no scissors, no rulers, no masters

when quilt class changes your life?

Last November I took a class called “a quilt is something human”, taught by Cody Cook-Parrott - artist, writer and author of my favorite newsletter. 

After the end of the last class I sat in my chair & sobbed. It felt like an incredibly strange, cathartic exorcism. The kind I was hoping a hero’s dose of mushrooms would get me; a perfect dance of grief and gratitude. 

Gratitude that Cody somehow created a container for 30 or so humans to show up in all of our stickiness & insecurity (over Zoom, no less). Grief for all of the ways I’ve stayed so tightly wound and curated; for the countless times my inner critic said my work didn’t matter and I believed it. 

On the face, it was a class about quilting. In reality, it was a practice in wholeness. It felt like radical pedagogy. No undesirable part left behind. All skill sets welcomed. Cody teaches from an anti-perfectionist framework. There are no expectations around participation or project completion. You are free to do as little or as much as you feel called to do.

This particular class was on the art of improv quilting. In this process, the quilt evolves as you go. There is no pattern to start from. To quote Cody,

“no rulers, no rules”.  

After the first class, I was super stoked and spent the night making my first quilt block … but I did so following nothing I had just learned. Instead, it was precious as hell. I measured the shit out of every piece. My sweet, familiar perfection. Only that block, I resolved. The rest of the quilt had to be different; it had to follow the framework Cody teaches from and I so desperately want to live by. 

As it happens, I didn’t show up to work on the quilt again for weeks. I felt paralyzed. How to begin this “improv”.

I ended up not doing anything until 3 days before the last class, when we were all going to share our work. The fear of having nothing to show (though that would’ve been totally acceptable) trumped my fear of starting.

So I began. Cutting and arranging. Admittedly, I still used a ruler to get clean lines, but everything else was led by intuition. It felt like painting with fabric. I would cut shapes, arrange them on the wall, step back, observe, then rearrange until I felt something. 

The whole experience was exhilarating. The directionless process made it impossible to involve my intellect. I felt my brain had shut off. This was a chorus between my eyes, hands and gut, each chiming in at different stages. What emerged was magic and my inner critic was nowhere to be found. It had no history to pull from about how much I sucked. It was stumped. By the end of the third night I had finished my quilt top. Left to its own devices, the work had bolted out of me onto the wall. 

The truth is, I signed up for Cody’s class thinking I probably wouldn’t learn much; I mean, I already knew how to sew. Maybe I’d learn a few interesting techniques? Certainly not a whole new creative process.

I can’t help but see the parallels here; that maybe life is just one big improv quilt. Sometimes it looks like mine. There are pockets of time when fear reigns and we feel constrained by our own thoughts or societal pressures. Other times, we think we know and then are quickly reminded that we don’t know shit. 

Then there are years we break open. We collect the parts of ourselves we abandoned in the wake of trying to follow some predetermined path. We gather our unloveable bits and fantastic genius, piecing them all together until we start to feel something again. What emerges is nothing we could’ve planned for or dreamt up. But we recognize it immediately.

Our one precious life, of course.   

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Welcome to hide & seek - a newsletter on life, art & the creative process. Mostly, this is a place to show my work and to hold myself accountable to that work.

Thank you for being here.

with love,
Meredith