In the sometimes quite of my sewing room I get aha moments of how the art of quilting helps me in my day to day living. I thought it would be fun to share a few of the life lessons quilting has taught me. Watch for them on the third Friday of each month. If you have learned life lessons from quilting. I’d love to hear them. Leave them in the comments or shoot me an email.
Todays lesson is “You Are Enough.” No matter where you are on your journey, what weaknesses or faults you may have, you are enough. I have a little quilt story to illustrate this point.
Illustrative Story
One of the things I love most about old quilts is the way their creators made do. I have a several grandmother’s garden blocks made in the 1930’s. The hexies finish at one inch. My favorite of this collection of blocks is one in which all but one of the round match. The last hexie is made of a slightly different fabric. What makes this round even better is that the quilter pieced that last piece to make it big enough to make her 1” hexie. I don’t know if I love this block because of her ingenious way of fixing her problem. Or because I love scrap quilts and that one pieced hexie gave the block a scrappy feel.
I took this, dear to my heart block and included it in my Grandpa’s Wrench in Grandma’s Garden quilt. Find the story behind this quilt here. In life we, like this quilter, have to make do. We think we fall short, that our abilities don’t measure up, or everyone else has it put together and we are the only one a few pieces short of a complete quilt.
Truth be told, we are all like this by gone quilter, just making the best of what we have. Sometimes we have enough to make the complete round, but most of the time we are robbing Peter to pay Paul. We rummage through the scrap bag to find some way to make things work, but what we don’t realize is that our scrappy make do ways add character. They make us real and more loveable.
While there may be a few quilt police out there that will judge us and point out our mistakes, others will draw strength from our example. Have empathy because they have been in a similar situation. Recognize the effort and time it took to figure out a solution, feel love, compassion and admiration for our achievements. What we see as a short coming, or mistake, they see as a quirky design piece that makes our quilt perfect.
“Celebrate what makes you weird. It’s God’s gift to you to give to the world” -John Mackey
