It counterbalances a mis-spent youth and is a second chance for the middle-aged. It gives off a virtuous glow and usually begins in autumn. As September approaches, when the chestnut cobs are bursting to reveal their fitted mahogany interiors, it is time again to consider Ireland's autumnal magnet -the evening class.
There is something about the notion of self-improvement that appeals as winter encroaches. Maybe the parable of the talent gestating underground, comes to fruition as the darkness approaches. We arrive in droves at our local vocational school - an assorted group scanning the list of subjects available; among them maths, computers, personal effectiveness, and patchwork. The thought of maths revives the memory of an old quarrel with Euclid, in fact a misunderstanding between us.
I am to the computer what James Thurber's aunt was to electricity. (She thought it would leak from the socket and kill her). Personal effectiveness brought Mussolini to mind immediately and his punctual trains, and Ms Moneypenny of James Bond fame. I always preferred the Sean Connery type.
A happy choice
Patchwork was one year's choice, and what a happy choice. The classrooms were filled with admonitions on healthy eating - pyramids of appropriate foods and pictures of models more staid than any pensioner I've known. The old domestic science room was used for the patchwork classes. It still had a written recipe on the blackboard, for sweet and sour pork.
Our instructress was Beatrice, quick, with an all-seeing eye and a whizz with the needle. Large clumsy needles were termed "crowbars" and consigned to outer darkness. We started off on 12-inch squares with a contrasting smaller square. Our purpose was to learn a patchwork technique called the Cathedral Window. We synchronised our tacking, our running stitches, and our neat finishing knots. We were one in the cameraderie of the needle.
Our pieces underwent an almost balletic movement of tack, press, co-ordinate and assemble. Our vocabulary was all patchwork-speak, "templates", "squares", "hexagons", "reversing", "log", "cabins", "quilting" and "applique". If our stitches were less than restrained, they were "dogsteeth", according to Beatrice. She used a thimble, as all true needlewomen do - few of us could use one. A butcher's wooden skewer, slightly blunted, helped poke out corners of fabric when a doublesquare was reversed for a Cathedral Window pattern.
A peaceful classroom
It was peaceful there in that classroom, still heady from the pheremones of its recent teenage occupants. We were surrounded by a glut of pieces; old summer dresses, dirndl skirts, off-cuts from curtains and borders from old tablecloths. Some patterns needed two colours and others, more. Some women had brand new cottons, but there the hierarchical structure ended.
There was nothing political in our patchwork. It told of no tragedies and showed solidarity only with the small group there. We were full of modest ambition, Christmas place mats or, maybe, eventually a quilt as a present for someone special. The non-purists among us sewed their patches by machine, but "therapy" people used the sewing needle. Perhaps there is virtue in doing things the slow labour intensive way!
We were lost in a collective burst of creativity with our fabric, templates, pin-cushions, reels of thread and sharp scissors. Against the recent tide of overwhelming events at home and abroad there was an innocence an gentleness in putting order on our hexagons, squares and rectangles.
Although our children might challenge our culture, and our certainties go into the weekly lotto bowl, here we had all the authority of Grace O'Malley setting out on an expedition. It was within our power to move and re-arrange our cloth jigsaws and make whatever we wanted.
Here in this lovely old classroom, with our animated conversation, we had control over our colours, our forms, the spread of our sewing, our silences and our speaking. There was a lovely young pregnant woman there dreaming of a quilted swan in the centre of a baby's cot quilt. We all oohed and aahed with her in joyful anticipation. Then there were the seasoned patchwork makers, who pounced on "Join-sanistic" errors - the patch police who ensured that tradition was upheld and "square dealing" implemented. We were a small part in the long pedigree of patchworkers: the women who assembled quilts by candle light in the 1840s, with scraps from dresses discarded by ladies from the Big House, and girls who created quilts with ribbons for bonnets sent from America.
Colour co-ordination
Some of these earlier quilts had a subtlety and sophistication, of colour arrangements and design, before colour co-ordination was a subject to be learned. Our log cabin patterns connected us with the pioneering women who watched their men break new ground in America and build cabins of planks in a certain order, the countless women who inspired The Little House on the Prairie books and TV series. Nearer to home we were sisters of the gallant women who bleached and dyed flour bags, and laboriously removed the miller's mark from the label.
They invented patterns as intricate as any Pennsylvanian Amish, Mennonite or pioneering woman did; patterns like single or double Irish chain, drunken ramble, old maid's ramble, and wedding ring. Isn't it strange that patchwork patterns and traditional Irish tunes have some of the best titles, eg Rambling Pitchfork and Upstairs in a Tent?
The two hours of class flew. Gathering up a colourful harvest, I set off home. Without a single act of ecclesiastical vandalism, without benefit of crowbar or battering ram, I had a Cathedral Window in one pocket and a Log Cabin in the other. What a delicious, illicit thought, walking home in the dark through an area long associated with the Land League.