Contribution short abstract:

The patchwork quilt is illustrative of the stream of women’s time, fractured, snatched and held in scraps. How can we employ this way of writing research, assembling partial narratives to challenge the masculine paradigm of academic writing and better represent the tangible nature of craft knowledge

Contribution long abstract:

The patchwork quilt is a material object constructed from the fragments, remnants and scraps of everyday life. As a craft practice, it is organised around many centres, put down, picked back up, returned to at a later date or forgotten about. It is partial and interrupted, temporally marked by the meander of life, faded from use, creased from being folded away.

Writing about this tactile practice after long-term ethnographic research within the quilting community demands an approach that reflects the process of making, collecting and construction. Hence, I ask how can the patchwork quilt be used as a metaphor and mode of writing? Inquiring as to how academic writing can incorporate this notion of the verbal-quilt, a stylistic use of scraps arranged in cunning irregularity to create patterns. I propose that an anthropological enquiry into women’s everyday experience can be better understood if we embrace the assemblage of partiality, offcuts from a larger expanse of life/fabric. This temporal flow of women’s writing, short sections seamed together are fragments illuminating the nature of women’s time. In my fieldwork with quiltmakers in northwest England, I investigated how the bricolage of women’s collecting, saving and stitching constituted their everyday experience of being and living in the world. The quilt itself quickly became apparent as a tangible object of women’s self-narration. In response to this creative practice of world-making, I argue that there is a more creative/poetic way to write research, one constructed of patches, conflicted and contrasting narratives redolent of the patchwork quilt.