The Big Why

 

Whenever I start sewing the binding down on a quilt I start about sixteen inches away from a corner and sew towards it. Getting the first corner out of the way quickly is fun, but it means when I turn the fourth corner, I am well and fully in the home stretch. 

I am very eager to finish this quilt and toss it over the back of the couch and see it with the pink pillows for a few weeks before the Christmas decorations come out.

I've been telling you that Millie has been acting really demanding. This photo should really give you the idea of what she looks like when she Wants My Attention. 

(I told you!)

Later today I'll be meeting my dad at a local restaurant to gift the Garden Party quilt to Marjorie, the Lady Priest. I've made a PDF file of the story of her quilt and collected all the in-process pictures and copied all to a flash drive for her. I hope to have photos tomorrow. 

Pretty sure there will be tears.

So now I'm going to tell you something you may have heard here before, but it's the kind of thing we quiltmakers shouldn't forget. It's WHY we make quilts.

I believe that quilts are Magic. I believe that the very best present EVER is a quilt, that it supersedes money or any other THING. What separates a quilt from "other gifts" is time and touch. Quilts take time to make. Time to plan, to design, to sew, to quilt, to bind. During that time whoever makes the quilt touches every square inch many times. I believe that touch STAYS with the quilt, that the quilt holds that touch, that caring, those thoughts and then surrounds the persons who are wrapped or covered in it. 

Don't believe me? Go back to the very beginning of this quilt blog, back to July and August 2008 and read about the quilt I made for my goddaughter Violette. Violette's quilt was the first fully free pieced quilt I ever made. It had free pieced letters, asterisks and butterflies. It even had a cat hiding in a garden of flowers. I worked on that quilt for over four months, agonizing every inch of the way. I never gave up, even though the quilt changed many times from inception to completion. Violette lay under the quilt exactly once, when I took her picture. Ten days later she died.

To say I and her family were bereft is an understatement of epic proportions. I was disheartened that a quilt I had worked on for so long would be forgotten, tucked away in a drawer somewhere. One of my friends reassured me that would never happen. "Just wait," she said, "that quilt will be a comfort. You'll see."

After Violette's funeral (the quilt covered her tiny casket; not exactly the way I wanted to remember it), her eldest brother put the quilt on his bed, "so she wouldn't be alone." Weeks later her mother admitted that during one particularly rough night when she couldn't sleep, she went to get Violette's quilt from her son's bed and covered herself with it. "I fell right back to sleep, and slept so much better... I slept under it a lot after that. I even woke up one morning to find my husband sleeping under it...  It has become the quilt everybody wants. When anybody here is feeling blue or they are sick, they sleep under Violette's quilt..." (And every time I visit, I get to sleep under it. It always brings tears to my eyes.)

Yeah. Hearing that story took my breath away. But since then, I've heard other similar stories, so I know that quilts REALLY ARE as Magical as I think they are.

So remember this: When you gift a quilt, the recipient does not care if it is an original design or if it came from a book, a pattern or a kit. They do not care if the fabrics are "designer" or left over. They don't care if you bought fabric from eQuilter or the local big box sell everything store. They do not care if your seams are perfectly straight, if your quilt lies flat or if the tips of the triangles are chopped off. They do not care if the quilt was custom quilted, or hand guided quilted, or quilted by a long arm machine running a CAD program. They do not care which side of the quilt you finish sewed the binding on. They do not care if it was sewn by machine or by hand. They don't even care if it was never in a quilt show. Or even if it was.

What matters is that it came from YOUR hand. From YOUR heart, from YOUR time, and from YOUR love. What matters is that it came from YOU. That YOU made it. That YOUR touch is in it. 

NEVER underestimate the importance of that.

That is the rock bottom reason I make quilts, and frankly, I can't think of a better legacy.

I'll never be a millionaire. I'll never be so famous everybody knows my name, but there are people I love who sleep under my quilts every night and feel that love. Hell, even I don't sleep under a quilt I made. I sleep under a quilt that my best friend made for me, and another friend of ours quilted.

Like I said, tears.

**Update: I added a photo of Violette's quilt.