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I've had these old Wiss scissors since I was maybe twelve years old. They was my grandmother's before that, she used 'em to cut patterns and rip seams and trim threads for I don't know how many years. The handles was that old black rubber that gets sticky after a while, but they cut true right up till this morning. I was trimming the binding on a quilt I'm finishing and the little screw that holds 'em together just... gave out. Dropped right onto the floor. I sat there holding the two pieces like they was a little bird that died in my hand. You know how it is with a tool that's been with you that long. It ain't just the tool. It's her hands on it before mine. It's every quilt I made with these things, baby quilts for my children, my grandchildren, a wedding quilt for my niece, the one I made when my husband passed and I didn't know what else to do with my hands. All of it in those blades. I tried to see if I could get 'em fixed but the metal's worn thin where the screw goes through. They're done. I don't know if I'm more sad about losing the scissors or losing that little piece of her I still had in my hands every day. Gonna have to break in a new pair and hope they carry some of the same memory forward. That's the way of it, I suppose. Tools wear out. What they helped you make stays.🙏

My baby girl's wedding was last month and I finished her quilt two days before the ceremony. Two days, y'all. I been sewing since I could hold a needle and I still cut it that close. Every night for six months I was in that sewing room after supper, listening to my old radio, ripping out seams and re-doing them like a brand new girl. She asked for her great-grandmother's pattern, the one my grandmother made for my own wedding back when we didn't have two nickels. I didn't have that quilt no more, but I had a scrap of it. Mama kept one corner of it all these years and gave it to me, and I sewed that little piece of history right into the center of hers. She cried when she saw it and so did I, and neither one of us was ashamed. It ain't perfect. One seam on the back is a little crooked and I could see it clear as day every time I looked at it. But my grandmother used to say a quilt's got to have a mistake in it somewhere, because only the Lord makes things perfect. So I left it. Now I'm just glad it's done and out of my house before I had to look at it one more time, ha.

Now I want to tell y'all something and I don't want it to sound like I'm fussing, because I'm not. But I sold a quilt back in March, a full-size, pieced from my late aunt's dresses and a few of my own, and I charged $850 for it. Felt proud handing it over. Felt right. Then last week I got curious and did the arithmetic. Cutting, piecing, quilting by hand, binding. One hundred and nine hours, and that's not counting the two trips to the fabric shop or the night I sat up ripping out a seam I'd done wrong. Comes out to about $7.80 an hour. Less than I made at the phone company thirty years ago. I'm not sorry I sold it. The woman who bought it lost her own mother and she cried when she unfolded it, and that quilt is where it needs to be. But I've been quilting since I was nine years old and I have been undercharging my whole life, and I think part of me believed that if I named a real price folks would decide it wasn't worth it and I'd find out I'd been wrong about all of it. Anyhow. I'm working on a new one now, red and cream and a little off-kilter, and I believe I'm going to put a fair number on it this time. Haven't said the number out loud yet, so don't ask me. 🙂