A Stitch in Time

Why don’t I ever use that quilt frame I bought, you ask. You know, the lovely wooden one that could pass as a piece of living room furniture (that was the sales pitch – really, how many people do you know with a quilting frame in their living room, or at least one that you might mistake for a coffee table?) I bought the frame almost a year ago, visions of quilts dancing in my head, but I’ve run into a few road blocks. Time – spare time to quilt – what is that anyway? I am far to busy writing, chasing grandkids, going for coffee, playing Paxon on the computer and wondering where the energy I had ten years ago went.

The other thing that keeps me from making a quilt worthy of a quilt frame that looks like a piece of living room furniture is, I still have three more rag quilts to make. These are the quilting equivalent of paint by number pictures, done completely on the sewing machine, no edges to finish, no quilting to stitch, but warm, comfortable, and ever so snuggly. They’ve become known in our family as love blankets – each grandchild has or will have one. So far, I’ve done one for me, seven for grandkids, and three queen-sized ones - after all, adults need love blankets too.

When my oldest grandson was two, I made his. His mom told him it was a very special blanket because grandma sewed love into each puffy little square. How sweet is that? However, with love added to the batting, this grandma can’t stop until each grandchild has one. The older girls got theirs as I finished them, the boys and little girls when they moved from their cribs into their big beds. I wouldn’t give up making the rag quilts for anything though. Just recently that same oldest grandson, now seven, told me that when he got married, his wife would have to bring her own blankets because he would have his love blanket and he wasn’t going to share it. No compliment on a hand-quilted project made on my furniture/frame would mean as much.