I’ll wash it soon and mail it and maybe post about it. My brother who may or may not have ever read a blog post told me to keep it. I mentioned this in passing to my brother last week. I thought about closing the blog, knowing that my posts had waned long before November 24 and not really sure when I would want to return, if ever. I glanced at blog posts here and there, I thought about shapes and let ideas percolate. Some of the obstacles were merely practical: for long chunks of the past few months, I was away from my stash, from my rulers and cutting mat, from my sewing machine. It had been 7 weeks since I last touched the quilt, forty-nine days of trying to gather new bearings. Some elements are impressionistic, but they’re still sharp and painful.ĭays marched on, time moved ahead, and we lurched forward, incrementally, taking small and tentative steps into a new world, one whose contours are still unfamiliar and whose boundaries are not yet charted. He was supposed to meet me for lunch and he never made it. It was the Sunday before Thanksgiving and I was close by, in the metro area for a conference. The gift nearly ready to be sent.Īnd then my world crashed down around me.
It came together in an evening and, with more deadlines met, I worked again, basting and quilting and watching as a glimmer of a thought materialized as a quilt. A month later, I pieced together the back, splicing and sewing yardage that coordinated with the front. I attended several sewing events at Pink Castle Fabrics, used the huge design wall to figure out the real plan for this quilt, learned how to sew a Y-seam to make the ideas I had work, and finally, the quilt top was done. All the while, a large block sat on my futon, and ideas about what to do with it flitted through my head.įinally, some breathing room, some space between other obligations, arrived, and I returned to the quilt. I prepared to teach my own class, I scurried to meet a bevy of early fall deadlines, I marched through a suite of Jewish fall holidays, I prepped materials for the looming job market that inched closer and closer. And then it sat, as these things sometimes do, while I took care of the rest of my life. It started with strips of fabric, hastily thrown together one warm summer night when I needed to sew, when my mind moved faster than my hands. It started, like most of my projects, with a glimpse of an idea, a passing thought about shapes and color. It started in the summer, a new project for a friend’s baby. Or, really, the fits and starts in which it was put together, sewn together, the long slow crawl in which it was constructed, made, shaped into being. The quilt, the many pieces of fabric sewn together, just so, says a lot about the past 6 months. It wasn’t that perfect 2 and a quarter inch I sought, I needed, to finish a quilt that had languished for weeks and even months. The rotary cutter glided against the edge, and all the sudden, it wasn’t even. I had forgotten how slippery a ruler could be, how hard I needed to press down to keep it locked into place as I cut fabric.
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