I ALWAYS believe the best asset a woman can have is a pair of hands. So one Saturday from 9.30am to 4pm, armed with a sewing machine and materials, I began a serious affair with patchwork and quilting, drinking hot creamy vegetable soup and eating salmon and cheese sandwiches in-between at Winander House on Park Road, Limerick -- a quilter's haven.
Patchwork has evolved into an art from the time my mother pieced together remnants of cloth to create security blankets. This time round, I had to purchase cotton material and coordinate the colours and cut them into angular shapes and sizes. It sounds ridiculous to purposefully cut a good-sized piece of cloth into smaller bits and then sew them back together again. But therein lies the mystery of many lessons learnt.
To begin with, I had to coordinate the prints and colours of the cloth to reflect the theme I had in mind. This reminded me of the friends I had made during my sojourn across the globe who are as different as night and day. There are those who swear by eating potatoes and others who will not survive a day without rice. Then there are the sago eaters and those who chomp churros.
Greetings also differ. There are some who shake hands, some who hug and some who prefer to kiss the cheek. A motley crew indeed but every single one of these friends added to my wealth of knowledge and understanding.
Then I took the stance of the master cutter, cutting the shapes and sizes of cloth that I needed. The image it conjured was of the gardener pruning his rose bushes, usually in winter, so that the roots would grow deeper and new shoots would sprout in spring. The pruned rose bush is nothing attractive to behold and if plants could talk, probably the sharp pruning shears hurt. Like plants, we are often pruned by our experiences so we can develop into better beings.
The cut pieces of cloth, on the other hand, are like pieces of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope. Each piece of glass is beautiful in itself but when combined with other pieces of glass they form unique patterns, each one different from the other.
Surely, we all, too, have our pieces of glass that cut and make us bleed. Classic quotes concerning the lessons learnt from experiences abound: experiences mould character, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, every cloud has a silver lining. The list goes on. Yet when we are caught in a bad moment, character moulding is the last thing on our mind.
Most times we think that our bad moments are the worst in the world until we hear of the predicament of another in a poorer state. There is this interesting exercise usually held at group therapy sessions where everyone is asked to pen his problem on a piece of paper and drop it into a bin in the middle of the room. At the end of the session, each person is given the choice to pick "another problem" from the bin to take it home or take his own problem home. The outcome is always similar: no one wants to take another person's problem home, for fear that it could be worse.
The next step in making a patchwork quilt is to sew the pieces together. Again this mirrors life's actions. If anyone has gone through surgery, he can agree with me that when the anaesthetic wears off, the pain is excruciating. Stitching is part of the healing process and the scars that remain stand to remind us of the experience. People say we should forgive and forget but being human, scars do remain and we may not forget but if the sting is no longer attached to the memory, then the healing has begun.
The final process is to put the batting under the completed patchwork to form a quilt. The batting gives it body and keeps someone warm while he watches his favourite television programme during wintry days. As the Christmas quilt now proudly drapes the back of the three-seater in the living room, I cannot but admire the big picture. Truth be told, I had my doubts whether certain strong colours would blend with the pastels, but I was proven wrong. The overall effect was spectacular.
Have a blessed Christmas.
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