Thread Cone Tower

Award winning writer Robert Olen Butler urges folks to pay attention in the liminal moments between fast asleep and fully awake. You see that in the title of his book, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction.

I’ve experienced the truth of what Butler says. The most creative time for me comes first thing in the morning, usually before breakfast and coffee.

As a teenager and young adult, my creative urges were poured mostly into making music. I started a shift to creative writing in my 30s. I made another turn in my late 50s toward quilting.

As a high schooler involved in band, stage band, orchestra, a Dixieland band, choir, and vocal jazz ensemble, I found little reason to go past the number four (as in four beats per measure). Recently, I’ve discovered an abundance within mathematics, including the joy of geometry. I’ve read books on the Golden Mean and the Fibonacci sequence. Great fun.

Of late, I’ve also immersed myself in the elements and principles of design. Sometimes I become giddy as I play with new friends: color, form, line, shape, space, texture, value, balance, emphasis, harmony, movement, pattern, proportion, repetition, rhythm, unity, and variety. Great, great fun.

Color theory became a new best friend. I wallow in hue, tint, tone, and shade. I analyze house colorations in our neighborhood. I look at magazine ads in new ways. I use software to build color palettes from landscape photos, using nature as a creative source. One day Stella and I made a color wheel out of the 96 crayons in the big box from Crayola. Super great fun.

In a Robert Butler moment early one morning, I decided to arrange the thread I use on the longarm quilting machine in the shape of a color wheel. I thought about gathering all of the thread we have in the cellar, but in the stillness of the early morning I heard a voice speak to me. “Leave my stuff alone.” How did she intercept my thoughts? She’s still asleep. But, okay, I will just play with my thread this morning.

I took all 53 cones to my work table. At first, I laid the thread cones on their sides, greens sprouting in one direction, blues in another. Since it kind of looked like a star anyway, I rearranged everything to put the yellows in the middle with the rainbow radiating out from the hot center. Nice.

Then I wondered if I could build a three dimensional color wheel. I rooted around in the back room until I found some dowels to support the stacks of color. I piled and positioned the thread-cone towers in several configurations until I had a full-blown Disney castle in living color. This is the life! Yay!

I showed my delightful creation to her later that morning. “That’s cool,” she said, then went back up the stairs.

What a dreadful moment. I cannot describe the deflation I felt. There’s very little light in the cellar anyway, but now it felt like even the air had been sucked out with two words. Or maybe it was her turn and ascent. I now have a sense of how the grandchildren feel when she refuses to plaster their artwork on the refrigerator.

My next thoughts sunk down into what felt like my total demise as a creative person. All my life I have pondered the mysteries of creativity. I have experimented and analyzed and tried again.

But Erik Erikson accurately anticipated my current condition. I’m now in a season when I look back over my life and wonder if any of it matters. Despair, Erikson predicted for the likes of me. Here I was, alone in the cellar, looking at a pile of thread on the table. Has my life become so diminished that it’s just thread? Not even a natural fiber like cotton, but a two-ply polyester. Plastic. My life has been reduced to a chaotic heap of plastic.

Fortunately, Butler did not fail me the next morning. As soon as my eyes focused on the clock — 5:27 am — I had an idea. I remembered that she said the thread castle was cool. (Maybe I had been too hard on myself the day before.) What might she say if I arranged all of our fabric in a color wheel? I bet she’ll get a kick out of that one! She’ll probably say that it’s super cool.

I hurried to the cellar and went right to work. We have an IKEA storage system for most of our fabric. Twenty-two drawers. Organized by color.

I pulled open the first drawer. Blues. Too cold. This idea is so good that I need to start with something hot. Orange. I pulled out the two drawers filled with orange fabric and took them to the other room, the place where we have the most floor space available for my stupendous creation. I pushed the recliners against the wall. I moved the rack with the TV trays. I needed all of the space I could get for this wonderful creation.

I emptied the drawers and arranged the orange fabric in a fan shape. I hurried back to get the reds — two drawers — and yellows — two drawers. I now had three fans: reds on the left side of the oranges and yellows to the right. Six drawers of fabric emptied. Sixteen to go.

By the time I got to the three drawers of blues I was running out of floor space. Stumped. What do I do now? My creative vision needed room to grow.

So I did what any normal person would do; I went upstairs for breakfast. Sometime between the first and second cups of coffee, the inspiration hit.

Since my creation called out for space to flourish – and I’m listening to the voices — I realized I could simply rearrange what I had already placed on the floor so that it naturally flowed into the next room, the room where we have the longarm machine.

I hurried to the basement to finish my dream. I curled the fabric stream through the longarm room and into the back room. But then I ran out of fabric. Part way to the door to where the furnace and water heater are hidden I emptied the last of the IKEA drawers. What to do now?

In a moment of pure inspiration, I remembered the totes where we keep the really long pieces of fabric. Oh, doggies, this is going to be even better than I first imagined it to be.

I had just pulled out the first of the totes when I heard footsteps. I stopped and waited for her arrival.

“Do you like it?” I asked when she came down the stairs. She stopped on the lowest step and peered around the corner to her right to where I had started. She looked to her left into the longarm room.

“Where does this end?” she asked.

“In the back room,” I said. “I was just going to get the fabric from the totes so I could …”

“NOT THE TOTES!”

I looked to see what had prompted the outburst. So out of character. She looked like she was praying, eyes closed, all of the cares of the world pressed into wrinkles on her forehead.

“Please,” she said, “for the love of all that is good, please …” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“Please what?” I asked.

She opened her eyes. “What’s gotten into you?” she demanded. “Where do you get these ideas? How long have you been at this?”

Finally, a question for which I had a ready answer. “I looked at the clock at 5:27, and whamo, the idea was there. Just like that. Fully formed. Do you like it?”

She took a deep breath. “Starting tomorrow morning,” she said, “we’re going to play Mother May I before breakfast. It will start when you wake up. If I’m still asleep, you have to stay quiet until I wake up on my own. Your first words of the day will be ‘Mother may I get out of bed?’ Do you understand?”

“I’d like to have someone to talk with in the morning,” I said. “Thank you for suggesting that we have a conversation.”

“There’s another thing,” she replied. “I determine when morning begins. We’ll be on my clock, not yours. Got it? No more of these 5:27 shenanigans.”

I nodded.

She looked again around the corner to her right, then to her left. “You know,” she said, a smile just about to form, “it almost looks like a prayer labyrinth, a rainbow prayer labyrinth.”

“I can see that,” I said. “That was my dream … the one I had at 5:27 … a grand vision of a colorful place to pray … to pray for peace on earth.”

“Good,” she replied, “I’m glad you see what I see. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to go back upstairs for a cup of coffee. You’re going to stay in the cellar and walk the labyrinth two times. The first time, as you walk, pray for your soul. It may be too late, but let’s give it one more try. And since this is for world peace, while you’re at it, hum a little of that song about let there be peace on earth, especially the part ‘let it begin with me.’

“The second time, as you walk I want you to visualize being in an idyllic garden. Hummingbirds and butterflies flutter about. Songbirds serenade you. As you walk the paths, you look down to see precious jewels … lots of jewels … in many different colors. I want you to see how many jewels you can pick up. Then put all the jewels in a drawer by color.”

She looked at me like she wanted a response. That’s when I got it. I smiled. I knew what she wanted.

“Mother, may I?”

She smiled and said, “That’ll be super cool.”

I have 10 days to complete 12 quilts … or else.