to spend time with our family, choosing us over friends sometimes. He still lives entirely at home, in the way children do when they live at home — sprawling, present, occasionally maddening, deeply known. Taking the trash out. Leaving his shoes by the front door.

And also: driving lessons are around the corner. A first heartbreak. The last day of middle school — which happened already, which is why I am writing this — and the first day of high school, which is coming. The last time he’ll need me the way he needs me now, though I probably won’t know it was the last time while it’s happening.

I have been embroidering these moments into a quilt. Each one stitched in thread, named and placed: driving lessons. first heartbreak. last day of middle school. first day of high school. last “first day of school photo” on our front porch. The moments I can already feel the shape of, even though some of them haven’t happened yet

There is a phase of motherhood that doesn’t get talked about enough. Everyone talks about the survival years — when you are so tired you can’t see straight. And everyone talks about the empty nest phase, when the child actually leaves and you stand in a quiet house figuring out who you are now.

But the middle is its own country. Middle motherhood is when your child is still yours but is also becoming someone else’s. When you start to see the end of something without being anywhere near the end yet. When the corners start to appear.

Shaw’s quilt has a mood of deliberate optimism. She was living through the Depression, and she made something funny and warm and generous toward her neighbors. She remembered it this way: “I never saw so much loviness in this country. Everybody loved. Everybody was scared and everybody was worried. All they owned to give each other was love.” I am Pam HollandJanneken

I keep returning to that as I stitch. What it means to make something about a frightening and tender season and turn it into an object with weight and texture. Something that can cover someone.

My quilt is honest rather than optimistic. The embroidered words name real things — things I’m looking forward to and things I’m dreading - things that are both at once, the way most true things are.

That’s the thing about corners. By the time you realize you’ve rounded one, you’re already on the other side.

Fannie Shaw made her quilt because she couldn’t get something off her mind. She went to bed with it and woke up with it and finally had to make a picture of it.

I understand that completely.

I’m holding fast to what is here now, knowing so much is “just around the corner”.

More soon.

Read more about Fannie B Shaw’s quilt at this link.

Warmly,
Kaylan

The “Pillars of my Practice” are 🎨 Painting 🧵 Textiles 🌈 Community and 💛 Care and this newsletter contextualizes my studio practice, life and art career through these 4 perspectives.