To Create Is To Live

Just make stuff.

My mother finished a project for her brother-in-law earlier this year. For reasons that perhaps only he can understand, he had saved every Crown Royal bag he had finished off over the years — apparently collecting Crown Royal bags is a thing — and he wanted to know if my mom, who is an accomplished seamstress and even once ran a small business out of our house called “Underground Fashions” in which she’d do fixes and alterations for whatever clothes you had for her, could make a quilt made of these Crown Royal bags. This was a more complicated project than my uncle, or my mom, had anticipated. The bags were once made out of velvet but are now produced using a thin, cotton-like synthetic meant to simulate the texture of feel of velvet; it turns out this is incredibly difficult to stitch without tearing. He also had hundreds upon hundreds of the bags, in all sorts of different, eccentric colors, which meant Mom not only had to find enough bags sturdy enough to be sewn, but to put them together in a color patterns that wouldn’t cause a seizure to whomever decided to cuddle up on the couch with one. It was a long, laborious project, one I heard about repeatedly any time I would visit. But she got it done. And you know what? It looked great. She even got his name stitched down at the bottom.