The Journey of a Fractured Star – the feature quilt at this year’s New Hamburg Mennonite Relief Sale – was pieced and designed by someone who wants to remain anonymous, but I had the pleasure of talking with her on the phone. This is what she shared with me:
“I had made a star-patterned quilt [based on a pattern by Judy Martin] and it was very well received … I didn’t manage to keep it for long [it was sold]. Initially, my idea was to do this second quilt with the scraps of the first, and I thought everything had been planned out and I’d have enough fabric. But when I was three-quarters of the way through piecing it together, I realized [I] did not have enough fabric! And there was not a single bit of matching fabric I could find anywhere; I had to revert to using a different fabric with the same tones.”
She then ran into another problem: the seamlines did not line up symmetrically in the centre of the quilt.
“I had it laid out on my kitchen table, [and then] on my dining room floor; I had calculators out, I was doing the math, trying to figure out how to make the centre line up. When you look at it closely, there are a couple glitches in it where the seamlines of the wave either … [have] a sharper turn, or [are] not symmetrical with the one beside it.”
After much struggle and frustration and even contemplating throwing the whole thing out, a different perspective began to take shape, piece by piece.
"I have to admit, at one point it was in the garbage can."
“I spend a lot of time with people who are going through a difficult time in their life. Sometimes, when we are in the darkest times, everything is so fractured and the bits and pieces are lying around—everything is such a tragedy. If you look at this star and think this was just a fractured set of pieces and strips pulled apart, remnant fabric, and, I have to admit, [at one point] it was in the garbage can—I thought it was a hopeless case. But I’ve never thrown out an unfinished work before. So, I took another look at it and laid it out and I knew it couldn’t be that bad.
“In the end, when I was ready to not only accept that it wasn’t perfect, when I was ready to embrace the fact that I was just going to make what I can out of it, and we’re going to create it to be beautiful, though it’s not the way a pattern would ever be written, it took on a deeper meaning and it’s much more gratifying the way it came together.
“My hope is that this quilt will inspire someone through a difficult time, thinking ‘maybe God is working within my life right now when it looks like the pieces are laying around, I’ve messed things up so bad, I don’t know what my future holds.’ And to remember that the Master Designer sometimes has a vision we can’t imagine. It might be years later when we look back and we see the work He has done in our lives which has allowed [our lives] to mature and grow into something beautiful.”