The show must go on

Soundtrack: The Greatest Show on Earth (film)

Inspiration: You can shake the sawdust out of your boots but you can never shake it out of your heart.  


The day I tackled the remainder of the circus block, I wasn't planning to quilt.  But, as I flipped through the TV channels, it just so happened “The Greatest Show on Earth” was playing.  How could I pass up a sign like that?

After the frustration that was the socks and fishnet piece, I wasn’t thrilled to get back to it.  I wasn’t even sure how that piece was going to work with everything else.  I had been so out of whack making it that I didn’t really think about how it might translate to the bigger project.  So I left it aside when I started.

Much like my time in the circus, this block proved to be a turning point in the larger project.

First, I moved my work space from the dark kitchen to the slightly brighter living room.  At the time this was to watch the film while sewing, but now it works for floor space.
Second, I began to see the quilt as a whole instead of focusing on each section.  This block was created with the resulting quilt (or show) in mind as opposed to just fitting it to itself.
Third, this section was the first to be created solely out of pieces yet to be cut, which left me with a lot of excess material.


But let’s get to the sewing.

As I said, this piece needed to be cut first.  This caused me a bit of pause.  It’s one thing to put aside shirts you know you won’t wear again, it’s another thing to cut them up when they are perfectly useable.  I didn’t have nearly as much to work with in this section as I did with the others.  Only five shirts and a pair of rainbow striped underwear.  Two of the shirts had only pocket designs.  I started with those and cut out a simple square leaving the rest of the shirt relatively whole.

As I have said before, once the first cut is made, it all just becomes a bit of material.  The pocket designs freed of their excess, I moved on to the larger designs.  Soon I was left with just a few squares and rectangles.

I began as I always do and started laying them out in some pattern.  And again, I couldn’t see where I wanted to go.  And again, I started by connecting pieces of similar shape to create larger shapes.  

Let me pause here to note how similar this repetitiveness is to the experience of the circus.  Every day is a new town and new set up, but every  day is also the same routine again and again.  Every time I start a block it is a new set up and experience, but the steps that get me to the end are surprisingly similar every time.  This isn’t unique to circus life, but it is a relationship I spent a lot of time observing and recording.  Those observations and resulted writings earned me a PhD, so I guess it is something I notice.

As I moved on with the block I noticed other ways in which this particular section reminded me of the circus.
As I began to piece this section together, I realized this would be the last section of the quilt.  This caused me to pause in my usual improvisation.  If this was going to be the last section, it needed to be built in such a way to stand on its own but also connect to the others (just like a singular act in the circus).  Before now, I had created each completely independent from the rest.  That couldn’t happen here.

The other pieces came out and I began, for the first time, to think about the whole of the project.  How would these pieces fit together?  Would they fit together?

It turns out they would.  Those extra strips I had left from the ‘zen block’ proved to be the perfect pieces to work as connectors between the previous two sections and this last one.

What started as a block, became a long strip to anchor the other sections.

In order to finish this section I had to work in the moment as well as think ahead and remember what I had done previously.  Again, a relationship I observed during my time on the road and which translates beyond the ring of the circus.

What I’m thinking ahead to is what I am going to do for the back of the quilt?  As I said earlier, this section left me with a lot of excess material as it was the only one to start as whole pieces.  Have I learned enough over the last few weeks to make a back piece completely out of scraps?

It seems a tall order, maybe impossible.

But as they say, "nothing is impossible when you work for the circus."