A Week of Two Cloths

Several years ago, I borrowed a pattern called African Huts and created a baby quilt for the shop that showcased a funny fabric of Kaffe's called "Pencils." I called it "Pencilville" and was so excited when it made its way into Quilt Magazine.

Not sure where the hypen came from...or the young boy, who I am sure would really be turning those crayons into aliens and mobilizing them into an attack on the wall. (Ok, blatant stereotype but,hey,I had only girl children and their little boy pals always seemed to be animating inanimate objects with superpowers and launching them against various surfaces...like my face.)

This week, I made a new Pencilville because so many of the original fabrics have been discontinued. My design wall blossomed with brightness and simplicity as Pencilville, Too came to life.

But handling those confetti pinks and daffodil yellows really strained my heart. Its enough to say that the Big Black Dog of maternal doom and gloom is once again trying to climb into my lap. I am having to make adjustments to what it means to be the mother of my forever wayward Thing Two. My struggles feel anything but simple or bright.

They feel like this:

This is my Sad Cloth, which I started several years ago when my discovery of Spirit Cloth coincided with Thing Two thudding into the darkness.

 The quote is an excerpt from a poem called "Kindness" by Naomi Shahib Nye:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth. 

I am not in the red heat that dominates this cloth, but more in its shades of umber.

I am going to work on Sad Cloth for awhile. I used to feel frantic in the face of sadness. But cloth (and some extra years, I presume) steadies me, makes me able to just sit with the Black Dog until he goes back into his house. This week, then, is about two cloths. One for babies, who need something to clutch when the world of Becoming becomes just too much...and another for moms.

Who feel the same.