Woody’s award-winning novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.
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Imagine a painting by Monet of a pond shimmering with a hundred shades of blue, deep ocean to summer sky, on a canvas larger than a king-size mattress.
Now imagine a different masterpiece, every inch as large and lovely and beautiful and blue, but instead of oil brushstrokes on stiff canvas its medium is five-inch squares of age-worn denim sewn together and framed by a twill border.
“Priceless” is a greatly overworked word, but it is rightly employed to describe the patchwork quilt my mother, gone 33 years now, made for me before I headed off to college.
To begin, Mom surreptitiously saved my old blue jeans, Levi’s mostly, for a number of years. From these she harvested enough squares, or “blocks,” to build a quilt of 19 rows by 13 – 13 being a lucky number in her heart because she met my dad on a blind date on the thirteenth of October – measuring an oceanic six feet wide by more than seven feet long.
She arranged these pixels of denim with an artist’s eye and a mother’s care, forming pleasing patterns from the spectrum of faded hues and varying textures. For example, a small number of blocks have inseams running through them and a few others have front or side pockets removed, leaving behind silhouettes that resemble suntan lines.
One noteworthy square has the white frayed beginnings of a hole, probably at a knee, chosen because Navajos to this day intentionally weave a faint imperfection into each blanket to make it more human and thus more treasured.
Less seriously, near the quilt’s bull’s-eye is a signature 501 Button Fly. Naturally, one square features a rectangular Levi’s label – the waist and inseam sizes erased by age – and a trademark Red Tab tag adorns another square.
In the heart of the blue-denim field, which features nearly 300 tasseled quilting knots securing the touching corners of each and every block, is a large diamond pattern comprised of 16 squares of colorful tartan, in homage to our Irish roots, an eyesore pair of 1970s bellbottoms metamorphosed into handsomeness.
Weighing nearly 11 pounds, thanks furthermore to heavy-duty twill backing and thick batting inside, sleeping beneath this heirloom quilt feels like being hugged. In time, it hugged my daughter throughout college and then my son during his university years. No worse for wear, it now awaits four grandchildren.
Speaking of grandkids, the quilt’s four main corners each have a complete back pocket that my mom said, with a wink, were for condoms because she did not wish to become a grandmother too early.
And yet when I eventually made her a grandmother (for the fourth time) it was indeed too early, for my daughter was born three months premature weighing just 2 pounds, 6 ounces. Dallas remained in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for two months that seemed like a hundred years. If there is such a thing as angels on earth, I will tell you NICU nurses indeed have invisible halos.
September is National NICU Awareness Month, which brings me to a second priceless quilt. It is crib-sized and new and conjures a field of sunflowers painted by Van Gogh. I purchased it from an on-line shop for my granddaughter, Auden, who is named in honor of my mom.
More than being beautiful, what makes this quilt beyond special is the accompanying note from the seller, written in purple ink in smooth looping letters, explaining that her mom donates the money from her handmade quilts to NICUs.
All quilts are works of art, but some are works of heart.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.
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