Behind the Reroute Collection
Reroute is a collection based around a single design in three colorways that explores the tension between movement and stillness. designed by Mary Hill, This is vacilando’s seventh collection of quilted goods.
I think I cannot
with two arms
touch the sky
I don’t know where I go
my mind is two minds
and longingly I long and searchingly I search…
— Sappho trans. Dan Beachy-Quick
I don’t think I’ve ever really known where I’m going. In a recent conversation I was asked how I became a quilter and I said I didn’t know. I’ve wanted to be a lawyer, to be a therapist, to be a nurse, to be a poet, but I never aspired to be a quilter. For someone highly organized and goal-oriented, my path to quilting has been strangely random and unfocused, but in thinking about my journey I’m now able to see a throughline of care – of listening, compassion, a desire for wholeness and healing, and quilting is just a further extension of this line, a quilt at its most basic level an instrument of care and comfort, a wholeness made from many parts.
As I’ve attempted to gather my thoughts ahead of the Reroute Collection’s launch, the story behind this collection has felt similarly sprawling, the path and purpose behind these quilts only now beginning to come into focus. I’ve rewritten these sentences over and over, unsure of where to start, so perhaps I will simply begin at what feels most like a beginning.
In the summer of 2020, I was living in Arizona and feeling particularly adrift. It was the height of the pandemic which certainly factored into these feelings, my husband had abruptly left his teaching job, and we unexpectedly found ourselves packing up our small apartment to move across the country with no concrete plan. At that moment of rapid and intense change, I began working on a quilt that was intentionally different from anything I had previously made. It wasn’t symmetrical, it used a wide array of colors that didn’t necessarily go together, and I named it the Reroute Quilt, the design echoing and attempting to create order from a period of personal and collective chaos.
It was also during this period of time that I applied to work for Vacilando Studios. I interviewed in Arizona, learned to sew circles in Colorado while driving across the country, and made my final sample quilt days after arriving at our final destination in Minnesota. I was delighted to ultimately receive a job offer, and after joining the team my time quickly became consumed by completing orders and learning to perfect Laura’s extensive library of patterns, so the Reroute Quilt I started in Arizona and packed into a box was never unpacked and finished.
A couple years later I revisited the design while making pieces for one of our scrap collections, this time with a keener eye and new skills. I made a new version of the quilt that incorporated circles into the design and simplified the colors into a sleek two-tone palette. That quilt was the first piece in the collection to sell, purchased just minutes after the launch by another artist which still continues to warm my heart, and a few months later we were commissioned to recreate the quilt for a conference to be used as a photo backdrop and later auctioned off.
This year as Laura and I were discussing the monthly quilt design reissues in celebration of Vacilando’s 10-year anniversary, I mentioned wanting to bring back that beloved scrap quilt and offer it made-to-order for the first time. Laura liked the idea of revisiting the design but thought it could stand on its own apart from the monthly design reissues, and so with that permission and encouragement I set out to design what is now the Reroute Collection, a collection of pillows, wall quilts, quilts, and quilt coats all rooted in the same design that has followed me for years now. Or maybe I have been following it. It’s hard to really know.
The timing of this collection feels right, launching after I recently celebrated five years with Vacilando Studios and coming into the world at what feels like another uncertain and pivotal moment. This time, however, the chaos feels mostly external – I am happier than perhaps I’ve ever been after years of struggling with my mental health and now feeling my own creative practice beginning to flourish, but the world around me simultaneously feels as though it’s falling apart on many fronts and I feel that dissonance deeply. I believe my continued insistence on forging beauty and goodness is wholly worthy and necessary, but it still feels selfish sometimes.
I was a runner in my 20’s and enjoyed running long distances, often setting out with a question or problem in mind and running until I felt it resolve. I miss that time in my life, but perhaps a similar sort of endurance is what the current moment requires. I ask myself nearly everyday what I should be doing as a maker to meet the moment, what I can make or say to have an impact, whether I am capable of making anything meaningful at all. I don’t have answers to these questions, but I think there is value in continuing to ask them, the thoughtful posture of repeated questioning perhaps more important than any answer I could offer.
The design of the Reroute Quilt and its variant forms offer space for this very contemplation in their quiet sparsity while also encouraging meditative movement, the eye wandering through the shapes like a sort of visual labyrinth. Because the design is simple, I wanted to offer it in multiple colorways to create more variety and chose colors that felt warm, grounded, and worked well together, so that multiple pieces could occupy the same space. This was also my first time designing a quilt coat, and after agonizing over every eighth inch of the design (and definitely driving Laura crazy in the process) I am so delighted with how it turned out. I worked hard to reimagine the Reroute Quilt in coat form while staying true to its original essence, and the finished product feels like a modern yet timeless statement piece, capable of providing the care and comfort of a quilt as you move through the world.
As we release this collection, Vacilando Studios is also undergoing its own internal rerouting. This is the second collection I’ve designed, and over time I’ve slowly been taking on a larger role as Laura enjoys the fullness of motherhood and works on other creative projects. I have so much enthusiasm and admiration for what Laura has built over the years, and I’m so grateful for the opportunities I've been given to follow my creative whims and curiosities as well as exercise my more administrative and organizational skills. Laura and I are actively working together each day to explore how we might reach a sense of balance that works for both of us long-term, and right now that looks like continuing my work as a production quilter, taking on more design work, operating our social media, responding to customer service emails, mapping out our Overlook newsletter each month, and soon beginning to manage a large custom hospitality project. I’m also dreaming up ways we might root ourselves more deeply in the vibrant Minneapolis creative community.
Circling back to the beginning, I am somehow only now realizing that I began with the very definition of vacilando – to be wavering and wandering, unsure of the destination but moving forward nonetheless, the very ethos upon which Laura founded Vacilando Studios after encountering the concept in John Steinbeck’s writing while traveling the country in her Airstream. In Travels with Charley: In Search of America, Steinbeck writes that “in Spanish, there is a word…vacilando. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn’t greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction.” These days Laura and I are both doing less traveling, both focused on building a home and community in one place after years of movement, but we are still committed to paying attention along the way even as we root in place, creating a foundation from which we might continue to grow, engage, and explore both ourselves and our surroundings. It’s not lost on me that the sonic twin of reroute – reroot – is also definitionally its opposite, a subtle shift in syllables opening a new word, a new world of possibility, meaning, and direction.
