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.

in progress: kite quilting

Trying something a little different on this quilt -- diagonal lines, alternating between single and double rows of stitches. It reminds me of kites -- as if what we thought was the sky were simply a million blue and white kites, flying so close to each other that we can't see the blank expanse of universe beyond. 

one red square

One-hundred-and-seven blues, whites and greys, and one red square -- this quilt top is done! It's made with blues pulled from the stash of ancient history, plus a few all-time-favourite Summersville squares, plus a little newly-acquired Bella, by Lotta Jansdottir, and of course the good old solid whites and greys.

This quilt is destined for the Salvation Army Banquet auction, coming up on May 9th. The banquet is in honour of our friend and mentor, Art King, one of the first people we met when we moved to Texas nearly four years ago, who sadly passed away last year. I wanted to make the quilt meaningful, somehow, without being fussy or cute, and in planning the design, I remembered something my granddad once told me, in reference to his watercolour paintings:

All great art has a spot of red in it somewhere.

All great Art.

Art, with his passion for the famously red Salvation Army, was the red -- a stand-out, never-afraid-to-be-himself sort of guy. Always visible, and yet able to get along with and fit into the community of other squares (!).