Seams

Nine days before the pandemic began, I married my best friend. We cherish our time together and spend hours having coffee and coming up with creative ideas for book titles, museum themes, and writing lyrics for his band. When I met his family, I finally understood why he is such a creative and energetic person all the time -- all his family is!

One Christmas at his grandmother’s house, I met his cousin Andrea, who was visiting from the other side of Texas. I had heard that Andrea was a very crafty person and spent much of her time in her room designing wedding dresses. I told her I had always felt inspired by the designer Vera Wang and that I owned a small sewing machine but had never used it. She invited me to join her at her grandmother’s house the next day. She told me she would teach me how to use my sewing machine while she caught up with her work on her machine. She asked me to think of a project I would like to work on and bring whichever materials I thought I could use the next day.

The next morning when I arrived, Andrea had sorted out many different colors and types of silks on the table, big scissors, rotary cutters, rulers, boards, chalks, and threads. I was fascinated at how colorful the table looked! I told Andrea I had brought my favorite Queen (the band) shirts to make a small quilt for my husband’s birthday. We were both very excited to create a gift that brought two sides of his family together. She instructed me to cut the shirts in half in order to have multiple fronts and backs. It was a very emotional feeling cutting through my favorite shirts but I knew it would be worth it once they were put into a quilt forever.

Cutting through the silks with the big, orange scissors was very easy and smooth and perfecting the lines with the rotary cutter felt satisfying. Once I had all shirts in halves, fronts and backs, I was ready to sew them side by side. It was my first time pressing on the pedal. I learned that if I pushed too hard, the thread pulled faster, so I had to find the right pressure to make it work. Managing to make straight lines was difficult at first, but Andrea guided me until I got the hang of it. Soon I was making beautiful seams, connecting the shirts that held so many great memories together.

I glanced over at Andrea who was working on the sleeves of a dress, and felt joy thinking that this activity was binding us like the seams of our projects! She then helped me set the quilt cotton between the two big pieces of silk I had created with the fronts and backs of the shirts. We marked lines along the edges of the silk and pinned them down. The last step was to finally sew all the edges of the quilt together. I could not believe what we had done in only a matter of hours! The Queen quilt was amazing and I knew my husband would love to see all our memories put together into a warm blanket. I thanked Andrea for teaching me how to use the sewing machine that had been sitting in my garage for years. I had made something precious with it!

Over the next year, I worked on sewing small canvas bags and giving them out to family members. When Andrea visited the next Christmas, she had a present for me and I had one for her, too. She gave me a big bundle with all the materials and equipment that she used in her craft room. All the scissors, boards, cutters, chalks and scraps of silks were carefully put together inside a big box for me. I couldn’t wait to get home and work on my next project! When I handed her the homemade canvas bag I had made especially for her, she teared up and hugged me tight. It was a truly heart-warming moment.

I am forever thankful that Andrea ignited my new passion in crafts, and I hope to inspire someone the way she did one day. If I have the opportunity to win the challenge, my next big project would be to get together with Andrea this upcoming winter and sew socks, mittens, sweaters and blankets and donate them to charity. It is a lifetime dream of mine to be able to help my community and do so through a passion of mine.