Most of us have heard about a grandparent or great grandparent who made do with materials at hand, instead of running off to the store any time they needed something. Onion skins and vegetable ends saved for a soup stock, a pile of shirts saved for a rag rug, glass food jars with metal lids for storing screws or buttons. I save fabric scraps and old clothes for costumes or dolls, and old socks get stuffed inside each other and tied in a knot for a dog toy. I never really thought of these sorts of things as crafting, until I started seeing the current revival, initially under the guise of recycling and repurposing. A garish tie from the 70s becomes a doll or a wallet, wool sweaters are purposely shrunk and felted for hats or mittens, new life and function is brought to a cast off. In some circles, the definition of craft is a hot topic of debate - at what point does craft become art? Is it thrift, or is it function? When you can buy all the materials at a single store to recreate a craft that your mother made from stuff lying around, can you still use the word “craft” to describe it?

When I was growing up, I thought quilting was the dumbest, most boring craft of all. A bunch of squares, whoop-de-do diamonds, all flowers and printed cotton in crayola browns and mind numbing pastels. And then, someone looked at these same designs - watered down from an age when new clothes were a luxury and every shirt went from parent to child, down the row of siblings, until it was beyond mending and even the baby couldn’t fit in it - and took the craft to the next level. I’ve seen beautiful quilts depicting the seasons with a million stitches in a hundred different colored scraps, portraits showcasing both the subject and the art of assemblage, ready to hang on a gallery wall. And I’ve seen quilts come back to the bed, made from t-shirts or salvaged cloth that isn’t big enough for a full quilt or a skirt. And now there’s instructions on how to convert a skirt in to a pillow. Some of it seems so obvious, while others are brilliant AND functional.

So why haven’t I made a quilt of my own? Because I don’t need one yet. I have a coverlet that does just fine - my step-grandmother’s mother tatted it in the 50’s. Sometimes it’s displayed on the wall, sometimes on the bed. I store it in a side table that my husband’s great uncle made out of scrap wood. It’s above a lally column in my basement made from a tree trunk. These things will probably outlast me. I hope I can create some sort of homely, useful thing that does its job so well that someone will one day say, “my great aunt made that, at the turn of the century.”

Perhaps craft is, after all is sewn and said, a piece of personal art that touches you across generations.