The Divine Collaboration

Last day for 15% off Lavender & Twine!

Half way through 2017, we left a religious order and started life out on our own. We put our homeschooled kids in sweet local Steiner school, rented a small, ugly 90s house, Tim got his first full-time job, and I worked extra long hours, trying to get this business off the ground. Our life was chaotic and lonely and hard.

Tully’s first ever teacher was a worn out, snappy woman nearing the end of her career. He struggled with her, and I struggled with him struggling. It was not the warm, understanding welcome into formal education I’d hoped for. But I also felt for her. Like me, she was burnt out, overwhelmed, not able to offer all she wanted. By the end of the year she was forced to retire, and we said goodbye.

On her last day, as I was getting the kids ready for school, I decided I really want to give her something nice, something to wish her well. I felt silly for not thinking of it earlier. My quilts were in my rented shed on the other side of town. I didn’t have time to bake something or run to the shops. After one last dash to the washing line to get some clean socks, I came across our single lavender bush that had survived decades of renters. Yes! I picked as many flowers as I could fit in my hand, found some twine in the garage, and made her a simple posy. When I dropped Tully off at school, I gave her the flowers and wished her rest and joy in the next season. She was very grateful.

I don’t know who planted that lavender, but I was very grateful to them. I’d grown up believing that the only meaningful good we could offer the world was in service - helping, fixing, feeding, running programs. Beauty was an afterthought, superfluous, perhaps even conceited. It was an idea that hung over me while I made quilts and shared my work online, but it was also one I was slowly detangling. That morning, picking lavender flowers, it felt like another knot released. Perhaps 20 years earlier, someone trying to make this garden beautiful planted some lavender. And that day, it gave both me, a tired and self-conscious mother, and a weary, disappointed teacher something precious. I started to think of it as the Divine Collaboration, a combined effort through time and space to increase the good in the world. I clung to that goal as I built my business and made my quilts, to the idea that nothing we ever make or do for beauty or love or good is ever wasted. That I could offer it to the universe to be used and enjoyed in ways I couldn’t imagine.

I often thought about that posy as I made my Lavender & Twine Quilt. I thought about who might have made the first Bridal Bouquet block on which this quilt is based, and if she ever got a sense of how many people enjoyed it through the weariness of the Great Depression, how much beauty it inspired. And then today, 100 years later, I get to play with the design, make it my own, and share it with you! It’s pretty wonderful, don’t you think - to grow something beautiful with people we’ve never met?

I want to thank you for joining me in this Divine Collaboration, for your efforts to slow down and make something precious and beautiful. Whether its a quilt or a painting, a meal or kind words, it all helps tip the scales for this anxious, weary world, towards something that’s full of peace and joy. And I really want to live in a world like that.

If you’d like to add to that joy by making Lavender & Twine, you have one day left to get 15% off the EPP kit and fabric bundle! (Discount applied at checkout.) Head to the shop now and stitch this lovely quilt of posies with me from June to October.

I hope you find ways to join in the Divine Collaboration this week!

Happy stitching,

Jodi. xx

PS. I’m always so stoked that Sash wants to make my quilts! Here’s her experimenting with colours for Lavender & Twine. Aren’t they lovely?! Grab your kit and get 15% off today!