A quilt is a beautiful thing. On so very many levels.

To start, quilts are brain candy. Straight up colours and shapes and repeating patterns injected right through your eye holes to the wrinkles in your brain.

They FEEL amazing. There’s something soothing about a blanket with a hundred little lines and pathways to trace with your fingers in the dark. 

Quilts are this brilliant compilation of art and math and human dexterity. As a creative and a collector of hobbies, I’ve always wanted to learn how to quilt, but my brain measures and tessellates so poorly. I don’t think I’m built for it. I don’t think you can swear and improvise your way through a 1000 piece project.

Quilts are also this meaningful and tender thing. They take a creative vision, intention, love, and patience and in the end, it literally wraps around the recipient of the final product.

Recently I watched a short documentary on Netflix called, “The Quilters”. It’s about a group of men in a Missouri maximum-security prison who volunteer their time to make quilts for children in foster care. They are people who have made mistakes and lived hard lives, finding purpose through their work to make something for someone they don’t know and will never meet. The film follows the quilters, but watching it reminded me of our experience, as recipients, of something similar.

When our child was little, really little, and sick, really sick, she was gifted a small handmade quilt from a local organization. This group of volunteers makes and shares pillow cases and hospital bed sized quilts for kids on long stays. The goal: to make everything a little cozier and friendlier. And it makes a difference. It really does. Seven years later my kid still keeps that quilt on her bed and we still pack it for long stays. The soft flannel on the back side is a little faded but the colourful animals and flower patterns on the front are still bright and sweet. Her pillow cases (collected over several long stays in hospital) are still in weekly circulation.

The magic of a quilt is hundreds (or thousands) of little pieces coming together. Thousands of little acts make those little pieces possible. The fabric is picked and matched and pondered. The pattern is conceived and drawn. Tiny strips and squares and diamonds are measured and cut and placed and stitched and ironed and sewn together into bigger and bigger elements.

And that’s how real support works when things are hard. When someone is lost or sick or hurt. It’s a thousand small acts of care and consideration that brings them back or holds them up. A thousand small gestures of sympathy and understanding. A thousand tiny problems that get solved by people who love and empathize both with their loved ones, but also with total strangers.

A quilt is a magical thing because it is literally created to cover a human body with these thousand acts of effort and good intentions.

So here’s to the strangers who create intricate works of art and love, one small intentional act at a time, to keep other strangers warm.

We could all learn a lot from you.