Recently, when commiserating with an online friend about the terrors of unsewing a project she mentioned that she spent way too much time with “Jack”. On the other hand, I don’t spend nearly enough time with him.
I’m not a big fan of unsewing and resewing. Unless it’s horribly obvious, or I’m making something for someone else I consider most goofs a learning experience. I’m currently working on a quilt project with my quilting group, a friendship quilt using a modified leaf pattern. We are all making several leaf blocks and signing them.
Once they’re all finished (some of us are a little slow, and it’s not me this time!) we’ll exchange them and each of us will have a leaf quilt representing each member of our guild.
When I sewed my blocks, I was in a hurry, thinking the deadline was fast approaching. Though I tried to be careful, I wasn’t. The resulting blocks looked nothing like the pictured leaf. See?
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Because these blocks will be given to other quilters they were taken apart and resewn in the proper order. Although, I left a couple “wrong.” One of the ladies in our group wanted my block to be the ‘mistake’ block to include in her quilt. She said it’d be a different block, and when asked about the different block, she could say, “That’s Nita’s block, she does things her way.” Not a bad way to be introduced, as an individual who does things my way. 🙂
A couple of the ‘wrong’ blocks will also go into my quilt as “crumpled leaves.”
We all have a few crumpled leaves in our quilts of life, but that’s good. It makes our life unique, special, one-of-a-kind, just the way God intended. We learn from our crumpled days and use the experience, or education for the days that follow.
Some days though, we wish we could ‘unsew’ a day and start it over. Terry Lynne Underwood, blogged about those re-sewn or do-over days. Check it out, it may make you feel better about your “re-sew” days.
How about you? Do you spend much time with ‘Jack?’ When do you wish you could rip a day apart and start it over?
Nita Beshear - A Patchwork Life 
Nita, I love this. Crumpled leaves…yes, I have quite a few in the quilt of my life. I want to throw them out or at least rip out the seams and resew them, but God seems to use them as character marks and growing experiences. Thank you for this post–we’re a quilt-loving family (and I’ve done a little quilting myself) so this really resonated with me.
Thanks so much!
Hi Nita: I love this autograph leaf block you are showing on your blog about sewing and unsewing. I think it’s perfect for a quilt our guild wants to do for a long-time member who is leaving us this year. May I use it in our guild quilt? Thanks for all you do. Kathie
I LOVE the idea of being able to unstitch some of my days!