This post is technically late for me.  It’s Wed. morning here but it’s still Tuesday on the East Coast where most of my blog readers are so we’ll let it slide.  This week is overwhelmingly busy here as we’re leaving for the States on Friday for a Thanksgiving trip and I’m hosting a party here Thurs. night (I know, what was I thinking).  But anywho, I’m sure y’all will forgive me.

It starts out as a pile of cloth.  Checks, prints, solids, florals.  Silky ones, soft ones, smooth ones.  Every color you can imagine.  What will become of this fabric?  Once, a puffy ball of soft white somehow manages to grace my shelves, a few steps later, as a bolt of fabric, awaiting creation.

With a few pin pricks, a snip or two, a slice and cut and a run down a noisy machine, this stack of cloth becomes something.  It’s a magic trick really. Just a heap of fiber, a long thin strand and a sharp needle and you have something out of nothing.

It’s like Creation in a way.  Someone comes in and takes this seemingly useless mass of elements and creates a splendid masterpiece.

My cutting board is always a mess, a load of scraps, threads, scissors, pins and patterns.  I fling mistakes to the ground, pick them up again, turn them this way and that and when I’m done I have something that I could have only pictured in my imagination.

The reason I love sewing so much is because I can take something professedly bland and make it into something visually beautiful.  I can make something that wasn’t there before.

I imagine that’s how God felt when he made the world.  He took his pieces, lined them up just so, matched the edges, made a few snips and stood back to gaze at his new creation.

He picks us up when we’ve made mistakes.  He turns us and shapes us and makes the pieces and scraps of our lives into something splendid and useful.  And he knows even the smallest shred can be used to make something magnificent.