On Sharing Or Not

Nicole (my would-be neighbor-down-the-street who lives on the opposite side of this continent) has a thought-filled post up today. The other day she shared an experience where she was at a workshop and was enamored with another quilter's project. But, when she asked, the other quilter declined to share the name of the pattern with her. The post generated a bunch of comments, and Nicole referenced them in today's post. Look how gracious she is (as always): 

I want to clarify that I did not mean to villify the woman who wasn't willing to share her quilt design with me.  I thought she was kind of eccentric, but laughed it off as just one of those things.  She was kind of a loner, a woman who obviously had not traveled the easiest road through life, and perhaps hanging on to the uniqueness of her special-one-of-a-kind quilt was a way for her to feel as if she had control over something.  I was ok with her not sharing, truly.

What I was not ok with was a couple of comments I received yesterday regarding her behavior.  One was just kind of mean, but the other was obscene.  No call for that sort of thing here at all people.  Snarky or off color comments will be deleted.

I got to thinking about the requests I receive every once in a while. Ask me for a pattern, no problem. Ask me how I made something, I'll try to tell you though I don't see myself as the best teacher. 

But.

On the rare occasion when someone asks me to share the pattern for my dancing ladies, I decline.

It's been about twenty years, I think, since I discovered them. I had bought a pair of earrings from a now-defunct mail-order house, and the catalog description said they were inspired by cave drawings somewhere in Spain, drawings that were believed to be thousands of years old. They quickly became favorite earrings, at the time symbolizing me and some of my seminary classmates, Sharon, Ingrid, Linda . . .  Then, sometime later on, Joe drew them for me, between three and six or seven inches tall, and he added more to the original four, and I appliqued them to the back of a vest I was making for a friend's birthday. And then they were appliqued onto a tote bag that I carried for a while. And then as the center of a round robin, the finished of which hangs above my bed. I've been known to applique them onto a block to give to a friend, and those original patterns remain safe and sound in my sewing desk drawer.

They've come to be my logo, my symbol, my totem. 

And I hope I'm not selfish for wanting to keep it that way.