Churn Dash with a little Dutch Treat

Well, they can’t always be the best.  Sometimes you just have to say, “This is what it is,” and offer it up anyways.  I was very embarrassed by how this one turned out and really didn’t want to share it with you all.  I made this one for a charity and I didn’t even want to give it to them.  I didn’t want anyone to see how poorly I had done.  But if I only share the perfect with you, there won’t be much to give.  So, on with the show.

This quilt started out approximately 8 years ago.  I know, not much to show for 8 years.  Anyways, here’s a little background. I was part of a group of moms at my church called A.M.M.O. (All Moms Morning Out.) It was filled with great women.  We would have a guest speaker one meeting and a craft day the next.  I brought in a quilt to work on (no surprise.)  One of the women there approached me with a request.  She worked as some sort of caregiver in a hospital or nursing home, I really can’t remember, and she asked me to teach her and a couple of coworkers how to make quilts so that they could give them to the patients.  She already had it cleared and okayed by her boss to do so.  I said sure and we planned the date to work on it.  Well, Spokane, WA in the winter is cold and snowy and the day we were to meet a storm came through and nobody was going anywhere.  We tried to reschedule but nothing would work.  My time there was coming to an end as the Army was sending us to Louisiana.  I knew the classes were not going to be able to take place, but I didn’t want this woman to go back to work and tell her boss that she couldn’t fulfill what she set out to do.  So I made a quilt for her to take in.  I made it huge.  Then I remembered that the man I was making it for was in a hospital bed and just needed something to cover the top so I took out a few pieces and made it a more manageable size.  In doing so I had eight blocks left over.  They have been packed around with me ever since.

These are them.  I forgot until I started looking at them closely that I had to sew scraps of the blue together in order to make some of the triangles.  There was no hope of finding any more of that blue in my box of fabric to make one last block.

I dug through and pulled out fabrics that were the same blues found in the original fabric to see what I could come up with.

I was quite pleased with the assortment.  Some of these fabrics were given to me years ago by my friend, Susan.  Hi, Susan!

I decided to make an entirely different block for the center of the quilt.  I found a picture of a Dutch Treat block and knew it was the one.

It starts off with tulips and then gets put together to make this:

Ah, it turned out! Yay!

Next was simply putting them all together with some sashing.

I put another border around it, pinned all the layers together and headed to the machine to start quilting it together.  This is where it all went wrong.  Even though I tried my best, I just kept messing up and it was pulling and stretching out of shape.

It wasn’t the beautiful quilt I wanted to give.  I could see every error.  It was embarrassing.  I struggled with giving away something I knew to be flawed and what I considered to be of less quality.  Because who would really want that.

I gave it anyways.

Do you all know what an object lesson is?  I love them.  It’s a way of using normal everyday stuff to teach spiritual matters.  Physical situations have Spiritual correlations.  This quilt is one for me.

I have Jehovah’s Witnesses come to my house often.  I’m nice to them, I answer their questions and they leave.  This last time they left me with a pamphlet of like 15 different topics that I could choose from to discuss with them next time they came around.  I opened it up and was shocked! I had no idea what their beliefs were and it pained my heart to read that they don’t believe that Jesus is God.

Well, I got on the ball and started looking up scripture to go to battle with them.  I am not a debater so I started praying for guidance and what verses to use.

1 Peter 3:15 kept coming to mind.