Chapter 2

            In my January post, I told the story of the quilt I made for my husband.  This post is Chapter 2.  To truly understand my tale today, you have to understand that I need to have a hand sewing project to do!!  Most evenings, my sweetheart and I watch television; he with a book or his scriptures on hand for the boring parts, and I with a hand sewing project.  This one is the quilt.  "Lovers' Knot" designed by Eleanor Burns.

I emphasize quilt top because a quilt is actually a sandwich of fabric:  the colorful top, a batting for warmth, and a backing.  The quilt maker puts this sandwich together by either tying, machine quilting, or hand quilting, and then binds the sandwich.  What you see in the picture above is the quilt top, and it looks symmetrical and quite attractive, doesn't it?  This particular quilt top was designed as two large separate triangles.   Designing my own Celtic Lovers' Knot pattern for the red and green knots you see in the quilt, from January to late February, I spent every evening hand quilting the bottom triangle.

My mother and her sisters used to brag about their quilting stitches.  Ladies in their seventies, they were so proud of their tiny stitches--twelve to an inch--that, if one dared to contradict or criticize, the others resorted to calling her some of their childhood naughty nicknames.  My stitches are more like six stitches to the inch, but I'm learning.

                       When I put the finished triangle half on my design board, I noticed, to my horror, a horrendous blunder.  See if you can spot it.  Look along the edge in the bottom left corner of the picture. See it now?  Look at the little red triangles.  There's a pattern:  red triangle, green V, red triangle and Ooops...

Three of the four sides of the quilt have this same error, and two of the sides are fully handquilted.

                       DO I CORRECT MY ERROR OR NOT???  This is the part of the quilt called the overhang--the part that hangs over the edge of the bed.  The border.  Should I ignore the problem and just finish the quilt?  Hours and hours and hours of picking out the hundreds of stitches.  Is it worth that much effort?  YES.  Yes it is.  This quilt is for the man of my dreams, and, even at 70+, he is as handsome and kind and loving--a Prince Charming--a real Boy Scout, as he was 41 years ago today when I met him!!

                 The first step was to label every part of the quilt with sticky notes. looking for the error. 

                 Then, I used these wicked-looking fellows:

Picking, picking, picking at miniscule stitches--mine aren't as small as my mom's, but they're small.  Picked and picked and picked through football games, political caucuses, old movies, and tv episodes until the pattern and rhythmn of the border is back in sync. 

                       In the meantime, my sweetheart is up to his old tricks.  These are his wicked-looking fellows.  He's been trimming and pruning the damaged trees in our yard.  Yes, he climbs on that orchard ladder.  Yes, I've told him a million times not to.  But, as I want the border on the quilt to be right, Tom wants the trees in the yard to look right.

 

Maybe that's the secret:  to do what's in our power to help what we love be the best that they can be. 

                         Love, Mom

“The purpose of life is not to be happy – but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you have lived at all.” Leo Rosten