Blue Blood

My sister went on a tour to the behind-the-scenes of Cougar sports on Friday. One of the team rooms had a large rock in it. Each BYU football player has a chisel decorated with their names on it laying in the rock dust all around it, and they used them to carve the Y at the top of the rock together.

I am so impressed with the way Bronco Mendenhall has turned the team around and brought pride and integrity back to the program. This rock and its chisels reminded me of my quilt group. We just completed our most recent block exchange at the Trunk Show last week. Those blocks are like those chisels to me. We couldn't have made that quilt without each other. Quilting is so much a group effort for me. I'm inspired by what others can do and design and create. I especially loved what Elder Uchtdorf said about creating at the LDS General Women's Meeting last week. I can't create world peace, but I can "bring into existence something that did not exist before—colorful gardens, harmonious homes, family memories, flowing laughter," or a new quilt top.

Also while typing really fast one day recently I missed the "l" in quilting. The word left was "quiting." So much of quilting is about not quitting, for me especially during the stage where you're just feeding pieces through the machine without knowing how great the final block will be. (It's at this point that I sometimes stop and finish one block, press it, and hang it close to my machine for inspiration.) There are a lot of things in life that can stop us, but being a quilter today reminds me that I'm not a quitter. Another reason I love quilting . . .