EPP: A Shared Gift

Because I am a complete quilt dork, loving nearly all things quilting, I love looking at my very first completed English Paper Piecing (EPP) block.  I love how I can use the fabric to make a secondary design.  I love how I can sit and watch Downton Abbey or a movie or talk to my husband, and at the end I have another something to show for the time. I love how I learned it from Krista, and how she shared with me how to put it together, and how I went to other blogs and quilters and friends, enjoying the fruits of sharing from this community of quilters.

I suppose my enjoyment is kind of all stitched together with the trip to the surgeon’s office today, and when he said, “Have a nice life.  You’re all done,” I thanked him, hopped off the table, got dressed and zipped out the door, with only a bandaid (instead of a bulky gauzy dressing) on the healing wound site.  I called my husband to tell him the news as I sat in the parking lot.  I know I’m an easy-to-cry person so I wasn’t too surprised by the tears that followed, streaming down my face as I sat there in the warm sunshine, thinking about my little journey of the last two-plus months, and getting that advice from the doctor.

So, I pass it on to you.  Have a nice life.  Finger some cloth.  Sit in the warm sunshine for a few minutes.  Enjoy those skills that you are developing, or have developed, in making something of yourself to leave behind if the have-a-nice-life line doesn’t materialize at the surgeon’s office, and you realize, like Sir Launfal, that all we ever have in this life is what we share.  So, just today, I share my first EPP block with you on this very normal, this very poignant day.

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Lines from James Russell Lowell’s poem: “The Vision of Sir Launfal:”

Not that which we give, but what we share,–
For the gift without the giver is bare;
Who bestows himself with his alms feeds three,–
Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me.