Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Everything I know about life I learned from a quilt

  Well, perhaps not everything.  And maybe not from just one quilt. But there are many lessons from quilting that apply to life ... I thought I saw a book by this title once, in a Christian book of the month club ... forgot to order it in time and then it was no longer available. (Well, maybe that wasn't the title ... I just googled it and some very strange things came up!).
  I am working on a T-shirt quilt now, another memory quilt.  Most, if not all, of the T-shirts were mine (some may have been my sister's, but for the first 20 years, we were in the same places most of the time).  I was almost finished it last spring, when it was 4 squares across and 5 squares down.  Then I was looking for something for another quilt and uh-oh -- I found another 10 or so T-shirt fronts that I had saved for this quilt.  Sigh.  Summer and my  Aug-Oct job intervened and I am finally back to the T-shirt quilt.
  The first square has YouthQuake '77 on it ... memories of the Terrace Evangelical Free Church youth group trip to Briercrest.  I appliqued part of another T-shirt on it from Camp Cherith ... the Pioneer Girls camp I attended for a few years, held at Ness Lake Bible Camp. I alternate a white square with a coloured one ... so YouthQuake is white, and the next one is red.  It reads "I'm in search of myself -- have you seen me anywhere?"  No doubt this is applicable to anyone's teen years.  It was also nicely form-fitting at the time.  I remember wearing it babysitting when it was new, and the baby spit up all over my shoulder (matched the white lettering).  Ah ... memories.
   There are quite a few shirts memorializing my days at Caledonia Senior Secondary and as a Kermode cheerleader, as well as the 20 year class reunion.  There seems to be a lot of pride in my schools, as I also have several from Trinity Western (dorm shirts and alumni shirts) and one from Capernwray Bible School (in England).  I even have one from the school production of "Annie" done by Clarence Fulton secondary students before the new Clarence Fulton school was built.  I taught there quite a bit in the early 1990s ... and I love the musical "Annie".
   I'll probably blog more about the various squares and their significance to me when I get it finished (soon, I hope) and post a photo of the finished product.  The interesting thing that happened while I was working on it was that one of the ladies from our church quilting group wandered over to see what I was doing, looked at some of the Terrace squares, and we realized we had been in the same schools from about grade 6 on.  Small world -- in which there are no coincidences!
   We have a quilt show at our church this Saturday ... I have the 3 quilts from my last post that will be displayed in it.  Then I can bring them home and curl up under them for the winter.  Most of my quilts are cuddly and warm.  My family seems to like them that way!
 

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