Grab That Bag!

          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.