During a recession so severe that most of us are feeling financially vulnerable, I’ve been spending my time, like everyone else I know, obsessing over bigger problems — how will I pay for two kids in college and still be able to buy white wine ($9 a day). When my friend Stephanie phoned the other day, I was so busy inputting new assumptions — the average family of five can survive on three cans of beans a day — that I was only half listening when she said, “You have to get out of this rut. If a giant meteor hit the earth and debris from the impact blocked the sun, she’d survive just fine in some homespun coat she made out of super-warm wool. After all, last year more than 56 percent of households in the United States reported that they engaged in some form of beading or quilting or knitting or soldering — maybe just gluing on glitter — to create all kinds of handmade objects that they learned to make from hip, young magazines like ReadyMade and Make. And in the 1970s, my parents always had some cockamamie project under way, like hand-inking illustrations for their stamp album or learning intricate crochet patterns, or even building model railroads. We fall squarely into the category of employed people who reported, in a recent Pew Internet & American Life study, that there’s less time for hobbies now that our networked lives distract us with work at home, thanks to BlackBerries and iPhones.

Tags: quilting patterns, age, make, 151, quilting machines, quilting fat quarters