Today is “write the Thursday blog” day. I usually let whatever’s rattling around in my head lead me into the prose, and I try to bring an image along for the ride, too.
But today, as I sat down to start a post, I looked at the date and thought, “What??? How are we only two weeks from November?” My internal calendar is still wearing flip-flops and insisting it’s the middle of summer.
Meanwhile, the store displays are already overflowing with Christmas. WTF? Did Halloween and Thanksgiving quietly resign? Did I miss them while standing in the checkout line?
Somewhere between summer and Christmas, time seems to have slipped right past me. So I wrote a mantra—a little poem—for “Time.”
Writing about time brought to mind an art quilt I made several years ago. Let me show you—and tell you the story behind it.
In the early 2000s, I belonged to a quilt guild in the Washington, DC area. One year, the guild announced a challenge with the theme “Time Flies.”
Most of the entries featured clocks. But as a graphic designer, I thought of “Time” magazine.
So I created a quilt inspired by the magazine cover. I thought it was finished, and showed it to a few friends before the challenge. I wasn’t sure how friendly they were—their grins suggested they were enjoying this—but they said they liked it. Then they gleefully pointed out a problem: it was the wrong size. I was six inches short horizontally!
Six inches!
Not “a little off.” Not “close enough.” Six inches—the exact distance between “ready for judging” and “sorry, not eligible but please enjoy this quilt privately.”
WTF? (Of course, that means “What the fudge?”—at least now it does.)
I was so mad, I put on my quilted thinking cap. At that point, I had only the quilted Time magazine cover. I wrestled it into place, flattened the seams, and tried to figure out where I could add the missing six inches. By the time I got it situated, I was so focused on solving the problem that I’d nearly forgotten to be mad about it.
Then I had an idea: I made a second quilt—a six-inch-wide grandfather clock.
I put the two pieces together and renamed the project Time and Time Again! With a third triangle quilt overlapping the others.
It turned out that being six inches short wasn’t a mistake. It was a design feature. Or at least, that’s what I told everyone after I’d solved the problem.
Sometimes a project has other plans for you. And sometimes, when time flies, it comes back around—usually six inches to the left.
One extra tidbit: it won the challenge! LOL
Comments