Quilting

My, how I love quilting. I love everything about it: designing, cutting, piecing, and hand quilting. I guess I don’t love how long it takes to get finished, because it takes me years. Lots of years if my family moves while I am working on a quilt.

The quilt I’m just about finished with is for my son, my oldest. I wanted to make a quilt for each of my kids while they are in High School. He’s a Senior and it’s Christmas Break. In my defense, we have moved twice while I’ve been trying to get this done. He chose the basic color scheme and a couple of optical illusion type blocks and I’m just three borders from being done quilting.

I had a setback this morning, though. I had to unpick some quilting. This is a pretty rare thing, but I am always willing to unpick and redo because I want it done the absolutely best that I am capable of doing. You can see in the picture that I’m working on the dark green outer borders and finished the narrow one going up and down. All of the template chalk tracing along the bottom was quilted yesterday, but I didn’t have it pin-basted. It had, unnoticeably, been shifting in the top layer so when I took it off the frame, it wasn’t flat. There were bubbly pockets of fabric and I decided that wasn’t good enough.

So I’ve unpicked and re-traced and pin-basted all the layers together so there will be no shifting. As I was doing this, I was thinking of all the life-lessons this work could relate to. Am I being sloppy with my words? Am I being carefully considerate to those in my family and others at work or church or in traffic? Am I spending the time to give my undivided attention to each of my kids often and not let our relationship shift because it is easier for me? 

What a lot of lovely resolutions for the New Year I’ve pondered as I was working on my son’s quilt this morning!