Hello. :)

fabric by moda

Hi there. I've finally gotten around to writing the first post, which I thought would be done in April, after SewDown Nashville, but time's a tricky thing.

My Instagram handle is @minnowpeck, and Minnow Peck is the name of my first blog. When I first started the original blog, I told my friend Katie what I would call it.

"Um, why??" she asked.

Here's why. Because a long time ago, when I more solidly identified myself as a writer, I wrote a poem that ended up being the last poem in a small collection of poetry. One of the lines is about being in the Currituck Sound and feeling minnows taking little bites of my back. The poem is about change and the line itself is, "The minnows peck—maybe they are eating the skin,/making everything worse. " About a year later, my brother Paul and I were swimming in the sound off my mother's dock, and at some point he felt a minnow peck. Then, in the manner of a Shakespearean actor, he stood up with his full 6-foot-2, 240-pound frame, stretched his arms out and proclaimed, "They are minnows!! Eating skin, CHANGING WORLDS!!" And then he laughed like a crazy person. He was (good-naturedly) making fun of me.

If I get teased about anything, it's usually poetry or quilting. People have misconceptions about both. Poets wear berets and snap instead of clap, and quilters are old and can't get out of their rocking chairs. Or something like that. I'm starting to think there may be something more than just chance that leads me to love things that have this kind of baggage, but I do know that one of the reasons I'm drawn to writing and and to quilting is because both require a lot of skill and energy, and in the end, if you're lucky (or skilled) enough, you make something that looks, in a way, effortless and easy in its beauty.

So I'm going to try to keep up these posts, keep here a quiltography of sorts, and just put back out the little gifts that sewing has given me. Thanks for stopping by.