Today, I was poking around in the local Goodwill here in Longmont, Colorado, when I ran across the quilt Becky Fetters of Laramie, Wyoming made for your son.  It is rare that I walk by a quilt without looking at its stitches, its binding, its piecing.  This quilt was no different.  It was small, about 30 x 40 inches, featured sailboats set on a red background, bound in yellow.  The workmanship was remarkable – the piecing was superb, all corners set perfectly, and the blind stitch used to attach the binding was the best I’ve ever seen.  The mitered corners were tight and flat.  It was machine-quilted, but not commercially.  Becky took her time with red and blue thread, outlining squares and snipping off the ending threads.

Then, on the back, I noticed the label.

So this little quilt, perfectly made, which had to have taken hours for Becky to create, was intended for your son. How, exactly, did it end up at my Goodwill, 2 hours away, tagged for $6.99?

I have to admit, my first reaction was anger.  My second was a profound sadness.  As a crafter, as a creator of handmade goods that I gift to people regularly, my heart breaks for Becky.  She worked hard on this little quilt.  She surely intended for Henry to use it.  I’m sure she didn’t intend for it to end up at the local Goodwill, discarded without so much as a thought.  The more I looked at the quilt, the more I realized that it had not even been used.  It was still stiff from the new batting Becky had used, the binding still crisp and not worn at all.

As a crafter, as a person who gives her hand-made goods away often, I have to wonder how many of the beautiful things I’ve made have been tossed away, where they end up in the $1.99 bin with all the other discards.  What would Becky think or feel if she knew the quilt she had worked so hard on was discarded this way?

Perhaps there’s a story I don’t know about this quilt.  Perhaps Becky was not as good a friend to you as she thought, and you never took the gift to mean anything because of that.  Maybe the quilt was with the other baby things, when you and your husband split up, and was lost in the move to new living quarters.  Perhaps Henry didn’t survive his birth, or his early years, and you couldn’t bear to have his things, lovely as they were, in your home any longer.  I would like to believe that this quilt was discarded on accident, or for a specific reason, than to believe you tossed the quilt into the giveaway bin with Henry’s outgrown clothes and the stack of worn towels you culled from your linen closet.

But the truth is, Ms. Brooks, I see quilts like this in the thrift stores often.  Perhaps 1 in 10 of them have such a label, or show the marks of being handmade with love for someone.  It is much more likely that you didn’t even realize the work that had gone into that quilt, the hours, the love and care put into it.  Like others in this world, it never occurs to you that something made by hand has value, and should be treated as such.  Our disposable society has not taught us well these last fifty years.  The handmade quilt has no more value to you than the package of receiving blankets you purchased at Walmart.  I want to believe this isn’t true, but too many times, it is.  The odds are that you carelessly tossed that quilt, never even bothering to think about its value.

I am still sad, and angry.  I am sorry that little Henry won’t grow up to be a father, and find that homemade quilt in the box of things you give him to use with his own baby.  I’m sorry that Becky’s gift meant so little.  I am angry that you were so careless with it. I don’t know enough about your story to feel any differently.  I would like to think that none of these things is true.  But the odds are not in your favor.

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