Running Stitch

My grandmother kept a trunk full of old sarees so worn they'd gone translucent at the folds. When she enough of them accumulated she'd them to a woman in the neighborhood who made kantha quilts, layering the cloth into something thick and warm with running stitches keeping all the layers in place. The finished thing would go to a grandchild, or to the bed of someone who'd just come home from the hospital, or simply back to her to sleep under.

I read about Project Repat recently, a company that turns old t-shirts into quilts, sewn at Opportunity Threads in Morganton, North Carolina, a worker-owned cut-and-sew cooperative. The origin story involves a Nairobi traffic jam, an overturned rickshaw, and a Kenyan man wearing a shirt that said "I Danced My Ass Off at Josh's Bar Mitzvah," which is honestly the most American object one can encounter anywhere in the world. The founders started by working with Kenyan artisans on upcycled products to sell in Boston, discovered that nobody actually wanted a repatriated t-shirt bag, and pivoted when customers kept asking instead for quilts made from their own shirts. So now that's what they make. The word "repat" they've folded into repatriation, bringing textile jobs back to the US, which adds a political valence to what is at heart a very old impulse.

The kantha tradition in Bengal isn't quite the same thing. Those saris my grandmother saved weren't random accumulations. They were hers, her mother's, her mother-in-law's and had stories about them. The women in the neighborhood who stitched them knew whose wedding sari was at the center, whose daily cotton was at the edge. They had known my grandmother since she arrived there as a new bride right before partition. These ladies were refugees like her but much more deeply impoverished. This was the way the community pulled together in hard times. Project Repat is working with the same grief about discarded cloth, the same refusal to let memory just go to landfill, but the shirts are collected individually and the customer sends in whatever pile has been sitting in a drawer since forever. The stitch is performed by strangers earning a fair wage in North Carolina, which is its own kind of good bit it creates a different relationship to the object.

The average American discards 65 pounds of clothing a year, and most of it goes nowhere meaningful. Kantha quilts survived in Bengal partly because cloth was expensive and partly because the women making them had time structured differently than ours, long afternoons and meandering conversations that could accommodate slow handwork and spending time together while earning a living. Project Repat has found the American version of that instinct, outsourced to skilled hands in a cooperative in the Blue Ridge foothills, shipped back in a flat box. My grandmother would probably find it a little impersonal and would also be very pleased that the shirts didn't end up in a landfill. Given her life circumstances she simply could not abide by waste.