Do Unto Others

On this dark stormy day in West Michigan I get to share with you the fate of my Rainy Days & Mondays quilt top.

You may remember earlier this year when Sassy Packs featured my tutorial on making a 9-patch quilt. I made the topper and wrote the piece in the throes of my “sick pregnant lady” stage, so once the top was done it got put into a sewing drawer, to be quilted when I was well again.

But I changed my mind about that topper a few weeks ago.

Margaret’s Hope Chest was was doing a quilt drive. In just four short years of existence they had already given away 1,000 quilts to people in unfortunate circumstances. Now they were collecting both finished quilt tops and quilts in an effort to keep that steam engine rolling and bringing hope to even more people.

So I gave them my Rainy Days top.

And Carin breathed new life into it. I had no further idea for how to quilt it or bind it or back it, but Carin did. And it looks beautiful.

Check it out!

Now I’m a little obsessed with wanting to do it again. With wanting to make some crazy quilt top and then to give it to MHC to finish. It’s a win-win for everyone. They get to spread love and hope with another quilt, and I get to do my Art.

If you have any toppers laying around that you have lost motivation to finish, send them to MHC. They’ll take good care of them!

Like my Mom and Granny, I like to find little meanings in things that I do. One of my first Rainbow Around the Blocks was a T square in orange and white, for the University of Tennessee Volunteers.

This time I did two “tributes”:

• a “Brad Paisley” pinwheel block (I’m naming it this because it has paisley fabric) in honor of all the Country Music establishments that were affected by the Nashville floods in May.

• a block with some Civil War reproduction fabrics, as Tennessee was a hot spot in that painful American event. And a sunflower. Because I can just imagine them bringing their sunshine to open fields down there.

What will I think of next?

Hmm….perhaps something Appalachain-esque. No ideas on how to do THAT one, though!

I have friends in family in Tennessee and when the Nashville area was devastated by monster flooding in May my heart was deeply saddened. I was mostly saddened by the minuscule attention that Nashville got compared to the earthquake in Haiti or Hurricane Katrina.  Nashville is a bastion for American music. It is one of the hearts of the Civil War and its history. It is a huge city that employs thousands. So why was there such little response when the entire downtown was incredibly flooded? Or when people’s homes flooded who did not have flood insurance?

Mysteries, indeed.

I was raised to be a charitable person. We were so poor growing up that we were fed from free lunches at school and food stamps at home. Getting new school clothes was a glorious treat that didn’t happen every year, and when it did we’d only get one, maybe two outfits, as I recall.

Yet no matter how poor we were, there were others who had need more than us. And my mom and dad never questioned helping them. One time my Mom dropped on someone’s porch a portion of a pig we had slaughtered. Another time my Dad put his last $20 in my Aunt Julia’s mailbox as we left her home, because he knew she was hardpressed and wouldn’t take the money if he handed it to her. I remember them giving an old car to another family. They didn’t strut around about these things. In fact, I didn’t know they had even done these things until years later when they came up in conversations.

Now I find myself as a “poor” person, too. I lost my job and am at the mercy of the unemployment agency’s paychecks. My husband has a new job but is starting at the bottom of the ladder at his new company. And our student loans are still madly in love with us.

So when I read about Anna Maria Horner’s Rainbow Around the Block charity for victims of the Tennessee floods I was thrilled. Now I can still be generous, even if I don’t have dollars to give.

I hope to have time to make more (take some long naps Olivia!), but here are my first two blocks that I’m sending. Lately I’ve been wanting to try a churn dash. And the T block? Well, I simply couldn’t resist. Go Volunteers!

So even if you’re poor like me, I encourage you to find ways to still give to those in need. It helps you to feel a little richer.