Big Quilt, Little Quilt

Good morning, my friends, and Happy Thanksgiving Eve. Are you cooking this year? I'm cooking for our family. It's a small gathering and I'm keeping things pretty simple. Mae is bringing dessert and one of her wonderful charcuterie boards. Mike is smoking the turkey. I can hear him downstairs getting it set up in a bucket for brining. I'll be making our sweet potatoes and our cranberries today. The rest can wait until tomorrow. I have just one housekeeping chore to do today and I want to get in a walk on the treadmill. It's pretty low-key despite being the biggest dinner of the year tomorrow.

As I mentioned, I had my "annual wellness visit" yesterday. There's nothing much to say about that. No problems and no complaints. There was just a little bit of time for slow-stitching before I needed to leave, and I took just a few first stitches on one of the book spines.

When I arrived home, I found Smitty engaged in a photo shoot for one of his many magazine covers. This is his hunting pose. You can look for it on the cover of the next issue of Field & Scream.

Sadie wonders if it's her short tail that keeps her from getting any response on her casting calls. Pawssibly she's just too purrtite.

But I had flat cats to work with. I could no longer put off wrestling with the Ties & Tails quilt one last time while I machine sewed the binding. Now it's ready for hand-stitching. I'll set it aside for our camping trip next month. Quilt bindings, especially long ones, are good take-along projects.

It was tiring getting all that done. Nevertheless, there was still time in the day, and I got a second wind. It seemed as good a time as any to ready the Humble Beauty wall-hanging for quilting. So, I sandwiched it.

I might have stopped there, but I decided I could do a little more. So I started on the quilting. I quilted a sort of shield around the words in the center.

And then this leafy motif around the outer edges of the embroidery.

And then another leafy meander around the border.

And then the quilting was finished. Here's how it looks from the back. I picked up that Beatitudes fabric when I visited some quilt shops in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Amish country. And the Amish are humble people. It seemed a good choice for the back. 

With each step, I thought I'd be finished, but there was still time left in the day. With the quilting finished, I squared it up.

And then...what the heck...might as well sew on the binding.

And there was still time left, so I finished it. Ta-Da! Sometimes I surprise myself.

Here's another look at the back.

Okay, so a narrative developed in my head as I was making this quilt, and I spent some time last night perusing this book I read some years back. 

When I was in graduate school, one of my assignments was to learn something about my family history. The goal was to identify stories passed down through generations, and consider how they affected our view of the world and of others. During the process of interviewing some of my oldest family members, I discovered my ancestry was Amish. And this was something of a revelation since I'd always had a fascination with the culture and with quilt-making. (It would still be many years before I learned to quilt.) And when I heard about this book, I simply had to read it. (After scanning through the book last night, I decided to read it again.)

The biggest takeaway from the book (for me) was this section about their day-to-day lives. Before I go on, I should say that Sue Bender was a woman in search of something she could not explain or name, and so she set out to spend some time living with the Amish. As you might guess it took some time to find a family that was willing to indulge her curiosity. 

So, the section of the book that spoke to me was this one. I'm going to quote just the pertinent parts. Telling about a day of mundane work, canning vegetables from their garden, she wrote this:

The women moved through the day unhurried. There was no rushing to finish so they could get on to the "important things." For them, it was all important.

Perhaps they had inherited the same routine from their mothers and grandmothers. . . .It was automatic, the repetition ingrained, no time had to be wasted questioning how it should be done--they worked relaxed, "unconsciously conscious."

* * * * * 

Which parts of today's process were a chore? Which were fun? There seemed to be no separation for them. Time was full and generous. It was as if they had uncovered a way to be in time, to be a part of time, to have a harmonious relation with time.

* * * * *

Everything was a ritual. Doing the dishes, mowing the lawn, baking bread, quilting, canning, hanging out the laundry, picking fresh produce, weeding. . . . No distinction was made between the sacred and the everyday. . . . Their life was all one piece. It was all sacred--and all ordinary.

So my take-away was that there is no good work or bad work or boring work. There are simply steps taken to complete a task, and none of it is mundane or unimportant. After reading the book, I took it to heart, and it allowed me to enjoy being in the moment more than I had previously. The book came to me at a time when I really needed to read it, and it helped me see the ordinary in my own life in a new way.

And all of that to say that this quilt has some meaning for me. "Humble tasks." There's a quietude about them that (for me) is worth cultivating.

Okay, so enough philosophy talk...what's going on today? Finishing up those two quilting tasks, brings me to the next section of my white board:

Next, I'll finish this little quilt top. The embroidery was finished a couple of months ago. 

The last thing I did in the sewing room yesterday was to pick out some fabrics to finish it off. I think I even have enough of a scrap binding left to finish it off. 

There are some things I need to do first in preparation for our dinner tomorrow, but then I'll get back to my sewing. I'm still waiting for the floss I need to start the Bumble Sampler. Maybe it will come today. Fingers crossed. I'll be back with a short post tomorrow, but if we miss one another, Happy Thanksgiving, my friends. Don't eat too much pumpkin pie.