selfishly

I finished piecing this yesterday. I had originally thought that this section would simply be the center of a larger quilt with several borders, but my thinking shifted over the day and I decided that I wanted this to exist as it does right now. I'm thinking that it might hang on a wall or eventually be a little play mat or crib quilt. I thought about sending it off to a friend, but then I realized--perhaps selfishly--that I needed to keep this for myself. I began it last april in the midst of a friend's struggle and I finished piecing it nearly a year later in the midst of my own struggle. It didn't quite make sense, then, as a baby gift for another. I worried that its energy might be too complex or too ambivalent for a child other than my own. Instead, I need to keep it as a reminder, a token, of my time and my trials in this little space. I'm machine quilting around random pieces of the top because it didn't seem quite worth it to hand quilt the top, especially if one day it will lie on the floor and be drooled on or tugged at. But we'll have to see about that in the years to come...