My first assignment was to cut as many 8” squares as possible out of a stack of homespun fabrics. Homespuns are loosely woven plaids and stripes that feel and look primitive and, well, homespun. It turns out that cutting them into squares that are actually square is far easier said than done. They slip and move and stretch and pull. Once the “squares” were cut, I had to sew them together in pairs diagonally down the middle and cut them apart into squares that were now made up of triangles of two different fabrics. Let me just say that it is pretty tough to get a diagonal seam through a shape that only resembles a square. Nevertheless, the process was repeated until the resulting blocks each had 4 different fabric triangles in an hourglass configuration. These were sewn together until there was a lap-sized quilt top made of hundreds of triangles of soft, homey plaids.
I lamented and fretted and worried about the crooked seams, the mismatched corners, the missing points and the resulting six-sided ‘triangles.’ “Don’t worry,” the experienced quilters told me. “We believe in the theory of the galloping horse. If you can’t see the mistake from the back of a galloping horse, it isn’t big enough to worry about.” Happily, it turns out you can see all that much from the back of a galloping horse. Our quilts aren’t meant to win contests, they are meant to share love and give a hug when there isn’t anyone else around to give one.
It wasn’t long before the quilt group was officially adopted as a ‘sub-committee’ of the Parish Care Committee. Leave it to Presbyterians to put a layer of bureaucracy over everything. It hasn’t changed much in our daily lives, but it does give us a line item in the annual budget, so we go along with the idea. Now that we are official within the church, we have to fill out an annual questionnaire about our mission work. Mostly it is filling in the blanks, ‘how many individuals were benefited by our efforts’, stuff like that. There was one question that threw us momentarily. “Do you open and/or close your meetings with prayer?” Well, no. But we do call upon the name of the Lord frequently when we have to rip out the same seam AGAIN! This is not your grandmother’s quilting bee.
Quilting has had unexpected gifts. I have spent most of my life in an internal tug of war between my right- and left- brains. I spent 10 years as an actor, (well, aside from my day job), which kept my right-brain happy (or is it the left?), but the other half was frustrated and restless. Then, I spent almost as long as an accountant, which kept the left-brain happy (or is it the right?), but my artistic, creative side was lost and forlorn. With quilting, I can satisfy both the artistic and methodical parts of my soul. The artistic self chooses fabrics and color and designs the layout. The methodical self calculates the measurements and angles and insists that, despite the galloping horse, I should at least try to keep my seams as close to ¼ inch as possible, or the whole block is not going to turn out right. And if the block doesn’t turn out right, the quilt won’t turn out right, and so on.
More importantly, though, coming to quilt group twice a week for the past few years has helped me pick up the pieces of a life that had disintegrated into rags, and begin to construct a new life of my own creation. The loving support of the women in the group has given me enough strength and courage to face the challenges of being a single mom. Their hugs held me together when I lost my mom (and later, my dad) and their laughter pulled me out of the doldrums when each day’s mail brought yet another surprise from the divorce attorney. When I thought I would collapse from the stress, it was the quilters who produced a certificate for a massage at the local spa.
In December, 2004, our community was struck hard by an ice storm. Phone lines were down, power was out and residents became refugees scattering to relatives’ homes and motels in neighboring communities that had escaped the full wrath of the storm. We lost touch with each other for more than a week. When we were finally able to reunite, we met at the local coffee shop, since the church was still cold and dark. While swapping “survivor” stories about our storm experiences, we saw our pastor come in. She came over to our table and we announced that even though we couldn’t quilt, we had been compelled to meet anyway. She grinned at us, saying only “I’m not at all surprised.”
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