If you’ve been reading my blog for long enough you might remember this Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt top. It’s a very long running work in progress, or WIP, which I think I last wrote of about 4 years ago.

Though I began making it in 1980, strictly speaking it isn’t true that I’ve been working on it for 40 years. It’s languished in storage for two long spells totalling about 12 years, but even so, it has been hanging around a while. In the stressful times of this pandemic, I’ve found hand stitching very rhythmic and calming – so in addition to the online workshops I’ve been taking, and several exhibition entries I’ve produced, I’ve also been covering and adding more cream hexagons to the border of the flower garden. I keep a little stack of cut papers and fabric hexagons, needles, thread and thimble just beside the phone to work on them sometimes while chatting in long phone calls with distant family or friends. Especially in this cream-hexies-border-building phase, it’s been easy to just pick up the top and add a few on to where I think I left off ‘last time’.

A couple of days ago I thought perhaps it was time to lay it out on the floor to see how many more hexagons I still need to cover and add, and where along the edge they’re needed. I really can’t remember making a specific decision to not add a couple more flowers on that chopped off corner, but the reason must have been that I had no more of that acid green. So anyway, that corner needs to be filled out to become square, and the corner diagonally opposite needs some attention too. Is this bothering me? Not at all. Ancient textiles often have some noticeable irregularity, and of course in the Muslim world every artisan craftsman deliberately puts in a few ‘mistakes’ in his finest silk carpet or hand carved furniture – because only Allah can produce a perfect creation.