CUNT – a quilt story

A little over a decade ago as of this writing I bought a sewing machine. I’d been reading about how modern fashion design created a lot of waste by precision cutting curves instead of engineering shaped garments from flat panels. I thought I could draft my own sewing patterns, sew all my own clothes, and divest from a bunch of stuff. I was kind of right (in the intervening years I have done all of those things, but it’s hard to maintain them consistently.)

I had quilting aspirations that were similarly born out of extreme thriftiness and dissatisfaction with systems. I talked a lot about quilting for years, and I’m a little unclear now on why it took me so long to make one.

Anyhow.

In December 2024 I had two and a half weeks off work, the longest stretch in years, and I hated my job and needed to feed a crumb of something to my soul. I don’t remember planning it out – I started cutting squares using a 5x5 cardboard template I made, and sewing them into half-square triangles.

The child was home on winter break and he helped me pick out colour and pattern combinations. The fabric was collected from 10 years of garment making scraps, bags of random household linens from friends, and some old shirts beyond repair that I cut up for this purpose.

My original intention was 6x8 blocks, for a total of 48, but I somehow made 49 and went with a 7x7 square instead. I was really excited by how the colours and textures looked. It was amateur work I’m sure, but I felt like I was making something beautiful.

I used a cotton blanket as batting and a cotton flat sheet as backing. The sheet was white, I dyed it lavender for this purpose. My first attempts at quilting with a small home sewing machine was very sweaty – I was nervous about fucking it up and also it was unexpectedly heavy.

I was unreasonably proud of the finished result. In retrospect, the batting was kind of heavy and the quilt turned out smaller than I expected, but I’m still happy about it. When I asked my kid what I should name it, he said "why don't you call it what you've been calling it the whole time you've been making it."

When I make a mistake at the sewing machine or stab myself with a pin, my reflex is to exclaim "CUNT!"

And a quilt was born.