Helen Kelley | loose threads

    Pearly
    Whites

One Sunday our newspaper was delivered with a sample packet of toothpaste. I am perfectly happy with my regular toothpaste, but this was a gift, absolutely free, and therefore I kept it.

We are expecting a house guest, and I have been cleaning. I vacuumed and dusted and then turned my attention to the bathroom. I scrubbed the porcelain and polished the chrome, but the grout was still tinged mossy gray.

I remembered that toothpaste. Why not try it on bathroom tile? I found an old toothbrush and set to work. The results were amazing. If I were to take someone on a tour of the house, I would probably start with the bathroom and show off my sparkling shower. Toothpaste! Who'd have thought?

The Household Hints column in the newspaper is filled with suggestions for using everyday commodities for odd applications. Who discovered these innovations? What sort of creative people realize that ordinary things are wonder products? Quilters, especially, are notorious for solving problems in nonprescribed ways. Inventiveness is what quilting has always been about. Early American quilters pieced their quilts from scraps and salvaged worn quilts by covering them with new patchwork. They marked quilting lines by drawing around dishes or rubbing soot from the kerosene lamp through little holes they'd poked through paper patterns onto their quilt tops.

Who pricked her finger and realized that meat tenderizer would remove the blood spots from her quilt?

How did someone know that hair spray would remove ballpoint pen marks?

Who first used masking tape to mark straight quilting lines?

And who discovered that plain old rubbing alcohol will remove the crusty residue left by the tape? Alcohol, water, and a dab of dishwashing soap make a magic mixture that removes pencil marks from quilts. What genius put that together?

Who discovered that we can press freezer paper onto fabric or cut it into sheets to feed through our computer printers and create made-to-order fabric details and labels for our quilts?

Helen Kelley is a quiltmaker, lecturer, author, and teacher from Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can visit Helen on the Internet at her website www.helenkelley- patchworks.com or email Helen at this address: helen@helenkelley- patchworks.com.

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Now the point of all this is to marvel at the inventive minds of quilters. They've had lots of practice making geometric pieces fit together neatly. They have coped with crises: spilled coffee, nicked fingers, bleeding fabric dyes, and fabric shortages. They reach into their everyday cupboards and drawers to solve problems and create wonders. They blot with paper towel, tea-dip their bits and pieces of material, and salvage the very best kind of pins from the collars of men's new shirts. They remove lint from their sewing machine feed dogs with clean mascara brushes and pull bits of thread from ripped seams with surgical tweezers.

Years ago, quilters devised quilt frames that hung from the ceiling, lowering them on pulleys to quilt during the day and raising them out of the way at night. Today we work on frames made of plumbing pipes. Surely that invention was born in the astute brain of a quilter.

Every seam we sew, every joining, every stitch requires us to be clever, to manipulate our fabric into perfect geometrics, to fashion our thoughts into visible form. We turn disasters into creative triumphs. Hooray for the quilter who figured out how to piece the needle-thin points of a Mariner's Compass by stitching her fabric to paper patterns. Bless the quilter who devised quick half-square triangles. We are inventors.

My toothpaste is now tucked into a drawer in my workroom, just in case. One day I just might discover a use for it in my quilting.

©HK 2007