Penance

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The Red Quilt with borders….that still need ripping out. April, 2009.

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Himself: Went to work, the fink. Went to yearly board meeting and was voted off board by 5 votes. He’s happy with it. Herself: Missing Harriette Schapiro, my constantly talking, needy, quilting guru. I think the one new board member did a door to door campaign to say that G was responsible for the assessment. Then again, he didn’t do a thing to get about putting himself in the public eye. I am upset that G was voted off the board, but if he is happy….. Reading: Starting something new. Jim Butcher’s Turn Coat. This takes place in a very convoluted alternative universe. I really need a score card to read it. Balance: The colors of the world on these hot, scorching days.

I sewed pieces of fabric to other pieces of fabric. Often I took these two pieces apart and did it again. And again.

The fabrics and the sewing machine did better before lunch. The tension was still off, but I didn’t have to take everything apart and do it again and again. After lunch, the machine scalloped the thread into lacy patterns on the bottom with contrasting straight lines on the top. Just to magnify these details, almost every seam I sewed wandered along its own road not mine.

Perhaps my joy in the colors and fabrics of quilting is offset by my feelings of doing penance as I tear one more seam out and endlessly pick threads off one more surface. It’s as if my past has caught up with me, and my endless corrections and continual seam rippings are a penance for my passionate wanton ways in the past.

No mad passion here. I’m forced to sit and pick at seams with my glasses perched on the end of my nose and my eyes peering over them to see what I’m doing. Slowly. Patiently. Nose to the fabric. Outwardly calmly, I pull threads out in slowly warming, darkened rooms. I’ve shut the windows, and pulled the shutters closed as the outside temperature climbs into the hundreds. I stick to this slow, boring, seam ripping until my self imposed quitting time, then I run downstairs for a icy Diet Coke and collapse into my new book.

In the North County, G reported that it was a very hot at 102, and in Mission Valley the temperature had inched its way to 101 by mid afternoon. Here at the beach, it was 91 in the driveway as I perched over my quilt pulling out seams. Even now is warm at 67 before dawn as I head for the pool.

Today I’m doggedly and very carefully taking out three more seams, making the corner pieces, and sewing on the dragon teeth. If I go so slowly you can barely see me move, maybe I can get these four strips done and sewn on….once.