Scrappy Quilt

In my younger years, I remember many days after school (when I wasn’t curled up with a book) sewing in the room at the top of the stairs. I would listen to the rain and the radio (not rock music--I never did like it) and the sound of the Bernina sewing machine. I don’t sew much anymore, but I do work in the quilting world.

Quilters often throw random scraps into a box and put it under their bed or in the attic. Years later they might piece together, from the fabrics they’ve saved, a beautiful quilt full of memories.

I haven’t saved any pieces of fabric, but I can make another kind of quilt:

“A journal entry is a piece saved from the fabric of a woman’s day. Ragged, incomplete, misshapen—only its color and pattern are left to show how it fits with its mates.” Maureen Ursenbach Beecher

A journal (or blog or personal history) is a way of piecing together the colors and patterns of one’s life, of making some sense of the random swatches.

Much of our life is like working on the back side of a quilt or tapestry. We do the work, but we don’t really know what kind of picture it is making. It is only years later that we see how each piece of our life is a part of a larger pattern, and that what we’ve made has sense and purpose and is beautiful.

I’m glad I don’t have to get out my sewing machine to piece my quilt. I’m sure, even then, I’ll have a lot of mis-matched pieces, dangling threads, crooked seams and unfinished edges. But ragged, scrappy, or crazy as my quilt may be, it will be warm, cozy, and uniquely mine.

When life throws you scraps, make a quilt.