Reflections on the Sixth Week of Fall - The Don’t Wait Quilt

Log Cabin Block

Last New Year’s Eve, the third anniversary of my mom’s death, I collapsed into an old Adirondack chair and reviewed scribbled notes for possible 2019 resolutions. Orange flames licked logs in the wood stove. Warmth wafted across the room, and Mom’s voice resounded in my head. If you have something you want to do, do it now.

I pictured Mom in her wheelchair. On my last visit, her hands shook preventing her from knitting the sweater she’d wanted to make for my brother.

Don’t wait.

Crumpling the notes, I tossed them into the fire starter box. Mom had a point.

After four eye surgeries and with aging eyesight, threading the sewing machine needle took at least a dozen jabs. Arthritis cramped my hands more each year. And occasional arthritis flare-ups—which stiffened my achy shoulders, applied vice-like pressure to my lymph nodes, and sent searing tingles down my arm to my fingertips—prevented sewing altogether.

On July 29, 2008, during one of Mom’s Wells Wood visits, none of these ailments plagued me. 

She and I shopped for a log cabin quilt, a quilt made from traditional log cabin blocks—pieced fabric with center squares surrounded by rectangles. I drove her over bumpy back roads to Homespun Treasures Quilt Shop, a red building that looked like a cross between a cottage and a barn. We walked past tempting bolts of material to the back room where Gail, the owner, unfolded one quilt after another until she found her log cabin quilt. 

I gasped. Perfect sewing, lovely design, but the light tan colors would look bland against the bedroom’s log walls. “Do you have one like that in brighter colors?”

Gail frowned and folded the quilt. “Sorry. That’s the only log cabin I have right now.”

“You could make one, JanJan.” Mom patted my shoulder. “Do you sell patterns, Gail?”

I left the shop with Judy Martin’s Log Cabin Quilt Book and a dream. I would sew a log cabin quilt for the bedroom in my log house. I studied patterns and designed a quilt with sixty-four log cabin blocks, eight log house blocks, and eight evergreen tree blocks. By angling the dark and light sides of each block, I could create diamonds radiating from the center.

Quilt Drawings

After making yardage calculations, I bought lengths of more than twenty different fabrics from Gail’s shop, cut the fabric into rectangles, and sewed—when other projects didn’t distract me. 

On New Year’s Eve 2018, I needed thirty-six more blocks for the quilt and six more blocks for coordinating curtains. Those plus quilting and binding would take a dozen more years of work at my current pace.

The wood stove clanked interrupting my musings. 

Arching my back to relieve the tension in my shoulders, I reached for a clean sheet of paper and wrote one resolution. Finish the log cabin quilt. 

If I attached rectangles in assembly line fashion instead of creating one block at a time, and if I only sewed the log cabin quilt, I might finish in a year.

Wind blew snow off outside branches, but the wood stove kept my sewing loft toasty in January. Every day, I climbed the spiral stairs, set the timer for forty-five minutes so I didn’t aggravate my arthritis by bending over the sewing machine too long, and, zingzingzing, attached fabric logs. 

The blocks grew log by log until I’d attached thirteen of the seventeen pieces by February 3.

That Sunday afternoon sunshine sparkled off our snow covered gardens. My son Charlie walked in the front door, pulled off his UPS cap, and grinned as bright as the garden sparkles. “I know you won’t have time before my birthday,” he flung his cap onto the kitchen table, “but I’d like three wall hangings like you made.” He pointed to the blank wall at the end of the hall. “You know—like the trees and the star you hung there.” He meant the Lover’s Lane attic window I’d sewed and a Christmas star hanging I’d received in a gift exchange. 

My cheeks warmed from blushing because he wanted my sewing for his apartment. But . . .

He never asks for anything—not even when you pester him about gift suggestions.

I made a resolution.

People break resolutions. 

Three hangings could take me the rest of the year.

Isn’t Charlie worth more than a resolution?

I couldn’t argue with that. 

Boosted by motherly pride and the balmy twenty-degree above normal February weather, I bounced over country roads to three different quilt stores to find a woods scene panel. Before I started Charlie’s project, however, I, zingzingzing, attached the last one hundred four rectangles. With the log cabin blocks done, I squinted, poked a darker thread at the tiny hole in the machine needle more than a dozen times, and sewed. On March 26, a month after his birthday, I completed his wood scene wall hanging.

Putting Charlie’s other two wall hangings on a someday list, I rethreaded the sewing machine without swearing, and pulled out my drawing for log house blocks. If I didn’t distract myself with another project, I could still finish this year and make Mom proud.

End of Part 1

 

Charlie's Attic Window