dos

At several points during the last entry, I attempted to expand upon being/becoming right-brained. I did not do well. Reality kept interfering with the creative process. Hate when that happens.

Years ago, I worked with a stripper who was also a Gemini. She commented that the best thing about being a Gemini was that you were allowed to make up your own reality as you went along if the present reality did not suit you.

You would have had to have known this girl for the impact of that statement to be truly manifest. Blonde, beautiful, tanned perfect body. This girl could stand on stage and pick her zits and men would throw money at her. I discounted much of the way she was due to having been raised in California by her aunt. Her mother was a 1960s hippie war protester "ringleader" from Berkeley who was in federal prison for selling marijuana to an undercover fed. Easiest way for the powers that be to get her out of the picture, I suppose.

Alternate reality. The realm of fiction was what came to mind at the mention of an alternate reality. Fantasy and delusion followed close behind.

But, this was the 80s in the Bay Area. The Valley was The Valley. Everyone was worth $1 million on paper, and the cocaine flowed like water. 80s Land.

Of that time, I say that I went from life in the fast lane to life in the breakdown lane.

I came back to Ohio where IT was an unknown term and what passed for computer geeks were a-twitter about Turbo Pascal.

I took a part-time job at a video store as Beta Max was taking its dying gasp, and I wrote.

I had begun writing in earnest on an ancient Olivetti that I picked up for $20 at a pawn shop in San Francisco. I liked it because it had character.

The more frustrated I became with the return to bucolia and with the inability to string two cohesive paragraphs together on most days, the idea of making up an alternate reality kept worming its way into my thoughts.

I am not sure when it was that I initially discovered that the alternate reality did exist, but its revelation came to me via quilting.

By this time, I had been a nurse for about three years. I worked a full-time job and two part-time jobs. I had already been hospitalized for a cardiac arrhythmia due to exhaustion and stress. I had had iced saline pumped down a nasogastric tube into my stomach in the emergency room for a bleeding ucler. Talk about being cold! There is nothing like the experience of having your body temperature drop due to a procedure like that. There was no getting warm.

I had a couple of aquariums full of fish. I had gotten my first one while I was in nursing school as a form of stress relief. I also went to the gym, work schedule permitting, for stress relief. The fish were cool, but the gym was not. Being me, I had to work steadily and diligently upon increasing the number of reps, the amount of weight. Static was not a good thing in my world.

While at the pharmacy waiting to pick up a prescription of Xanax, I came across a magazine with the most beautiful quilt I had ever seen on its cover. I bought the magazine.

I had learned how to sew when I was probably 9 or 10. That was the early 70s and double-knit fabrics were the thing! (I can't believe that I even admitted that.) When I was maybe 12 or 13, I decided that I wanted to make a quilt. I diligently cut my scraps of double-knit fabric into squares, tried to arrange them into a pattern, and sewed them together. It was totally hideous.

In looking at the beautiful quilt on the magazine cover and the other beautiful quilts inside the magazine, I thought back to my atrocious patchwork creation and shuddered.

There had to be a way to do this quilting-thing and have it be beautiful. There had to be a secret, and I determined that I was going to discover that secret. I set about it in my left-brained way.

I searched the bookstores for several months, looking at the quilting magazines and buying the ones that I liked. After a few months, I had settled upon three magazines that I liked and bought subscriptions to them. I chose those three for content regarding construction tips and techniques and tools, the types and styles of the quilts that they featured, and articles on things such as color and balance and the illusion of motion and designing quilts and blocks that were "outside of the box." Those appealed more to me than what was presented by most magazines which featured mainly traditional quilting patterns and colors and themes.

I began to buy fabric. Cotton fabric. No more polyester double-knit for this gal! I wasn't sure what to buy. I bought basic calicoes. I bought seasonal prints. I bought graphic and geometric prints. If I liked it, I bought it. It didn't matter if the fabric was orange or puce or a print of giant cacti or of primary colored dinosaurs. My only requirement was that it had to appeal to me. The more I looked at fabrics, the more I found that I did not like most of what was offered as traditional quilting fabrics. The geometrics and novelty prints and batiks seemed to draw me more than calicoes and florals.

I continued to read. I read about new techniques for cutting and assembling blocks. I bought implements of destruction. (Namely rotary cutters and rulers and mats.) I began to search out books of quilts that I liked. I began to come across the names of a few quilters whose body of work appealed to me. Foremost among them, Nancy Crow. All the while, I continued to buy fabric.

Determined that my second attempt at quilting was not going to be the wretched failure that the first had been, I finally gained the courage to attempt my first "real quilt."

I would do a wall hanging for my mother for Christmas. Armed with rotary cutter and ruler and theory on strip piecing, I began to select my fabrics. As my mother tends to be very traditional, I decided to go with a more traditional type of pattern. Garden Path. Four colors in rows where each color is offset one to the right from the row above it. I began to select my fabrics. My "stash" at that time was close to two hundred yards of fabric. Pretty out there for not ever having taken that first stitch. However, I had read that the biggest mistake that beginning quilters make was in poor color selection. I was determined not to make that mistake.

I began putting fabrics side-by-side in different combinations. I fussed. I fidgeted. I moved and rearranged. I pulled out more fabrics and repeated the process. At the end of it all, I had three fabrics that I liked. I needed one more. The hunt was on. To the fabric store I went.

I found my fourth fabric which worked perfectly. I came home and began to cut strips, sew, cut into blocks, sew some more... In just over two hours, I had the top pieced together. It was stunning. I was amazed. It was absolutely beautiful. Simple, yet very, very catching.

I finished the wallhanging and gave it to my mom for Christmas. She loved it.

A few months later, I was visiting my parents. My baby sister had gone off to college, and my mom had bought an antique bedroom suite, complete with dry sink, and put it in my sister's old room. I was in the dining room and looked up the hall through the open door of the bedroom. Wow! This quilt that was draped over the back of the dry sink caught my eye. I had to go check it out. Once I was nearly at the bedroom door, I realized that the quilt which had caught my eye from 30 or so feet away was the wall hanging that I had made for Mom. My sister had hung it over the back of the dry sink.

Eureka! It had worked! As simple as the design had been, it was the combination of colors that made it work. I had managed to make a "good" quilt.

Somewhere in my right-brain, an alternate reality had just taken shape.

A reality where things were more than the sum of their parts. A reality where rules were made to be broken. A reality that was not limited by traditional, settled boundaries and constraints. A reality that was not black & white and concrete. This reality was vibrant and fluid and full of color. I really liked this reality a lot.

It is coming up on 3am. I have kiddo-duty tomorrow and work again tomorrow evening.

My right-brain says tune in for the next installment, when we shall hear our heroine say, "....." Oh never mind. You never know what crazy thing will be said next.