Fabric of life

In early spring of this year, I traipsed around to various dry cleaners and tailor shops in Montreal, looking for scraps of fabric. When I entered a shop and made my request, the staff invariably look at me oddly: “You want leftover scraps of fabric?!” In most cases they eventually granted my request and I walked happily away with a bag stuffed with their castoffs – leftover fabric from hemmed pants, shortened skirts, or jackets taken in.

As my pile of scraps grew, I worried that I wouldn’t have quite as much as we needed, which sent me scouring the internet. I can tell you that it’s easy to find lovely packets of carefully curated, perfect squares of colourful fabric (for crafters) but that’s not what I was looking for.

More up my alley was Fabcycle in Vancouver, which advertises part of its work this way: “We’re collecting fabric scraps from Vancouver apparel manufacturers and we have production offcuts, swatches, and other wonderful textures and colours of fabrics for you to play with.” In their efforts to reduce waste in the fabric industry, Fabcycle had gathered up precisely the scraps I was looking for, and I just had to pay for delivery.

All of this was aimed at a workshop we were presenting at the college. It was led by Steve Prince who is a master printmaker from Virginia, but who also leads workshops that integrate faith and artistic practice. In this case, we were to engage in an exercise of patchwork quilting.

Making it beautiful

Each participant was provided with a square of plain-woven cotton fabric on which to create their unique piece. The images we were invited to create through fabric scraps were those of transition or transformation or renewal we had experienced in our lives. We piled up fabric pieces and glued them together in order to tell a story – and when our pieces were completed, that’s just what we did. We each shared our story and our creations, sometimes through tears. Stories of God’s provision and mercy. In our hands and in the telling, the scraps of our lives became beautiful.

This exercise in patchwork quilting is not entirely dissimilar from the practice of Kintsugi described by Dawn Berkelaar in the August issue of Christian Courier. Rather than working with broken pottery, we were working with material that had been thrown away. Fabric scraps had been gathered up from unwanted piles in the forgotten corners of non-descript shops, and were being given new life.  

Christ meets us here

Artistic practice doesn’t only provide us with metaphors for life. Rather, through the time-bound, physical practice of gluing and repairing and forming and imagining, we inhabit and tell our stories in a fresh way. The practice and embodied telling itself has the power to transform us by God’s grace – a God who, in Christ, meets us in the materiality of our lives.

In the end, we did not keep our individual creations. Rather, they were all packaged up and sent to Steve Prince in Virginia. His intention is to integrate these with quilt pieces created by others across the continent. Our lives are ours, but they are not only ours. Our lives and our stories are enmeshed, and the final mile-long artifact will express this in the fabulously recycled fabric of our stories.