The margin for God

A feel-good story for all you knitters out there.

A few years ago a friend and I travelled around the Maritime provinces in Canada and at that time we were interested in quilts. We quilted a bit, but our interest was mostly in other people's quilts. So we went to a lot of small exhibits, talked to local quilters and had a great time learning about people's lives through their quilts. In memory of that trip I bought a book of amazing hand-made quilts. In the book was a picture of a log-cabin pattern quilt which had taken twelve years to complete. What stuck out immediatly was that one of the squares was set upside down. How can you spend twelve years quilting a blanket and not notice that one of the squares is upside down??? And once you did notice it (no doubt someone would point it out if you had failed to notice it), wouldn't you undo that section to set it right?

The explanation was below the picture. Not only had the woman noticed, but she had done it on purpose. She said that she had rotated the square because only God does things perfectly, and she did not want to upset Him by making a perfect quilt.

I love this story. It is so outrageously arrogant of her to believe that if she had set the square correctly her quilt would approach God's perfection that her attempt at humility is in fact charming.

She also leaves us with a wonderful lesson about life. Whether you believe in God or not, perfection is not human. Either because it belongs only to God, or because it is never really attainable. So now, whenever I'm knitting and I make a mistake I don't want to correct, I claim that it is of course not at all a mistake (me? make a mistake? NEVER!), but rather it is a margin I deliberately left for God. As I am a beginner, my work has quite a few margins, some very visible, and I love the idea that it's ok, it's so that God doesn't think I'm trying to be as perfect as Him.

I'm not actually religious, but this story is so funny and delightful that it has become my "comfort zone" when I knit, and indeed when I do a lot of things.

Above is a big margin that has proudly stayed put in one of the squares I knit for my baby blanket (not sure how it happened, but it is in the first square I did). I plan on making a flower and sewing it on top, because no one ever said everyone had to see your margins!!

The members of my knitting group liked this story a lot, and agreed that God knew of course where the margins were so it was ok to cover them up with flowers. So now that we have established that it's ok to cover up margins, every time we see flowers sewn onto a knitted item, we all laugh and say there must be a big hole or knot underneath.