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Wednesday is mine.
I meet with an amazing group of women.
We gather to tie quilts for hospices and shelters.
What is the mystery about quilting?
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Mixed Blessings
By Helen Kelley
Wednesday is mine. It is the high point of my week. It's the day I meet with an amazing group of women, quilters who range in age from somewhere in their thirties to their mid-eighties. Sometimes as few as four are present. Sometimes there are as many as 12 or 13.
Each Wednesday, we gather to tie quilts for hospices and shelters. Just like other groups that gather together across the country, these women meet to give their precious time and energy as their personal gifts. Not all are quilters, but they all join in and find talents that they had not dreamed of.
We gather in a room where the sun floods in across a rose garden. In winter, mounds of snow bank against the windows. Each person has chosen how to spend her time. Several work on the floor, spreading out patchwork blocks, arranging them into quilt tops. Some sit around a table with an unfinished comforter spread out in front of them. They poke giant needles through the quilt layers and tie colorful yarn knots. One young woman brings her sewing machine and churns out sturdy denim quilts for men and boys. Another sets up her machine and sews on the first stitches of the bindings, and then I take over, folding those binding strips up over the raw, exposed edges of the quilts and stitching them down, the finishing touch. I do this because it is a mindless job. It requires no special abilities and no forethought, and it leaves me free to enjoy being with these women as I sew, over and over, around and around.
My friends are bright, funny, and caring, like the women I've met in similar groups in town halls, churches, and museums. As much alike as they are, they are a diverse group. They all come for a variety of reasons: some because they feel the need to be part of this generous experience, and some originally came out of curiosity. Some of the women come for a time of relief, to be away from the pressures and demands of their professional lives. Others are retirees who spend other days driving for Meals on Wheels or tutoring school children. One woman brings Hobey each week, her teddy bear-like yellow lab, in training to be a Helping Paws dog. He lies beneath a table pretending to be asleep, but one eye is always partially open, watching. Each of these generous, busy women comes ostensibly to make quilts, but in all honesty, they come for the pleasure of being together.
At noon we stack our finished work in cupboards and go out to the corner restaurant for soup and salads. We sit around a table in perfect order, the left-handed quilters on the right, and the right-handed quilters on the left, and Hobey in the middle. We laugh a lot, and I feel privileged to be counted among them.
What is the mystery about quilting? How does it bring out such amiability, such charity in people? If you were to try to categorize these friends of mine and sort them into groups of interests or talents or backgrounds, you would find the job amazingly difficult. Yet these people fit together so snugly. The wonder is that such a conglomeration of human beings can form such a close, perfect circle, all because of needles and thread.
©HK 2003
Helen Kelley is a quiltmaker, lecturer, author, and teacher from Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can visit Helen on the Internet at her website www.helenkelley-patchworks.com or email Helen at this address: helen@helenkelley-patchworks.com.
Helen's book Every Quilt Tells a Story: A Quilter's Stash of Wit and Wisdom is a collection of two decades of Loose Threads. Now in its second printing, the book is available at quilt shops, bookstores, or from us at https://secure.tpli.com/VillageQuiltShoppe/QV_Products.asp. Helen will be signing copies of her book at our Primedia booth at the International Quilt Festival, October 30 through November 2, 2003, in Houston, Texas.
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