Back in 2011, when Scrabble was just a puppy, and our hearts melted every time my husband Mark and I looked at her, I gifted her with a Log Cabin quilt I made in 1980—a small wall quilt, hand quilted!
Currently, having recently finished my novel My Life with Shelley after many years of dedicated, daily writing (sorry, folks, you will hear about this, often), I find myself looking for metaphors. Scrabble's quilt is just such a one.
When I made that wall quilt, I was just learning to hand quilt. (Machine quilting in those days was a subject one didn't discuss.) My rookie stitches were crooked and large.
Luckily, I had the opportunity to observe a master quilter—Chris Wolf Edmonds—ply her needle at a meeting of the Iowa Quilters Guild (in Mason City, I think). Seeing Chris rock the needle taught me how to rock my own, and within a few days I had the knack. A person can track my apprenticeship from one corner of that small quilt diagonally to the opposite side. By the time I finished, I had about eleven stitches to the inch.
These days, as I bask in the euphoria of novel-completion, I think to myself, "I learned to write fiction by writing My Life with Shelley" just as I learned to quilt by completing Scrabble's Log Cabin. Giving that little quilt away was easy because, really, I no longer needed it. The quilt was the vehicle of my education, the quilt itself, not important.
I taught Scrabble to fetch her quilt by bribing her with bits of sandwich ham. I'm having bit of difficulty linking you to the video posted many moons ago of Scrabble fetching said quilt. If you copy the url below and paste it in a browser window, you'll be there!
https://www.facebook.com/MarianneFonsFanPage/videos/452325074869051/
Today's Fortune Cookie Fortune:
You will feel a sense of accomplishment.