A lesson in quality

This quilt is from the Goodwill Outlet store, where you buy clothes by the pound. I normally wouldn’t have picked it up, but I was a few pounds shy of a major price break and wanted the lower price. I usually pick up old bedspreads for dog bedding. 20111106-112034.jpg Anyway someone put a lot of work into this. I suspect it was for a baby or young child. It’s unfortunate they didn’t put more thought into it. The pattern is lovely but the material used is not used wisely. Then there’s this, the reason it was discarded.

20111106-112342.jpg All of the white areas have torn loose. The material is not tightly woven enough. I tacked it down to keep it from further destruction but the quilt just isn’t good enough to really repair. The person that made this should have been more focused on beauty and utility. It would have been so simple to have used better material for the white. They could have chosen material that worked better. This fabric is really bad:

20111106-112818.jpg Which brings me back to beauty. I used to get lectures on using synthetic yarn. Now there are situations where synthetic yarns are appropriate. And there’s nothing that says it can’t be beautiful as in these gloves:

20111106-113132.jpg There’s definitely something to be said for using the best materials you can get.

I finished the Steve Jobs biography recently. What I took away from that was a reaffirmation of the importance of beauty in our lives. I think we are more pained by surrounding ourselves with cheap ugly crap than we might imagine. Beauty does not need to be expensive but it does require a careful pruning of what we choose to keep.

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