you are sew loved

"Feeding the people I love is a hands-on way of loving them. When you nourish and sustain someone, essentially, you're saying that you want them to thrive, to be happy and healthy and able to live well."

Author Shauna Niequist writes about her love of food, and how she has found that cooking for others is a tangible way of loving them. And though I don't often feel that way about food, that's exactly what sewing means to me. Sewing for the people I love is a hands-on way of loving them -- of keeping them warm and comforted, and perhaps brightening their day with a bit of colour. Emotion often stays concealed in the remote world of the heart and mind, but we can bring it out into the physical realm of the senses. Love is a warm bowl of minestone soup on a cold day. Love is a soft blanket to wrap around your shoulders when you wake before dawn. It's hands-on, it's communicated.

This quilt is a bit of tangible love for Art and Lylabeth -- a couple we met a week after we moved to Texas and were feeling very distant in that new-start, new-place sort of way. They showed us love with homemade cinnamon lemonade. Love was a physical space around the dining table, or room on the big leather sofa. Love was well-thumbed pages in borrowed books.

Next week, then, this quilt goes up for auction at the Salvation Army Banquet in honour of Art. You can find more details on the event here.

+ all finished +

These twenty-three crosses are all packed up, and headed across the country to their new home.

It took me ages to work out how to quilt this design -- swirly stippling didn't seem to go with the geometric design, but I couldn't bear to sew through the black crosses with white thread. In the end (thanks to a little quilterly advice), I used straight lines, but skipped over each cross. The crosses are then outlined with a line of black thread. Time-consuming and oh-so-much turning, but finished at last.

On the back, a gingham-ish black print, broken up with a line of low-volume prints from the front.

Such a pleasure to sew with this collection of all time favourite fabrics, and experiment with low-volume prints like this. When I look at the quilt from a distance, new patterns seem to emerge in the background, from where the pure whites or the greyer fabrics fall, or where the little fox heads pop up. And, of course, just a little bit of red.