Stitching Friendship

"[It] improves happiness and abates misery, 

by doubling our joy and dividing our grief."

Marriage?

Chewing gum?

No, friendship, according to Cicero, who also said, 

"I urge you to put friendship before all things human . . . excepting virtue (without which friendship cannot exist)."

And if you must end a friendship, he advised, it is better to unstitch than to rip.

By that reasoning, friendship is formed by stitching.

I have been sewing with the old and new friends lately. 
It's so nice; I'm finding that once you get your stitch going, you can sew and talk at the same time, not so much the case with other kinds of art-making I've done (including writing and drawing), which require more continual mental focus.

Just yesterday, a new friend (someone who worked in Memory Care, like me) gave me two clever sewing tools:
a white leather thimble (after I told her I can't get the hang of a hard thimble--you can't feel what you're doing), and a yellow rubber glove finger–– which she made by cutting the fingers off dish-washing gloves–– for grabbing and tugging slippery needles through thick or layered cloth.

I am collaging an old linen runner ^ with a handstitched decorative border; 
I rescued it from the recycling bin at the thrift store, where some volunteer had discarded it because it has a tiny hole in its center.

I wish more of my fellow volunteers would see the value of these old linens––I hate to think of them being ground into pulp for industry. (Car insulation is one of their possible destinies.)
I will suggest we set them aside and sell them as scraps. I think some sewers and quilters would buy them.