Quilting is the miracle of giving new life and purpose to
fabric scraps. It can rejuvenate your spiritual life too.
fabric scraps. It can rejuvenate your spiritual life too.
We affirm that life is here and now in our quilting and its ability to enable our journey. It is the vehicle for our continuing movement along our lifetime of efforts. Our quilts allow both the goal and the process in one magnificent creation after another. Our quilting generates the perfect combination of faith with action, hope with realism, and the universal with the particular, so that we are blissful and grateful in our co-creation experiences.
—from the Conclusion
What can you learn about yourself through quilt making? What deeper symbolism can you find in the act of cutting and piecing? How can this simple activity help you make your way down a spiritual path?
Delve into these questions and more in this imaginative book that will become your spiritual friend, your teacher and your sanctuary. Contemporary quilter Louise Silk takes you through her own quilting journey to discover how the process of making a quilt can be used to explore and strengthen your own spirituality. Each chapter introduces a universal human attribute organized according to the mystical tradition of Kabbalah, relates it to a personal life practice and then applies the attribute and the practice to an original quilt project.
Anyone from the novice to the needlework expert—and from any faith tradition—will be nourished and gratified by the patchwork and appliqué experiences offered in this creative, engaging book. These ten projects, carefully designed for you, include:
• One-Patch Utility Quilt • Log Cabin Quilt • String Pieced Pillows
• Straight Furrows Baby Blanket • Quilting Carry-all Bag • Patchwork Prayer Shawl
• Folk Art Appliqué Quilt • Remembrance Crazy Quilt • T-shirt Quilt
• Rail Fence Signature Tablecloth • Plus dozens of variations …
“[Shows us how] creativity and the construction process enable a quilt maker to engage in an internal dialogue which can lead to a multitude of intangible personal enrichments and an awareness of the spirituality that is within each of us.”
—Hilary Morrow Fletcher, project director of Quilt National
“Meanders along a double lane of creative expression and celebration of life. At each stop, readers learn from the artist’s own hard-won life lessons and receive inspiration both practical and sublime.”
—Eleanor Levie, author of American Quiltmaking: 1970–2000
“The simple tools of thread and fabric both cover and reveal a soul. Here oneness with the Divine is not a castle in the air, but a tangible and useable thing, a way of uniting heaven and earth. Quilting is a kind of prayer in action. If you read and use this book, you will find that it is your own soul that is revealed.”
—Jason Shulman, founder of A Society of Souls and author of The Instruction Manual for Receiving God
“A compelling invitation to intersect our own spiritual paths with the power of quilting. Deftly shows how we can explore further dimensions of understanding by literally creating whole cloth from the pieces of our stories. Access to unique and meaningful possibilities opened up as I read.”
—Linda Skolnik, coauthor of The Knitting Way: A Guide to Spiritual Self-Discovery
Louise Silk has been quilting professionally for over thirty years. In addition to commissions and exhibitions, she teaches quilting classes and workshops and is an artist member of Studio Art Quilt Associates and a life member of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. One of her five solo quilt exhibits, called I Was There, Now I Am Here, traveled to four venues around the United States. Her website, www.silkquilt.com, contains a color gallery of this book’s projects and many others.
