Near Selma, Alabama, there's a community of African American quilters. I haven't been there, but plan to go on my next road trip to Georgia.
The company, Galison, has produced a beautiful 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle featuring forty of the quilts at Gee's Bend, and I have finally unboxed this one given to me as a gift. I'm going to take it on!
Jigsaw puzzling can be a form of meditation for me. First, I look for all straight-edged pieces and make the border. Then I put the pieces in a bowl according to color. The beauty of this grid of quilts puzzle is that every quilt is its own mini-puzzle, a museum in a box as it were.
The more you look at puzzle pieces, the more you see nuances of colors. Some look like pieces of candy, others flowers. It's very satisfying to click two or more pieces together, then search for others by color family and shapes.
I started a puzzle of rainbow tigers last week--also 1000 pieces--but gave up on it. After I got the tigers in place, the rest was a numbing exercise in putting trees together.
This one takes me online to research the people and the place where African Americans, in hard times, expressed themselves in the art of scraps. If it's satisfying to click cardboard shapes into place, I can only imagine how thrilling it must have been to turn strips and squares of outgrown clothes into beautiful quilts.
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