Auspicious Apron: Mother Has a Wild Heart

A is for Apron #1

Auspicious Apron: Mother Has a Wild Heart

One side of the apron is an updated version of the traditional patchwork.  Patchwork is an art form that utilizes the diminutive detritus of primary textile construction projects.  For example, a woman fabricates a new garment every year for each of her daughters to wear for the first day of school. She saves all of the material scraps in a basket.  Eventually, she has a stash of odd shaped pieces and random strips that call out to be arranged in juxtapositions of color and texture.  She saves the scraps for the purposes of thrift, but she will mobilize them for the purposes of delight. One day, her artistic sensibility kicks into overdrive and she presses all the wrinkled pieces with a hot iron and begins to stitch them together forming a collage of abstractions. The piece grows organically: a triangle added here on this side, and a rectangle fit along this other side, with perhaps an irresistible and original polygon as anchor at some sort of off-kilter center.

The developing patchwork has no extrinsic orientation of top or bottom, but it develops a personality as it grows.  It begins to express preferences: “Here I need a bright red!” or “I fancy a geometric pattern next to this floral,” and “Yes, this IS up and THIS is down.”  The choices emerging from the basket of scraps are multitudinous and subtle. A pair of scissors may be as significant as an artist’s brush or knife in fine-tuning the thrust of a particular shade or shape. Eventually, the amorphous construction reaches a level of maturity and commitment. The patchwork becomes an apron. 

But, in the practice of patchwork, the woman herself has also been gathered and transformed.  She recognizes herself in the process and knows that she is more than a basket of gently used and useful qualities. She forges her own coherent statement of desire from the disparate urges set aside over the years. Still, she will keep the new fabric of herself hidden (but ready for action) on the reverse of her domestic utility; the patchwork apron.  Did her family guess at what was hidden beneath her quiet competence? In retrospect, her daughters will not be surprised to learn that their mother had a wild heart.