LOVE THREAD – AROUND THE FRAME
Happy Valentine’s Day! After all of the high winds and record-breaking low temperatures, it’s good to focus on something warm and fuzzy like Valentine’s Day.
About ten years ago I quilted a special quilt for a young Chinese girl adopted by Vince Maloney and Karen Ericson. While going through the adoption process, Karen starts cross-stitching blocks using black thread on white aida fabric. She sews Chinese symbols for all of the good things she wants her yet unknown child to experience.
Karen asks family and friends for pieces of fabric featuring the color red which in the Chinese culture brings good fortune and Chinese symbols like dragons, lanterns, and lady bugs-another symbol of good fortune. Karen cuts the fabrics into strips and creates a log cabin style quilt. Dark burgundy fabric is chosen for the back and now it’s quilting time. Karen makes a grid of the quilt placing the fabric donor names in the position of where they appear on the quilt. Karen also shares with me the Chinese proverb “people who are important to each other are connected by a single red thread.” So red cotton thread becomes the color of choice to connect Dana’s parents, “Grandma Piano” aunts, uncles, cousins, the church pastor and friends to make a quilt bigger than the sum of its parts and bound literally and figuratively by love.
I’m not a big fan of the holiday: candy, flowers, a fancy dinner: not my kind of a day. In fact this year I’m spending Valentine’s Day late afternoon completing our 2013 taxes with Stan our Taxman and hoping for a refund. I’d rather be treated special on a day I least expect rather than some obligatory day of celebration.
And by special, I don’t need the queen treatment…I don’t need my nails painted, my makeup perfected, my hair foo-fooed, my calluses treated, or my colon cleansed. Not having to clean cat boxes, shovel snow or wade through piles of junk mail on the kitchen table mean “I love you” more than grand gestures.
I guess I want to be treated like a quilt. A quilt is made of three layers: a top and a bottom sandwiched with batting. And now comes the love… The stitching that binds the three together. Without the stitching the quilt is not a quilt but three separate parts that will literally fall apart. Love is the thread that binds with hope and faith and it is love that is the most important.
May your love bind you close to the ones you love and burn forever in your heart.
REMINDER: Don’t forget to sign up for The Gathering before February 25. Go to www.appleseedquiltersguild.com and go to the “Gathering 2014” tab.
Lois Eubank is the owner of Born Again Quilts Restoration Services. You may contact her through her website at www.bornagainquilts.com or “Like” Born Again Quilt’s on FaceBook
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