Dorothy's quilt Part One

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27 January 2018; two patches already applied by machine. Yet the interior remains untouched, albeit compromised.

Amid reading aloud Straight to the Heart: The Hawk Book Three, I did a little photographic research to discuss my latest quilt finish. To my surprise, I found I've had this quilt, pictured above in January of 2018, since the previous summer. That's eight years, my goodness! Where has the time gone?

The quilt was already in need of repair when I received it. Yet to cloak the gorgeous stitching took time for me to admit. (Future Me was probably rolling her eyes, fully aware of what awaited this quilt, lol!)

Yet this post isn't about time's fickleness, lol. It's about a beautiful English paper-pieced quilt made by a woman named Dorothy, her last name starting with S, inked on the back of the quilt in two places. She deserved such recognition because this diamond star pattern is GORGEOUS. Well, it was gorgeous. Now it remains as one snippet of what has become a Kawandi-inspired cozy by yours truly.

Because of that Kawandi element, I've decided to wax lyrically in two posts about one quilt that came into my possession rather by accident, or what appeared at the time innocuously. But does anything in our lives truly happen by random accident? I don't think so, hence my need to blather about this quilt in my usual rambling style. Because...this quilt could very well have been a huge inspiration into my journey of English paper piecing, which I didn't take up until 2018. Did staring at it make me think, "Hey, I could do this!" I will say in staring at it, I found how fragile it was, especially after I began to love on it hard, and wash it with impunity.

Less than two weeks later, on 9 February 2018 the patching process had begun. 

Washing it began to unravel fibres whose origin I do not know. Washing it produced a need to patch said fibres, which began in January of 2018. I didn't know squat about Kawandi sewing back then, hadn't even began to dabble in EPP. All I knew was this amazing quilt required treatment. And so started a journey that ended late yesterday morning.

Some of these patches are preserved in the quilt, but I couldn't save all of them.

I snuggled under it last night, a beautiful, slightly hefty lap quilt that I am quite attached to, but certainly willing to pass on to whoever might see it and adore it equally. Dorothy's quilt landed in a Wisconsin thrift shop where my sister-in-law found it, so no cozy is safe from being re-homed. Yet that's part of the beauty, how something so precious can be claimed, admired, then turned into something else. I adopted Dorothy's stunning creation, loved it thoroughly, then changed it into a different quilt. What a gift, in my mind, that something so delicately hand-crafted has been re-crafted into whatever this quilt is next to become.

Photographed about forty minutes ago, here is my second Kawandi-inspired quilt. Needless to say, I LOVE IT!

More about my beloved Kawandi-style in the next post. Thanks for listening to my rambles. And thanks to Dorothy, on whatever plane she exists, for stitching such a gem.

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