The story behind the name | The name behind the story

What do you think of when you think of the word frayed? Maybe words like worn, undone, or useless come to mind, but how about words like love, meaning, and tradition? When I think about quilting, these are the ideas that come to my mind.

For as long as I can remember the women in my family have sewn anything and everything. A mantle that stopped with my mother because while I loved the handmade pieces she created, I’d given up on ever being able to do it myself. After all, the last time my mom tried to teach me to sew, I created a shirt two sizes smaller than the pattern somehow. And for a long time, I was content with this. Quilting and sewing were impractical hobbies in the world of fast fashion and Amazon. In my mind, it was too hard, took too long, and the patterns were too old fashioned. But with my grandmother’s stroke two years earlier and her increasing frailty, I thought about all the knowledge our family would stand to lose when she died. And so, I decided quilting would not be one of those things. After all, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, I had nothing but time. So, I picked what I thought was an easy project we could all do together as a family. And wouldn’t you know it wasn’t as hard and didn’t take as long as it seemed. Sure, there were imperfections, things that could have been improved if we’d known more, but isn’t that the beauty of having something that’s handmade instead of by some robot pushing out a 1,000 pieces a minute? Isn’t that what it means to be human?