a tisket a tasket

I'm getting very side-tracked with my grandomther's basket quilt.
I worked on it for most of Monday, our first day home after Mexico trip.

I thought of mending each square before working on it.
nah

I questioned why I felt that I needed to do anything with it.
I tried to do something with it back in 2007 and ended up making a paper quilt.
Folded the real one up for twelve more years.

The thing is, it's quite badly made.

Machine stitching is mixed with hand stitching - and this is for both applique and the quilting.
It's as if my grandmother, my mother's mother, didn't know what she was doing.
She was just going for it

 I think she stopped working on it because she didn't know how to proceed.

I've been told that I am a lot like her...and handling these patches makes me feel her more closely.
She's right here.
She doesn't mind that I decided to cut her work up.
She's glad that I am working with it.
She was an amazing gardener.  and painter.

This always happens to me when I come home from a trip.
I'm faced with a house FULL of artifacts of our long life together,
and I start to put everything in order.

By making new things out of them!  It's so foolish. 

What I need to do is turn my back on it all and get back to me.
pure me....moving forward.

But instead I wallow in my - our- past.
My grandmother's quilt is just a passing phase.  I will get over it.
But for now, it is what I'm working on.

I'm thinking of treating the patched and mended piece like a Japanese boro
densely stitched with big threads.
Lord, save me from myself.

The physical act of making is a way of clearing the mind from demands of the outside world.  Somewhere between the heart and the mind is a state of concentration out of which ideas and insights emerge. 
Mary Jane Jacobs