"Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2001" - gosh was it that long ago?
"The Idea of Perfection" was sitting on the shelf at the Oxfam Bookshop and I tried to find the passage that impressed me, about a quilt remembered from childhood, the alternation of the colours of the pieces ... isn't that how a fascination with patchwork often starts?
Instead I found something else, something completely forgotten, but something that still seems to be happening.
Starting on page 147 is an account of a quilt meeting in a small town in Australia. Fictional - but oh so
true -
Several pages later, the interloper - who is a
contemporary quilt maker, brings out her piece, which has "little triangles that did not quite match up together, and big odd trapezoid shapes in many shades of grey".
"It was a feature of Harley Savage's fibre art, the way she made her seam-lines not quite line up. It was one of the things that
held the surfaces in dynamic equilibrium and
wittily subverted the form. This one,
Shearing Shed #5, was one of a series she was quite pleased with, that took the big simple shapes of country sheds as a basis for
lights and
darks to fit against each other in interesting ways.
"When you had been sewing as long as she had, it was actually quite hard, getting the seams not to line up exactly. But she already knew that many people, the ones who knew a lot about
Log Cabin and
Bear's Paw, only saw her patchworks as a series of mistakes. They could not see past the fact that the seams did not quite line up, and the way the stripes of the fabrics ran in different directions, and that the quilting was just done on the machine, and not even in proper straight lines."
Why didn't I buy that book, then and there? I might have to go back for it - it was such a good read altogether, and how often do you find quilts being written about so knowlingly?
