Quilting

I gave up! I gave in! I joined the party!

Quilting has become the lastest craft addiction for my two girls. They went to see Grandma "Buppy" last summer for a weekend affectionately known as Quilt Camp and came home forever changed. Fabric, patterns,needles and thread, magazines, quilt stores, all shapes and sizes of rulers and rotary cutters. They bought matching sewing machines and dove in with reckless abandon. Becky and Ruthanne now send pictures of the lastest quilt creations over the internet to each other, buy fabric in every town they visit and sew, sew, sew. The results are amazing.

After several visits to shops full of every sort of quilt option, I relented. I bought into the game. Whether out of feeling left out, or falling in love, I purchased my first honeybun, layer cakey thing and started cutting. I am terrible. BUT I am having fun. Yesterday I told some expert quilt ladies at a dinner party that I have actually threaded the needle on my sewing machine because I broke the one that Ruthanne had threaded for me before she left for college. AND I added thread to the bobbin thingy AND made rectangles instead of squares out of the little squares I had cut.

All of which is to say that something new is a challenge but also a joy. I am not an expert. My 19 and 27 year olds are way better than me at this put fabric together into a blanket deal, but I am having so much fun. Laughing, skyping to see the lastest project, and hearing ideas for the new baby quilt or graduation quilt or wedding quilt long before any babies, graduations or weddings are on the calendar.

Sometimes I long for family members to live on the same block, in the same village, or at least the same city. Mine do not. But Milwaukee, Manhattan, St Paul, Seattle and Atlanta don't seem so far apart when the threads and patterns of our quilts keep pulling us together.