A bit of background ... This year I celebrated a Big-O birthday. The best part about this birthday was telling someone how old I was now and having them say one of two things (and sometimes both): 'You don't look that old' and 'You don't act that old'. Of the two, I am rather proud of the second. Of course, they could be lying to me, on both counts, and that's OK too. I choose my friends carefully and selective truth is a criteria high on the judges' list of key characteristics.
So, because I turned 50 this year, I took some time to look at my life: where it's been, how it is now and where it is going. Cut a long (boring) story short: life did not measure up to what I thought it would be by now. Some things were better than expected; some were worse. The duality of my life was palpable.
I couldn't decide how to represent the duality in a single quilt without it turning into a cliche. And they don't live side by side -- it's one or the other. That is sort of the nature of duality. So I decided to make two and join them together to form a two-sided quilt.
One side represents the part of my life that I'm happy with, when I was happy or when I bucked convention and listed to my heart instead of someone else. The other side represents times when I haven't been happy or when I did what was expected and not what was right for me.
Here's my quilt, the happy side first, followed by the unhappy side. It's a small quilt, 24cm by 29cm, but big enough to say what I wanted to say. Like life, really.
Each one was finished with the zig-zag stitch in black rayon thread, then they were put back-sides together. I stitched along the line at the top and then around the other three sides leaving a gap of about 3cms from the top line of stitching. This left a little tunnel across the top of the quilt for a hanging rod.
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