Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Prayer-wrong number: a journal quilt

The memorable incident this week to record with a journal quilt, took place on Sunday at the Memorial Church at Harvard. During the closing prayer of the service, my cellphone went off. Joe and I had rushed out of the house to get to Cambridge for the 11 AM Palm Sunday service. He had grabbed my cell phone and handed it to me since I can forget to pocket it on the way out the door. During an earlier prayer, I had a warning: my mind wandered to wonder if the phone were turned off; and since I am married to a dedicated caretaker I decided Joe had turned it off for me. I thought it might be more disturbing to look to check mid-service. Wrong.


The swirling circles in the journal quilt can refer to the noise of the phone's ring as well as to the whirlpool of my embarrassment as I fell down to my pew seat to find the phone in the furthest pocket and realize the impossibility of rising. I was so mortified.


I could not think of a metaphor for the church and prayer; so the circles and colors (more magenta than here) are going to have to refer to eggs/colors of the season, a stretch but a reminder. I thought I might Google Images, for praying hands, to find something to embroider outlines later. There I found a tutorial on drawing such. By the way, amazingly, I saw noone looking at me at the time or afterwards. People must have realized I was humiliated enough; thus the closed eyes on the quilt.

8 comments:

  1. Brilliant, Linda - as always. I love your journal quilts. I can imagine your horror when that phone rang. :). ss

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  2. Heck, we've all been there, done that with regard to forgetting about our new necessity - a cell phone - that just seems always to ring at "quiet times" at various venues. No one looked at you because they were reliving the times their phone caught them by surprise.

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  3. Linda, this is fantastic! I love the background fabric and the phone, and now I need to know the source of both. Is the phone an applique you made yourself, a picture you drew and scanned, or one you bought, or WHAT? And where did you get that fabulous background???? Details, details, I need 'em! I knew you had planned to capture this moment (and yes we've all had them!) in a journal quilt, but could not imagine how you'd do it, but you didn't disappoint!

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  4. I bought the phone fabric ( which I cut out and fused) at The City Quilter in NYC and the background at JoAnne's. I was thinking one should purchase mood fabrics to have available for the memorable emotions of a journal quilt.

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  5. Mood fabrics. Sounds great. Buy them and put them on your blog. Maybe we should all get mood fabrics and share them on the blogs.

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  6. You turned an embarrassing moment into a piece of art!

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  7. I can see (hear?)it now. Sounds like one of my tricks. Katy had a friend who had his phone go off as he was serving as a pallbearer--just as they were toting the coffin down the aisle--unfortunately his ring was "Jingle Bells!" He jingled all the way to the hearse.

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  8. Hi from California! I easily got to our blogs after all after I signed in to Google. Duh! Love your idea of "mood fabrics"! I'll hope to get to the fantastic quilting fabric shop in Orange, where Kathy's law school is located, and browse for great mood fabrics in fat quarters. I am excited that my niece Laura has now become one of my followers! Martha's child.

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