A quilt is often made up of remnant scraps stitched together and in that emerges a new object of beauty! It could not be more symbolic than this for me on the 20th day of July, 2018.
I have been feeling like a scrap, dragging myself to complete tasks that should have been wrapped up a month ago, frayed around the edges and not exactly fitting in. I have been pushing my needle- brained head into thinking of the months and the way forward and did not imagine that the day would have any beauty to show. I was wrong. I was so delightfully wrong that as I look back on the day it was joyous because of The Quilt.
We have an old, worn copy of The Quilt by Ann Jonas that was a part of my children’s collection. It sits on the shelf at Bookworm with other books on quilts and fabric art that make up the stitching shelf! It is one of my favourites, not only because it is about a quilt but it has that dimension of allowing you to escape into a fantasy world made possible by colour, texture and pattern of the quilted fabric. I had however forgotten all about the book.
Two of our young library educators, Velanky and Pranita come to talk to me about a session they will do. They shyly put The Quilt upon the table with a tentative suggestion that they would like to talk to me about reading it aloud in Chimbel- our Saturday MOP site. My heart raced on seeing the book. I looked at Pranita who knows my penchant for stitching and she understood my excitement. But that is not all, as they proceed to share how they are thinking about unfolding the book and opening the theme with the children I saw the thoughtfulness and care with which they have considered the book.
They have a clear objective and purpose and have understood the design of the session by being observers (Velanky, newer than Pranita) and together they have considered how they will begin, what pages will cause a pause and why and how they will allow the story to carry the readers forward. The joy! They noticed the calico end note paper that belongs on the quilt and the pause page where the narrative shifts from reality to fantasy.
When I imagined we were done with the book we began to look again at how each block is represented in the individual illustrations and how it matches up to the image of the quilt as a whole. Pranita pointed out to a path that is quilted into the illustration and that also moves the story forward. I had a rush of memory of a small finger tracing that path as I read The Quilt to my son almost fifteen years ago and I was struck anew.
This is what books do for us, they come alive in sharing and in memory and remind us of this thing called beauty that can be found even amongst scraps!