(or ... many hands make right work)
Yesterday while enjoying tea break with the Fifty Quilt Club ... which, by the way, is one of the best parts of my week when I am able to be there ... they have the best cookies and squares, and also the most interesting conversations ... one week we explored the idea of the likelihood of life elsewhere in the cosmos and wondered if the beings "out there" would have the same saviour as us ... or even need of a saviour ... or have the same Bible or even the same God ...and how our grade on God's report card of experiments in the cosmos might compare to theirs ... another week we shared thoughts about a new family trend some of the quilters had heard about ... shared parenting by two close friends who are not a couple and do not intend ever to live together as a couple, but who commit to being parents together of children ... sounded to me kind of like best-friend divorced couples who happily share custody of the children but without all that business of marriage, separation and divorce to get there ...
Anyway, yesterday over tea I learned about pot-luck quilts.
In another local quilt club every member starts a quilt, doing just a centre panel. Then that centrepiece is given to another quilter, who over two months adds her own work around the centrepiece, of whatever material and design she sees fit, enlarging it that much. Then it is passed to another quilter, who over two months adds her own work to that, of whatever material and design she sees fit, enlarging it that much more again. And so it goes over the course of a year, from quilter to quilter, each one enlarging the original centrepiece by adding to it an expanding border of whatever materials and designs each one sees fit to add for the two months it is in their hands. Until at the end of a year, the quilt returns to the original quilter -- hers now to keep and enjoy for what it has become.
When I was a child, my father designed buses and I thoroughly admired and was in awe of what he did. Over a lifetime of work at Motor Coach Industries, he worked his way up from shop floor to design room, and with his lifetime of knowledge of what works and doesn't work in building a bus, whenever a new design was needed for a new customer with new requirements, he was the one who drew up the blueprints and made the templates for every single part in the new bus's shell. And it was then everyone else's job in the factory to follow and implement his design as it was given to them.
I know there is a place for building buses. I know there is also a place for pot-luck quilting.
And I guess the trick is to know ... when you're working at anything, whether it be marriage and family and household, community, church, country, a life ... the trick is to know whether you're better at that point to be building a bus, or making a pot-luck quilt.
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