This Old Quilt

Today we unpacked our shipping container of household goods into a storage facility in Enschede, the Netherlands. Hoorah, our things have arrived safely overseas! It feels good to see all of our furniture and the boxes we packed so carefully once again. Elora climbed up into her highchair not a minute after it was unloaded from the shipping container, right there in the loading area! So much here is new and unfamiliar. Bringing these bits of home back into our lives will be quite comforting. For now most of it stays in storage, but hopefully that will change later this summer.

In one of the boxes I have packed all of my “house quilts”. These are my quilts that we use on a regular basis. I have a rotation of about four that grace our sofa at different parts of the year. One of them is my very first quilt, Colorbrick. (See here for a free tutorial.)

Colorbrick is made entirely with Anna Maria Horner’s Good Folks collection, sashed with natural linen. I can’t take credit for the gorgeous color combinations - that’s all Anna Maria! Yes, this is the collection that made me fall in love with sewing. It’s the quilt I made before I had a clue what I was doing. I pieced it the hard way, bound it terribly and didn’t quilt it nearly enough. As a result, it’s been coming apart at the seams of the quilting cotton and linen. I’ve repaired it a couple of times, but new holes emerge regularly.

This spring I set the quilt aside for repairs. I decided I wasn’t going to pack it this way. It needed to be tended to or repurposed, and given that it’s my very first quilt, it deserved mending, even if it is poorly made. By this point the quilt had holes at the linen sashing almost everywhere that there were not quilting lines. For sure, more quilting = more durable. I’ve learned the hard way.

So this May, in the evenings after packing and preparing to move, I sat down with these pretty new scissors from Warm Crochet and some nearly invisible Bottom Line thread to make repairs. It felt kind of crazy to take the time to do this when we were in the middle of packing, but sometimes crazy is good. Sometimes it's just the grounding you need to carry on for another day.

I decided to use a simple whip stitch, nothing fancy. The repairs are visible, but subtle. I don’t mind that they are visible, anyways. This quilt tells a story about where I started, about what brought me into this profession and how far I’ve come. The mended spots are testament to my appreciation for that journey. In the cold winters to come, here in our new home, this old quilt will ground me. So, I shall hold it close as we embrace adventures to come.