Mary Kolb (the Modern Quilt Perspectives blog tour)…

(Go visit Mary’s stop on the blog tour here. I cannot thank her enough for piecing both the cover quilt and Answer Key. Yay Mary!!!)

I am a bit OCD; I come by it honestly. I rarely trust people to do stuff, which explains why throughout most of my life I haven’t slept much. Heck, remember that story I told about auditioning Lisa Sipes as a quilter?You may well ask what the heck I am talking about (I ask that of myself often), but it all gets to one of the things I keep returning to about Mary: I have never met her, and don’t really feel like I know her, but I trust her implicitly.

Perhaps I should back up: there was a moment in the early days of doing this book that I realized that I could not get it all done in time, that I would need help. I asked a few people who they would trust and Mary’s name kept coming up. So, out of the blue I wrote to her, and much to my enduring luck she agreed to help out. And this brings me back to the story about Lisa (who I love more than most of my internal organs), in just a couple of emails I suddenly found myself completely trusting Mary with bits of my baby, my book. Yes, I had other people helping, but I knew them. Mary was different, at that time a complete stranger, but in a few shared sentences she somehow overcame every OCD fibre in my being, which is the vast majority of them.

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Now I am not telling you all of this simply to illustrate how my brain works, it let’s you know just why Mary is one of the people in the quilting world I most want to meet. Of course I want to thank her in person for all of her help, for the fact that she masterfully piece what became the cover quilt (yay Mary), as well as the quilt I most dreaded piecing in the entire book…

Okay, you might ask why I dreaded quilting that table runner. Well, cutting all those circles just right and keeping everything happy and straight is just the sort of thing I tend to suck at. Give me a million pieces to put together and I am happy, but give be a big piece of fabric that needs careful handling and the sculptor in me kicks in and just wants to hit it with a hammer.

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Mary, on the other hand, seems to just have the sensitive tough, the ability to naturally make the details seem effortless, and to make just the right choices. Luckily I know better and understand that it comes of effort, and consideration, and love for the practice of quilting. It is all a manifestation of the fact that Mary truly cares about quilting, she is in the stitches, each decision, and each quilt.

All of that is why I really want to spend an afternoon sewing Mary, partially so I could finally meet her, but more than anything because I think it would just feel right, which is a rare thing indeed for someone who has the brain that is inside my head.

So, thank you Mary, for so beautifully piecing “You Are Here” and “Answer Key.” But more importantly thank you for making me feel lucky to have met you (virtually) and giving me something to look forward to when we finally do meet.

-t

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