I believe
in balance. I rarely achieve it, but I
still believe in it. For example, I
recently had a birthday, and my dear friend, Cynthia Horst, gave me this
incredible, handmade gift:
And look at all the interior pockets:
Let me
just say that Cynthia, as near as I can tell, does NOT believe in balance,
because she is waaay at the end of the quilting/sewing bell curve, where few
other humans dare to tread. She is
nowhere near the middle, where most of us who sew find ourselves.
We average
sewers (sewers? What a horrible homonym, right?) do not attempt tricky projects,
nor do we design our own. We make
pillows and curtains and stay in the realm of forgiving gathers and prints that
do not have to be matched. The seam
ripper is our favorite tool because we so often goof and have to rip out our stitches.
Cynthia Horst, on the other
hand, has a jaw-dropping blog called dreamquiltcreate that will make you pity
her grandkids’ other grandmas. She makes intricate, smocked and embroidered
blessing gowns with royalty-worthy bonnets and scallop-edged slips. She uses silk
from France and ribbons from some heavenly source I cannot hope to find. Then, apparently because she has no need for
sleep, she also makes dolls and doll clothes, doll houses, doll bassinettes, princess
costumes—all from beautiful fabric. This, in
addition to drop-dead gorgeous quilts.
And then, as you will
quickly see from reading her posts, she is also a genuinely warm and loving
person. You could search the world over,
and never find someone so sweet and generous.
She was raised in Montreal, and even speaks French. Somehow, this just puts icing on the cake for
me. She
and her husband, Ricky, are expecting their 12th grandchild soon. Can’t you just imagine the little unborn
spirits in the premortal world, fighting and clawing to get into that family?
So I am particularly honored
to have a Cynthia Horst creation, especially one so customized for me, as a
writer, with a typewriter on one side! I
might add that she tucked chocolate and other goodies inside. I would post a picture of those, but surely
you didn’t think they lasted long enough to be photographed.
So now I have to decide, of
all the possible choices, how to use this phenomenal bag. Makeup? Too messy. Office supplies? Too pointy.
Jewelry? Don’t travel enough. Coupons? Please. Teaching tools for Relief Society? Possibly.
There are a zillion ways this fantastic organizer will be put to
use. Number One, of course, will be to
show it to one and all, so I can brag about my talented friend.
Thank you, my friend, for
setting the bar so high and being so wildly talented. Balance, it seems, can definitely be
overrated.
If
you’d like to read about a character who's unbalanced in another whole direction,
check out the main character in my humorous book, Sisters in the Mix, about an OCD
woman with a cooking show.
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