Here’s the link to Bonnie Hunter’s Mystery Quilt:

https://bit.ly/2EPpX2n

Happy Christmas Eve! In the midst of all the holiday prep, I’ve relaxed with these:

https://quiltville.blogspot.com/2018/12/mystery-monday-link-up-part-4.html

Bonnie gave us three choices to complete clue #4. I chose EASY.

I am honored to know that you are taking time to enjoy this blog with me. It’s a very busy time of year, and I’m going to suspend blogposts for awhile. I’ve got cookies to bake, and a cantata to sing, and handbells to play, and cards to write and mail, and parties to attend, and gifts to acquire, and feasts to prepare, and ….

I hope you have a peaceful holy season and I’ll be back in the new year.

I have a confession to make. I had challenged myself to paper piece every block in this quilt. I had not done that before. When I got to this block, I faltered. I counted the pieces and made a decision: Forget paper piecing, just go for it with shortcuts and fingers crossed. I sewed blue and white strips together, then chopped them into square pairs and built my rows.

You can see that I reaped what I sowed. I am not happy with this block. The squares are all wonky. And I’ll have to tug at it a little to persuade it to be 6.5 inches square when I add the sashing. Paper piecing the other blocks has caused me to expect near-perfection. The points always point, the seams match up, and the squares finish at exactly 6.5 inches. Every time. This is one good reason why it’s worth troubling over the laborious method of paper piecing y’all.

What I want to do more than anything with this block is turn it into a potholder and give myself a do over. But I’m going to leave it.

It will serve as a reminder. I fell short of the goal I set for myself. And I did so early on in the project. Well, I need to just get over myself and move on. It’s just one quilt block. Even though I didn’t meet my self-imposed challenge on this project, there will still be a quilt when it’s done. I will have transformed a bag of scraps into a beautiful keepsake.

There’s a fallacious fact out there that is spread among quilters. It states that the Amish purposefully insert a mistake in their legendary quilts in order to show humility. But think that through – it means that if they don’t make that intentional error, then maybe they would actually achieve quilty perfection. Pride!

The Amish would be the first to say that’s ridiculous. I have Amish friends, and pride is just not in their nature. I would like it also to not be in mine. So I’m keeping this block and cutting myself some slack.

This block is called “Doors and Windows” and goes with Genesis 6 when Noah builds the ark. I chose blue wavy and watery fabric to foreshadow what is to come. When I first read the name of this block, I thought of Julie Andrews as Maria saying, “When the Lord closes a door, somewhere He opens a window”. (The Sound of Music). In that context I think it means that we can make our plans, but God redirects our steps in different, better directions. God closes doors in order to protect His followers. In the context of Genesis 6, I think of how God will close the door of the ark. Then after many dark days, Noah will open a window and see that he survived the storm.

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We are in Genesis chapter 3. God must’ve taken pity on Adam and Eve when He saw them in their makeshift fig-leaved get ups. Because the next chapter describes how He clothed them in skins before He sent them away from the garden. I wonder what God’s design looked like?

The quilt block that accompanies this passage of scripture is “Mother’s Favorite”:

Genesis 3:20 – “The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.”

I’m sure there’s a graphic t-shirt that says, “I’m a mom, what’s your superpower?” Think about it. Us mothers push forth from our bodies new human beings. Their very survival is dependent upon us from the moment of conception until they fly from our nests. It is up to us to keep them warm, dry, fed, and content. When they become mobile we have to keep them safe too. Eve did all of this by herself, outside of the garden. She had no grandparents or babysitters available for relief. Or disposable diapers. How could I ever have resented Eve for listening to a snake and ruining paradise for all of us? If I could, I’d buy her the t-shirt.

At the least, I hope Eve got her “favorite”, as the name of this block suggests. I think, as mothers, we have to put ourselves aside in order to meet the needs of the living beings that have been placed in our care. And we do so gladly with profound love and utmost devotion. As our babies grow, we learn what their favorite things are, and we do our best to provide them. This block name tells me not to forget myself entirely. And I am a mother who happens to have an empty nest. So I’m having fun with my favorites, sewing and blogging!

What are some of your favorite things? I still consider myself a blogging novice. But I will ask here, for the first time, that you leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you!

I’m participating in Bonnie Hunter’s Good Fortune Mystery. Here’s the link:

https://bit.ly/2QG5nXC

Here’s my progress on Clue #3. It’s quite meager, I know. I marvel at you all who are keeping up each week. I still have 100 more to go on clue #2. I haven’t made more of these because I’m struggling with clue #3. In order to reach the correct unit size the seam allowance is tiny. I just don’t want to forge ahead in case someone posts a solution.

The word sin literally means to “miss the mark”. It comes from archery. As in, anything the arrow hits outside of the bullseye is a “sin”.

Genesis 3 describes Adam seeking refuge as he slinks around the garden in fear. I find it interesting that he has not been taught the Ten Commandments. He just knew that disobedience was a sin. We are made in the image of God, so a conscience is hardwired into our very beings. In Adam’s case here, it’s a guilty conscience. When confronted, Adam cowardly blaming his sin on Eve. Then God delivers The Curse – and now we all live in this imperfect world.

Adam’s Refuge

We’ve all heard of the “quilting police”. I’ve personally never met one. Or maybe I have, and they just kept their judgmental opinions to themselves. And for that reason I feel sorry for them. We are doing this for the purpose of having fun after all. Perhaps it is fun for them to nit pick the details. And there is a place for best efforts as opposed to sloppy carelessness. But if I’m looking at someone’s quilt and I notice that the points don’t match instead of the amazing color play, then I’ve missed the mark. Striving to sew inside the bullseye seems stressful to me. Anything outside perfection is a curse. Well, that’s just not realistic. We live in a fallen world. To hold such a high standard that is impossible to meet just makes one feel that they’ve fallen short.

Actually, I’ve been my own worst judge at times. I thought that my paper piecing would produce “perfect” results every time. Not so. I made so many cutting mistakes on a block that I ran out of the fabric just when I needed one last piece. After considering starting over with different fabrics, I pulled the scraps out of the wastebasket and patched together a big enough piece to complete the block.

One block was printed with the wrong setting (note: always choose 100%, NOT “to scale”), so the whole thing came out too small. I fretted for a bit, then just framed it up with more fabric until it reached the right size. I like it more than if I had done it “right”.

My most glaring mistake so far is:

See them? Are you gasping in shock and disappointment? My point exactly. My goal with this quilt is to use up my scraps of reproduction fabric, starting with the smallest bits. I play “fabric chicken” with each block. It’s fun! Well, I lost this round, and rather than start over, I put in a substitute. Not a bulls eye, but close enough.

I will say it has been fun to see my skills progress with each new project. But when I look at my first quilt; it is with affection rather than embarrassment. The seams are wavy, the points are buried or floating, and I didn’t even know about hand stitching bindings. At the time, I didn’t see any of those things. I was having too much fun.

I am not striving for perfection. I am sewing for personalization. Someone’s going to get these quilts someday, and I hope they will spy my mistakes. Hopefully they’ll realize that the “misses of the mark” don’t diminish the beauty of the quilt. Rather, they add the human touch. Mine!

Remember that silly childhood question: “When is baseball first mentioned in the Bible?” The reply, “Huh? Baseball?” The punchline: “In the “big”inning . . .”

Yuk yuk.

Well, my fellow sewists; Chapter three of Genesis describes the first account of sewing in the Bible. It was born out of “bare” necessity. Adam and Eve had to make do with fig leaves. They contrived needles and thread and stitched their clothing together.

Sewists still sew out of necessity, albeit for different reasons. Speaking only for myself, I sew because of community. It connects me with friends in a purposeful way. It connects me with my past, and the past I imagine when I look at old quilts. I wonder at the people who sewed them. What passed through their thoughtstream as they stitched for hours and hours?

Some sewists say that quilting is their therapy. I believe that is true. When I was in Alaska, I saw this in Skagway:

I think about Jennie Olsen.

This mother was holed up in that tiny town with those long, dark, cold winters. Of course she would sew duck necks together. It was the sane thing to do.

Here’s our next block in the Bible Sampler Quilt, Garden Walk.

In Genesis chapter two, God put Adam in the Garden of Eden “to work it and keep it”. When the world was still perfect, that was the job God gave Adam. It’s the perfect job. I know farmers today who agree. They choose their vocation because it keeps them closest to God’s creation.

I have a garden. I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a gardener; I dabble. Currently I have six raised beds newly planted in winter crops. Lettuce, peas, kale, chard, parsnips, onions and herbs. Summer stragglers fill in the rest: eggplant, tomatoes and peppers. I don’t have the heart to tear those out if they could produce a few more fruits of my labors. I live in a zone that gets little frost. So the chance that I could have a homegrown tomato in January keeps me from pulling out the scraggly vines.

My garden design is inspired by the kitchen potagers of France. I dream over Pinterest images and save them to my potager board. Then I go outside and play in my dirt.

My vision:

My reality:See? I dabble.

A major part of the fun of working through the Bible Sampler Quilt is the organization of the project. I print out all the paper piece patterns from the CD included with the book. I place them in clear sleeves and they go into a huge binder.

There’s room to tuck the fabric scraps into the sleeve for each block. My goal is to eat up my scraps of reproduction fabric. If I pull it and put it in the binder, then the bin is already showing destashing progress. But the best part of all is when I finish a block. After tucking it into its clear sleeve in my binder, I flip the page and see the “reveal” of the next block.

When I saw the Garden of Eden block, my first response was “It’s a potager!”

I am having fun being a blogger. I have to laugh at myself. At the start I warned you that I would be longwinded. But WordPress informs me that my posts are taking less time to read. In fact, I’m shortening my posts by a minute each day. So there you go!

Genesis chapter two describes the Garden of Eden. God put the tree of life in the midst of the garden. I wonder what the fruit of the tree of life was like? What color, what shape, what flavor did God create in the food that would enable us to live forever? I guess it doesn’t really matter now, because the tree no longer exists. And we don’t need that tree anymore. We are still able to live forever. God made a way – and it also involved a tree. A tree that was cut down and shaped into a cross. A new tree of life. Because it is at the foot of the cross where surrender and salvation take place. And the ground is level ground there. All may come and receive God’s free gift of eternal life.

I did it again, I jumped to the New Testament when I’m supposed to be going in order through the Bible. Well, the Bible isn’t written in chronological order after all. And God is not constrained by our time/space continuum. He knows the end from the start, He is both the Alpha and the Omega at the same time. I believe He meant for us to make these connections to His son Jesus as He gave His word to Moses to write down.

Here’s my tree of life block. Thanks for taking one minute (according to WordPress stats) to share my thoughts and quilt blocks.