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We had a great time making holiday cards.
One year, our youngest daughter cut the linoleum.
She slipped and we made a fast trip to the emergency room.
In February, when her hand healed, we mailed our letters.
We still laugh about our card.
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To Err is Human
By Helen Kelley
When our family was younger, we had a great time making our own holiday cards. Everyone participated, and our cards were made with love and sent to special friends. Each year we made Santa puppets or patchwork shapes, and once we mailed out a mobile with paper angels.
We most often used block printing to make the cards. One year, my youngest daughter Faith was assigned the job of cutting the linoleum. She drew angels and added the word "JOY" across the top, and then dug out the unwanted areas of the design with a sharp chisel. Tired and not as cautious as she should have been, the tool slipped, and we made a fast trip to the emergency room to have her hand sewn together again. That year, no card went out for the holidays.
As February approached and Faith's hand healed, we decided to bring our distant friends up-to-date on our family activities. Faith finished cutting the linoleum, and she inked it to press it onto the top of a letter that we had written. We discovered that she had forgotten to reverse the image of her design. The angels flew gently across the paper beneath a large "YOJ." We thought it was hysterically funny and mailed our February letters embellished exactly that way. All these years later, when we get together for the holidays, we still laugh about our YOJ card.
When I make a quilt, I make mistakes, and I try very hard to fix them. I am a ripper virtuoso, a talented restitcher. I am a master of appliqueing clever little details over careless snips and cuts. I remember how I once deftly touched the edges of an impressive accidental slash with a fine needle that I had dipped in fabric glue. When the delicate line of glue had dried and sealed over the soft cut ends of the fibers, I pulled the edges neatly together, and then signed my name over the mended damage. My name covered the mutilation beautifully. It was an unusual place to sign a quilt, but it was neat.
It takes courage and humility to swallow my pride and confess my clumsiness, but it's a great deal of fun to devise a way to camouflage a glitch, and perhaps I will make the quilt even better. It requires spontaneity and inventiveness. And a sense of humor helps.
I have always wondered if the best quilts, the best paintings, and the best art are the result of having to recover from disasters. When my quilts turn out exactly as I plan them, perfect points, straight, smooth edges, exact in every way, they no longer feel lighthearted and exciting. Instead there is a rigidity about them. Improvisation creates variety. Little differences catch the eye. They create wonderment and stir a bit of excitement. They are satisfying. I am a great ripper, restitcher, appliquer, and camouflager, and I tell you this: no one else has any idea of the panic I feel when I have to devise some creative damage control. Being a klutz is not an easy life, but it opens your eyes and surprises you to discover how resourceful you can be. I don't know if confessing this makes me a better person, but I do think that owning up to it somehow makes for better quilts.
©HK 2004
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 www.VillageQuiltShoppe.
View our archive of Loose Threads columns.
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