—Written for a friend and her gorgeous, no-waste quilt—
The scraps were discarded from a local retailer. “We have no use for these.” So you took them home.
They were messy, uncoordinated. The different colors, shapes and sizes stood in opposition to the neat rolls of fabric stacked thirty high on your shelf, but the unused pieces took a front seat to all the rest. They had been cut into, disfigured. They deserved to be used.
Your own life felt like those scraps. Messy, disfigured. Days spent indoors, at a desk, poring over spreadsheets. Far from family. Negative energy built up, as it must, with each piece of distress – more and more work, less and less personal connection. Family pain.
The scraps by your side crackled with positive energy, waiting to swap. So you did.
You picked up one piece, a teal, slanted strip that had been cut from the shoulder, or maybe neckline, of some poorly made shirt, and set it on the table. “What would go well with this?” you thought, and your eyes locked in on a rust colored triangle poking up through the pile. “You,” you say, as though speaking to a friend.
The arrangement between you and the pile continues that way for weeks. In exchange for your negative energy, which it absorbs, bit by bit, as you cast it aside, the discarded scraps are given a purpose. They rewrite their story. “We have no use for these.”
And then one day you get a word from a friend. Some wool isn’t being used. Some wool is being thrown away.
“I could use that,” you say, thinking not only of the growing patchwork of fabric lying across your bed but of the negative energy that has continued to build. The last few weeks have been bad, and the wool, heavy in your hands, is just thick enough to absorb the sparks that leap from you throughout the day.
The wool sits warmly in your apartment. It’s less needy than the fabric, its purpose simple: Let me warm you. You need warmth, more so than ever, and one day it hits you. “I will make a quilt,” you say, your apartment nodding in agreement.
Now both fabric and wool have an identity. They know what they are going to be, the value they are going to provide. And so everything feels different. The messy swatches of cloth you have sewn together stand tall and straight, in clear, crisp patterns. The work feels intentional, although you can’t remember planning a single thing. This is your energy speaking on the quilted canvas, the good and the bad, the positive and the negative.
And you love it. When you tie off the final stitch, you sit there in awe of your creation. “I did this.” There’s nothing more to say. The enormity of the object speaks for itself. The beauty of the patterns.
But you realize very quickly that you misunderstood the purpose of the fabric, and of the wool. They were not discarded to become a quilt. They were discarded to comfort you.
