June 20th – July 4th
An essay response to stevie emrich’s “A Quilt for the Birds”
by Hannah Edgar
All roads lead home
For the time being, we are here on the porch, summer unfolding around us in its own haste. stevie has made quilts for the birds, and that is what we call them; they’re “not particularly good at titling their work,” they tell me, as if to apologize.
The quilts have holes. Well, that’s not quite sufficient. Some are windows, circular and intentional; the second quilt, porous like Swiss cheese, overlooks the garden like a portal to another realm. Others have pockets, stuffed with birdseed. Hence the title: quilts for the birds.
stevie hung these on the solstice, the longest day of the year. The birds have been hungry in the days since: the pockets’ hems are frayed, the pecked-at gashes bleeding out batting. Squirrels have come here, too, chattering and indiscriminate in their destruction.
stevie learned how to make those pockets from a former job, as a seamstress at a Western wear emporium: you back the tear with a small square of fabric and stitch it together. Workplace politics aside, stevie loved the job, loved how those garments had housed a body at work, how they were so precious to their wearers as to be patched up and given new life, how the farmers sometimes drove for hours on end just to have the tailors mend them.
stevie knows that devotion well. They’ve hung their favorite socks — striped, gaping holes at the heels and toes — between the quilts. The socks have been stitched up and stuffed with birdseed, too. stevie’s friends made fun of them for wearing them threadbare, they say with a laugh. But they came to see the tears as units of measurement, meting out the stuff of life — like warm bodies come and gone, crow’s feet deepening, shitty apartments lived in and laughed about later.
Much of stevie’s work dwells on these absences, on “removed material.” Like doilies. What we perceive as lace is just as much defined by the fabric that isn’t there as opposed to what is.
“I’m participating in this history of quilt makers without having been explicitly invited, and also in the aftermath of being explicitly removed from family structures in general,” stevie says.
stevie’s siblings are here, genial and warm — a sister and a brother. The older generations are where things begin to fray. Both of stevie’s grandmothers quilted, they say. But they rebuffed stevie’s interest in quilting — crafting and other “domestic,” feminine-coded arts.
“What craft histories and lineages was I welcomed into? Which weren’t I, and why?” stevie muses, the breeze playing with loose tendrils around their face. “It’s become another outlet for me to find some tether to a history of identity.”
stevie has been reading about spinsters. Solitary, maligned, weird, mystical, mighty. Queer, even.
Of course, just as that word kicks up misogynistic myths, so stevie’s very being refutes every ugly stereotype about spinsterism. stevie is young and beautiful: high cheekbones, smooth brown hair tied into a low pony at the nape of their neck, a megawatt smile. They glow golden with the idealism of someone in their 20s, but they have the soft-spoken maturity of someone who has lived a lot of life in a few short years. (I think again of their socks.)
Nor are they a loner — not entirely. Together with Emrys — smiling, jouncing, elfin, also here — stevie runs Craft Night Collective, a queer gathering in Ukrainian Village. It sprouted from a desire to “sit in a circle with people to knit or fix clothes” (per stevie) and blossomed to host drag shows, mutual aid craft sales, art auctions, bookmaking workshops, and performance art.
stevie recently graduated from SAIC. (I wonder if I’ve imagined a slight wince when they tell me this.) They started in the painting and drawing department but soon found themself in fibers. The medium’s tactility, its relationship to the body — it felt alive, they tell me. Last year, they were wet felting, as physical as it gets: rubbing raw wool together for minutes straight.
The words stevie uses to identify themselves:
queer. trans. seamstress. orphan.
organizer of community. spinster…!
The words stevie struggles to find right now have to do with home. They grew up in nearby Evanston, but with their family relationships either “complicated or missing altogether,” they’re not sure what “home” means, entirely.
A quilt, the larger of the two on display, steps into the emotional space that sends words scuttling. What appears at first to be a jagged mountain range towers over a peak-roofed farmhouse, adorned — in a meta touch — by a simple barn quilt. At closer inspection, however, the mountains are actually the V-shaped flight formation of migrating birds, rippling out from the roof peak. It is poetic, evocative. Every stitch of it aches.
stevie says the design was inspired by the name of a quilt pattern they found in an old crafting magazine, gifted to them by a friend. All roads lead home. They didn’t use the pattern itself, but the name lingered.
Where was home?
This quilt is also for the birds, of the birds. Unlike their other quilt — the Swiss cheese one — stevie only added the seed pockets around the quilt’s border, what quilters call the finishing. That, like the socks and the other quilt, have been chewed up by feathered and furred visitors.
Perhaps stevie will mend them before redisplaying the quilts. Perhaps not. stevie likes the double entendre of “finishing.” If they don’t mend those holes, does that make the quilt forever unfinished, an eternal work-in-progress? But that is a decision for another time, a shorter day.
Later in the afternoon, the others — stevie, their siblings, Emrys, everyone — make a circle in the garden like we did as kids: criss-cross applesauce / hands in your lap. I don’t follow, and not only out of shyness. A cool breeze has made a shiver out of me. The wooden porch railing, sun-baked and right, beckons. I fold my arms like a cat upon it and watch the others and in the watching wonder if I have ever seen something so beautiful. Next to me the wind runs its fingers through stevie’s quilt, the flag of a country I would be proud to call my own.
I have never known such a place. But through the circular windows, I see it. It looks like the faces in the garden. —H.E.