patchworking

this and other augusts

It’s the last bright week of August and summer feels stretched, thinner but holding on. Jackets in the morning and after dark, swimsuits and bare feet in the afternoons. We’ve got this one last week until school starts, and amidst the sorting through hand-me-downs and checking feet for rainboot sizes and sewing patches on the lunch bags, we’ll go to the lake one more time with our friends, take morning and evening bike rides, play at the river, and maybe make the root beer floats I’ve been promising we’d have all summer. There will be haircuts, room cleans, and daily chatter about all there is to look forward to in a fresh new year. I bought two (2) watermelons from the roadside stand and there’s not a chance I’ll be setting a morning alarm until Tuesday. It’s a week that feels abuzz with quiet excitement like  August’s slow-moving bumblebees on the New England asters, and slow with savoring like the cool fog softly melting off the brisk, dewy mornings.

This week feels slower too because the last one was busy with stitching and binding a big summer quilt commission. The quilt is for a local friend’s daughter who is setting out for college at the end of this week and wanted a little piece of home to bring with her. Before designing her quilt I learned more about her – favorite colors and quilt styles, the sheep she raises and her plans to become a nurse and then a midwife – and we shared images back and forth of quilts that sparked joy in their patterns or colorways. We settled quickly on a mostly pink and purple quilt, and through the images she sent me I learned she was drawn to traditional patterns, stars, and a soft, neutral volume that evokes a gentle and folksy feeling. She was set on incorporating florals into the stars on her quilt, and I relished the opportunity to choose a range of sweet floral prints called Emily Belle by Liberty. I so often begin my quilts by focusing on striking pairings of naturally dyed colors that a chance to play with soft and sweet florals and coordinating shades of cotton and linen felt like a walk in a rose garden in a borrowed city. Because this quilt was to be larger than my usual throw size, I spent weeks cutting squares, piecing pinwheel stars, patching stars to blocks of oatmeal-colored linen, basting and pressing lines across the squares, and finally quilting it all together and watching hundreds of pieces of fabric become a warm, cozy, pink and purple field of quilted stars all bound up with a soft floral edge. I drove to their family farm on Monday and left the quilt with its intended, leaving as I always do a little piece of my heart and hands’ work stitched into the cloth.