“Turn that bloody torch off. I only get two hours” is stitched into one patch of The Sleep Quilt, Tracey Chevalier’s latest project. The bestselling author explains: “The prisoner is high risk and on suicide watch, so he is woken every two hours to make sure he’s still alive. It’s been happening for 24 years for this prisoner – it’s horrifying. For him, sleep is something he craves, but it’s a horrible experience.”
After teaming up with 63 inmates in Wandsworth prison, south London, the author of novels such as The Girl With a Pearl Earring has helped them to create a quilt made up of the patches they sewed. Now that quilt is set to become a book.
Chevalier, who discovered her love for quilting while researching her novel The Last Runaway (“my heroine was a quilter … it meant I could write about it more easily”), curated a quilt show at Danson House in Bexleyheath, London, in 2013. Subsequently, she was contacted by the charity Fine Cell Work, which teaches needlework to prisoners and pays them for the work they do, to come and speak about her books and quilts.
Chevalier asked the Wandsworth inmates to design a quilt for her show, Things We Do in Bed, which was split into the themes of birth, sleep, sex, illness and death. Sleep seemed like the least controversial theme for prisoners to tackle, so Chevalier invited them to design and create a 10” x 10” square each.
“The need for sleep is universal and, I assumed, a kind of comfort in prison,” Chevalier writes in an introduction to the resulting book, The Sleep Quilt, which launched its own Kickstarter page on Tuesday. “I wrote and explained: ‘Your square can reflect your feelings about sleep, either in images or words or both. How do you sleep in prison? Well? Poorly? Deeply? Lightly? Do you sleep more or less than you did outside? What are your dreams like? Have they changed since you’ve been inside? Are they happy or do you have more nightmares? What wakes you up? What keeps you awake when you want to sleep?’”
Chevalier says that the project “became much more therapeutic than I’d thought – things came out, emotions came out. Sleep is quite contentious in prisons, and I hadn’t known that. But when we’re going to sleep, it’s often the time we think the most. For prisoners, things have gone wrong for them in their lives and that’s the time it comes out. That definitely came through in the quilt.”
On one square, a prisoner is crouched, almost foetal, in a cell, with the moon shining through the window. “The stitcher used a chain stitch symbolically to outline the inmate. Crowding him in is the word ‘SHAME’ embroidered in a repeat pattern,” writes Chevalier in her introduction. “When he showed me the square on one of my visits, he explained that a guilty verdict makes you feel shame even if you know you are not guilty.”
Another sees an inmate lying in bed with embroidered tears running down his face. One prisoner said that their square – a sleeping woman in an eyemask – “represents me and my dream – love of the outside, the beach, owning a beach hut and a vintage VW camper van to drive around in and be a free spirit once again … I have been in prison for quite a few years, and my dreams and aspirations of a life outside of these four walls are what keep me going all day.”
Chevalier says: “Once the individual squares came together, the strength of these emotions was greater than the sum of the parts.”
The plans for the book, which features the patches alongside quotes from the prisoners, came about when publisher Alexander Fyjis-Walker of Pallas Athene saw what had been produced. “It’s such a touching piece – tragic in some places, witty and lighthearted in others, and always so beautifully made. I wanted to bring its designs and ideas to as wide an audience as possible,” he says.
The Kickstarter is looking to raise £5,000 in order to publish the book, with all royalties from sales going to Fine Cell Work.
“It sounds crazy to say that sewing can help people, but it is actually very therapeutic and calming,” says Chevalier. “And it’s an opportunity for these guys to make something beautiful and be praised for it and paid for it. They might start out thinking they’ll join as they’ll get paid for the work, but most continue because they like sewing … It seems so unlikely, that sewing would unlock something, but it does.”