Several years ago I decided to learn how to quilt. My instructor always emphasized two rules:

– Measure twice, cut once
– Sew a scant ¼” seam

If you don’t measure the fabric carefully (twice), you may cut it wrong, thereby wasting fabric, money and time. You can always trim off a little extra, but if you cut too much, you can’t put it back together.

Sewing a precise seam is essential to getting all the pieces to fit together accurately and neatly. If a seam is even slightly off, it changes the size of the piece. When sewn to other pieces with seams slightly off, the pieces continue to be less and less accurate.

If your cutting is sloppy and your seams are inaccurate, your quilt will be messy – your points won’t be pointy, your blocks won’t come together neatly, your quilt won’t lay flat.

Of course, that is exactly what happened when I first started to quilt. Try as I might, I just couldn’t get it right. The end product looked good – from a distance. But if you looked closely, you could see where the seams didn’t line up, the blocks weren’t the same size and the quilt looked amateurish.

It’s all about the attention to detail, accuracy, consistency and patience. As I continued to learn, the seam ripper was my constant companion. Sew it, tear it out, sew it again.

There is a myth that Amish women always intentionally made one flaw in their quilts. The idea was that only God is perfect and quilters should not try to outdo God by creating a perfect, mistake-less quilt. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I do know that I don’t have to try to intentionally make a mistake. I make plenty of mistakes without even trying. And I have been known to excuse my mistakes by saying, “Only God is perfect!”

Over the years, my quilting has improved, but I still make my share of mistakes. The last project I did was a fairly complicated pattern with lots of diamonds and plenty of intersections. I found myself ripping out seams and re-sewing them over in over in order to get them right.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “Please be patient with me. God isn’t finished with me yet.” I am so thankful that no matter how many mistakes I make in life, God doesn’t give up on me.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “Please be patient with me. God isn’t finished with me yet.” I am so thankful that no matter how many mistakes I make in life, God doesn’t give up on me. He continues to transform me into His image and in the end will make me flawless.

And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. 2 Corinthians 3:18

Now all glory to God, who is able to keep you from falling away and will bring you with great joy into his glorious presence without a single fault. Jude 24