finding the right pattern

I love fabric. I especially love fabric that is old and has a story.  And every good story has to have the right pattern for support.

I knew last summer that I wanted to make a quilt using old sheets from my childhood (mostly my parents' king size sheets and some of my own twin sheets) when I visited my mother. She could not understand why I wanted worn and tattered sheets that have sat stacked in a tall pile at the back of her hallway cupboard for over twenty years.  I knew why.  The colors, the patterns, the feel of the cotton through my fingertips, and the smell, ah, the smell, tell a story and I want to write it.

The story of this quilt is an old one.  It is about big ideas--loving and forgiving, living and dying, digging and growing, birthing and fledging, dreaming and resting--as much as it is about simple ideas--the beauty of blues and greens, the peace of sea and sky, the comfort of a parent's embrace.

I finally discovered in Cassandra Ellis' Quilt Love the right pattern: a celebration of a life well-lived. It is a pattern that has a path that runs from top to bottom and connects with many important stops along the way.  While this quilt is a memory quilt in honor of my mother, I am aware that the story it holds is one about the continuity between a mother and a child.  How one path leads to another, how one life gives life to another, and how one death brings about change.

Today I completed the first of eight panels.