Every quilt
has its story. This quilt is lucky enough to have three stories.
The Printing Press and the First Books - Incunabula
First of all, what on earth does “incunabula” mean? To fully appreciate that we have to go all the way back to 1455 when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Encounters with print are now such a ho hum occurrence that it’s hard to imagine a time where there was almost no print. Before the printing press came along a book was a produced in a long drawn-out sweaty labor of love. A monk or scribe wrote down every word by hand, one painful letter at a time. This took an enormous amount of time and ensured there were a miniscule number of books available. Annual book awards would have been simple to judge back then, with every book that came out that year being in the top ten. So, when the printing press began cranking out pages by the hundred in 1455, the information dam was broken. We wouldn’t see anything that significant in knowledge exchange until the invention of the internet some 500 years later.
The books printed between the years 1455 and 1500 are called “incunabula” [in-kyoo-nab-yuh-luh]. It’s a term that gives a collective name to all the books that were printed during the “infancy” of printing, or roughly the first fifty years. After the year 1500, printing presses became more common and the now familiar format of books evolved. About 30,000 incunabula are still in existence.
I’ve always been fascinated by line drawings, and the idea of whether or not I might turn one of these into a quilt. The line drawings in these very old texts are a particularly fascinating view of artistry and of life centuries ago. Pictures were added to them using woodcut or metalcut plates, where someone painstakingly carved the image into wood or metal that could then be inked and printed. The book pages were sometimes decorated with embellishments called “illuminations”. These were hand painted and included vines, flowers, animals, letters, in a procedure that was done in individual books after printing. Many of the incunabula have now been scanned in and can be viewed as digital copies held by the major libraries of the world. You can page through them online as you would a print book, drinking in all the gloriously meticulous illustrations. Most of them were written in non-English languages in fonts that are an illegible delight to the eye. I spent many hours looking at incunabula and pondering over the illustrations. I imagined who might have spent so many hours bent over a dimly lit workbench carving these out, never knowing that over 500 hundred years in the future, people would still be able to view and enjoy their work.
The books were written on many topics of importance at the time - religion, history, medical treatment - basically the same things that still interest us today. I am particularly fond of the ones on medicine – humanity’s endless quest to
Life and Times of St. Roch
The book is about St. Roch who lived from 1295 – 1327. Probably. The dates are not certain, just an approximation. Despite searching far and wide, I cannot come up with a first name for Mr. Roch so I will refer to him as “St. Roch” even though he was not officially canonized for well over 250 years after his death. He was born in Montpellier, in the south of France. His father was the governor; we can assume his family was wealthy. This interested Roch not at all.
Born with a birthmark in the sign of a cross on his chest, he was devoutly religious from a very early age. When Roch was 20 his parents perished. Custom dictated that he become governor, since this was an office of birthright, but politics were not uppermost in his mind. He passed the honor on to his uncle and began travelling towards Rome. The way things turned out, I’m pretty sure giving Uncle the job became a huge regret. Roch became a mendicant pilgrim, meaning that he divested himself of all his worldly goods and money and relied on the goodwill of his listeners to meet his needs for food and lodging.
A plague was raging as he began making his way through the small villages of Italy. Roch would pray over the sick, making the sign of the cross. Many were cured. He continued tending to the sick until he too became stricken with the plague. In an act of what we would now call “self isolation” he withdrew to the forest and made himself a rudimentary shelter of boughs. A spring inexplicably bubbled up nearby. Also inexplicably, a dog began visiting him, bringing him bread and licking the large plague-induced bubo on his thigh. The dog’s owner, nobleman Gothard Palastrelli, found it curious that his hunting dog had begun carting around bread. He followed the animal one day, hoping to solve the mystery. When he discovered St. Roch, he decided to take him home until he recovered. A lot of things had to align to save the man who later became a saint.
When he returned to his home city, Montpellier, Roch travelled incognito, having gained some fame for all his miraculous acts. The city was embroiled in a war. Roch refused to reveal his identity and was labelled as a spy and jailed by the governor – yep – his uncle! Roch never left the jail again, spending the last five years of his life there. He continued to refuse to reveal his identity. According to legend, an angel attended his death, granting his wish that whoever invoked his name “shall not be hurt with the hurt of pestilence”. After his death, the townspeople recognized him by the birthmark on his chest. St. Roch was a mere 32 years old.
While not officially a saint yet, he became canonized in the minds of the people, and many churches were erected in his honor over the following several hundred years. His influence, which remains today, was felt in many cities throughout Europe, the Philippines, and other places in the world. During the plagues in the century following his death, citizens would march while invoking his name as an intercession against the plague. Today he is the patron saint of many things, including dogs, cattle, invalids (especially knee problems), falsely accused people, bachelors, surgeons, apothecaries, grave diggers, second-hand dealers, and pilgrims. It is quite understandable that there was renewed interest in St. Roch during our own Covid “plague”.
St. Roch is still remembered and honored today. The relics of St. Roch are located in Chiesa di San Rocco (Church of St. Roch) in Venice. You can celebrate his feast day on August 16th.
Making the Incunabula Quilt
Being in love with the simplicity of line drawings does not easily translate into recreating these drawings with a sewing machine. I’d been hacking away at various techniques for years, with some success at making the animals on the Souls quilt. For those I printed out very simple drawings, pinned those printouts to cloth and stitched along the lines, removing the paper after I’d finished. The words “nerve wracking” and “tedious” are utterly inadequate to describe this process. Unfortunately, the paper technique would never work for a large project like the drawing from Petrus Ludovicus Maldura. Back to the drawing board!
I used unbleached cotton because this fabric mimics the cream-coloured pages common to very old books. After an interminable bunch of test pieces, I came up with a method. The drawing was printed out on several pages and these were taped together to form one large picture. Using a version of that, I taped it to a light table and traced all the lines onto the cotton with a non-smearing mechanical pencil. Yes. It took many hours.
Next, I put the traced fabric drawing on a layer of batting, and after another round of test pieces, I was satisfied that I knew what thread, tension, and bucket of patience this was going to take to free motion quilt stitches in black thread over every line in the drawing. I worked on a small section at a time, with each section taking a few hours to complete. It’s amazing how you can capture in a few sentences something that was toiled on for over two years. Admittedly, I kept putting it aside, but I have the fortune of having a sister who kept reminding me about this quilt. I’m avoiding the use of the word “nagging” here. She would never nag. It was more like guilt inducing prodding. “Are you working on that quilt?” “You’re working on the quilt, right?” Hey, it’s all incentive.
I kept despairing that it would go wrong and I would ruin it. It’s a large one-piece item and there would be no coming back from any mistake. Coffee cups were not allowed within 10 feet. Days where my stitching looked like a wobbling trail from a lost drunken snail would bring things to a full stop. To up my odds of success, I decided that the borders would be added on after the main area was stitched. This would give me more chance of a do-over if I messed up on a border, and would also avoid the risk of dense stitching on the central part causing rippling on the borders, which would be more lightly quilted. I've fallen into that rabbit hole before. Because the endlessly tedious stitching along the lines became intolerable at times, I worked on the border strips alternating with stitching the central drawing. This enabled two separate “projects” on the go simultaneously, with neither having a guaranteed acceptable end result. This may or may not have caused some anxiety. I don’t like to say…
For the borders, I wanted to use artwork that was based on the decorations inspired by one of the Gutenberg Bibles. If you were really rich and patient back in the late 1400’s, you could take your Bible to an artist who would painstakingly paint the borders of the pages for you, one page at a time. I’m not sure if these painters liked this job or if they just endured the tedium of decorating page after page because it put bread on the table. Probably they loved the work, as there was not much distraction in the 1400’s, television not having been invented yet. Books were few in number. Pickleball was not even on the horizon.
I purchased an image of a page from the Gutenberg Bible that is held in the British Library. Some of these Bibles are uniquely “illuminated”, that is, decorated with painting. There are only about 21 whole copies now in existence out of the original 158 (or possibly 180) that were printed in the 1450’s. All are in libraries. Using the floral, leaf, and bird elements on the border of that page, I created my own borders by drawing and tracing them onto long strips of paper. These were then traced onto fabric and then the outlines were stitched in black thread. I had thought about recreating these in applique, but wow, the pieces would be soooo small.
Since I was already circling the drain of the patience pool, I thought perhaps hand embroidery or thread painting by machine might be a better option. Empathically, no. Test pieces were being jettisoned in great numbers. The border project stalled as I plodded on like a half sick turtle, stitching the central drawing. I finally settled on painting the borders with Inktense Pencils. These look like pencil crayons, but are made of coloured ink, and are applied to fabric in combination with liquid Fabric Medium. This brings out their vibrant color and keeps them from bleeding into unwanted areas. This too is a slow process, but it was at least doable within a single lifetime.
After all the trials, and errors, and heaps of test pieces, I was finally able to attach the borders to the central part…and then…seemingly start all over again as I had to add backing fabric and machine quilt the entire piece. After, you guessed it, a few more test pieces, I decided what worked best for this was Wonderfil’s Invisafil thread. As a 100-weight thread, it was fine enough to add contouring without detracting from the picture.
Whew. It now looked okay, but a whole new issue cropped up. All this stitching had left an empty background behind St. Roch and company. And the empty space was looking a bit wrinkled and baggy, as it was the only place that lacked stitching. It’s a good thing he was a saint, because completing this quilt was becoming a near-religious devotion. Back to the land of test pieces. I finally made an overlay drawing on plastic that I used to help create the lines of the brick walls in the background. For any sort of authenticity at all, I had to put the mortar layers between the bricks, and yet again, it was an enormous amount of machine quilting. Was I really finished now? At some point, you just have to call it a day. I threw in the towel. Which I had used as a test piece.
I think quite possibly that I could have painted the pages of an entire Gutenberg Bible in the length of time it took me to complete this quilt, but GB’s are in short supply these days, so it’s lucky I had that quilt to occupy those two years of my life. And if I long for the days of this project, I can always satisfy myself by sewing all those test pieces together.
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