Quilt Making

Day 41 of 365

It’s so chilly today Ron had to start a fire in the wood stove! The high was 48 degrees Fahrenheit, and I am pretty sure the strawberries and peppers were far too cold. I know the baby chickens were. They didn’t leave their mama’s wings all day. I know I was cold. We were in the 90s just a few weeks ago. Today, that wood stove felt wonderful.

It’s hard to imagine that, as we are shivering a few days before the Solstice, other parts of the country are experiencing record-breaking heat. I read about the cows dying from the heat in Kansas last week, and my heart was broken. The heat is so tough.

But here it’s so chilly that my quilting efforts make sense. I do not usually make quilts in the summer very much, but I have four quilts in progress right now. One is an order from our Etsy shop, and the other three are gifts. I love to make quilts. I can’t do anything fancy, so I have just embraced my primitive design skills and rolled with them. I have ideas all of the time about designing quilts, and it brings me so much joy to give a quilt as a gift.

My great grandmother on my mom’s side was a quilter. I still have the quilt that was given to me when she passed when I was a child. I treasure that quilt so much. I have repaired it a few times, as it is so old now, and when I make the repairs, I imagine her hands running over these stitches as mine do. It connects me to her.

When I quilt, I make wishes for goodness and warmth and well being. I quilt with intention and just hope it works. Maybe it does. I made my first quilt for my oldest child, my daughter, who is now 25, when she was just 5 years old. I was at my first full-time professor job, and my pay was so low we could barely afford food. I really couldn’t get her anything for Christmas that year, but I found a used Harry Potter Hogwarts train and made her a “starry night” quilt out of discount fabric. I even had to borrow the sewing machine. She still has that quilt and even wrote a poem about it for her creative writing class in college.

That seems like a good sign for my wishes I put into my quilts, right?

Wish me luck on these four quilts. I have to finish them pretty quickly, and I am also building the Summer Solstice issue of the journal. I hope you will read it. It’s going to be a beautiful issue.