I went to Texas last month to visit my God daughter. She took us around to see all of the wonderful sites, fabric stores, and, of course, lots of wonderful restaurants. My favorite place for barbeque was a place called Clayton’s Barbeque. This amused me because I live in Clayton.
Clayton’s BBQ is a building made of corrugated sheet metal and it has old rusty tools, antlers and such on the walls. In the middle of one wall hangs an old, old quilt. This quilt is maybe as wide as a single bed, but way, way longer. The blocks are random colours, random sizes. I could see no rhyme or reason for the piecing. There are about 20 black and white nine patches going down the side about two feet from one side, but they don’t go right to the bottom. Why did the quilter stop there? There are some larger white and blue nine patches off to the other side, some churn dash blocks, some blocks that are uneven stripes, and then some just random blocks that I don’t recognize. After a while the quilter just started adding different sized bits of fabric to make it bigger. Wow it was ugly.
We went there several times. Each time the quilt caught me attention. I couldn’t stop staring at it. Why was it this odd size? Did it fit on a couch? Was it made for the world’s longest single bed? Why these colours? Why that crazy row of nine patches? I puzzled and puzzed till my puzzler was sore. Then something started to happen. The quilt started to amuse me. It became a thing of wonder. The quilter had something in mind and I’m sure it was created as a thing of beauty as well as warmth, and I was starting to, somehow, understand it. The more I started at it, the more I loved it. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and I wish I could show it to you. Perhaps I'll make one for myself.
Happy Quilting.
Dianne
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