When I decided to turn a spare bedroom into a quilting studio, I thought a lot about cabinets, cutting tables, storage, and where in the world I was going to fit a longarm quilting machine. Lighting seemed like the easy part.

It was not.

The room had a perfectly ordinary ceiling light, which was perfectly adequate if your plans involved finding the door, making the bed, or perhaps looking for a missing sock. It was decidedly inadequate for quilting.

Quilting requires seeing things—tiny things. Thread colors. Seam allowances. Pencil marks. The difference between ivory and slightly warmer ivory. Whether your stitching is actually in the ditch or merely vacationing somewhere nearby. I wanted light, and a lot of it.

A Simple Plan

So I bought twelve smart bulbs and the fixtures to hold them, with the idea that my son Daniel could install everything before the longarm arrived. Daniel is an apprentice electrician, which in my mind translated roughly to: Wonderful. I have my own electrician. In Daniel’s mind, apparently, it translated more accurately to: Wonderful. Mom has another project for me.

The job sounded straightforward: remove the old light, install the new fixtures, run some wire, and put in a switch. Done. Except nothing involving this room has ever been quite that simple.

The first challenge was deciding where all the lights should go. A quilting studio needs even illumination rather than a single bright spot in the middle of the ceiling, so we carefully laid everything out. We measured, marked, measured again, moved a mark, stood back, squinted at the ceiling, and moved it again. Eventually, we had a plan for twelve lights spread across the room.

Then came the holes. There is something psychologically unsettling about watching someone deliberately cut holes in a perfectly good ceiling, even when you have specifically asked him to do it. Daniel climbed the ladder and began cutting openings for the fixtures while I watched bits of drywall drift downward. One hole became two, two became several, and before long my nice intact ceiling looked as though it had developed a severe case of polka dots.

Daniel had started the installation before the longarm arrived, planning to return the next day and finish the job. By the end of that first day, some of the track lighting was in place, but the studio was far from usable. Drywall chunks, tools, electrical wire, a ladder, and the shop vac covered nearly every available surface.

Then Daniel discovered that he couldn’t come back the next day after all.

Meanwhile, the Longarm Arrived

Before the installer came, I cleaned up the drywall chunks and vacuumed the carpet, but Daniel’s tools, wire, ladder, and shop vac had to remain where they were. The longarm installer simply added his tools to the collection, piling some of them on top of Daniel’s. Amazingly, when he finished, he managed to identify and collect all of his own tools without accidentally taking any of Daniel’s with him.

For the rest of the week, my newly installed longarm shared the studio with the unfinished lighting project. When Daniel finally returned for the second workday, I covered the longarm, sewing machine, and every other machine in the room so drywall dust wouldn’t get inside them and jam up the works.

Then Daniel went back to work. That was when we discovered that cutting holes in the ceiling had actually been the easy part, because the track lights needed electricity, electricity required wire, and the wire had to travel through the attic, down inside the wall, and somehow emerge through a relatively tiny opening near the switch.A week later, Daniel returned for day two. That was when we discovered that cutting holes in the ceiling had actually been the easy part, because the track lights needed electricity, electricity required wire, and the wire had to travel through the attic, down inside the wall, and somehow emerge through a relatively tiny opening near the switch.

That was still the easy part, because the lights needed electricity, electricity required wire, and the wire had to travel from the ceiling, through the attic, down inside the wall, and somehow emerge through a relatively tiny opening near the switch.

The Designated Wire Catcher

Daniel went into the attic, and I stayed below as the designated wire catcher. The technique seemed simple enough: Daniel would push the electrical wire down inside the wall, and I would look through the opening and grab it. Except I couldn’t see it. Daniel pushed while I peered into the hole. He pushed farther. I stuck my fingers into the opening. Nothing.

Then Dixon became involved. Dixon is an eighty-pound black Labrador who considers virtually every household activity a group project. By now, he knew something interesting was happening inside the wall, and he intended to participate. He planted himself beside me just as Daniel called from the attic.

“CAN YOU SEE IT?”

BARK, BARK, BARK.

“NO, BUT I CAN HEAR IT SCRATCHING A FOOT AWAY FROM THE HOLE.”

We tried again. Daniel moved the wire, and I could hear it scratching and sliding around behind the drywall, tantalizingly close to where I needed it.

“MORE TO THE LEFT!”

BARK.

“YOUR OTHER LEFT!”

BARK, BARK.

The wire scratched past the opening and disappeared. Back up it went, and we tried again. Eventually, through some combination of electrical knowledge, stubbornness, luck, and yelling through a ceiling while a Labrador provided commentary, the wire appeared. I grabbed it.

Success. One down.

Unfortunately, there were more.

The next two holes were easier for me, but they were decidedly not easier for Daniel. To reach them, he had to belly-crawl through the attic toward the edge of the house, where the roof slopes down and the available space gets progressively smaller. Attics are unpleasant places under the best of circumstances. They are hot, dusty, cramped, full of insulation, and decorated with roofing nails sticking downward from above at exactly head height.

As Daniel crawled forward on his stomach, he managed to scoop a considerable quantity of fiberglass insulation underneath his shirt. Almost immediately, he started itching—not a little itch, but fiberglass itch, the kind that makes every nerve ending suddenly announce its presence. The wire still had to go down the wall, so he kept crawling.

Then his head made contact with the sharp end of a roofing nail. Hard.

Now he was lying on his stomach in an attic, itching like crazy, with blood oozing from his scalp. At this point, most reasonable people might have reconsidered the project. Daniel pushed the wires down the wall, and eventually I caught them through the openings below.

When he finally emerged from the attic, Daniel came down, stripped off his shirt, and announced, “There. Done with the attic work.” He cleaned the wound on his scalp—a wound that later resulted in a tetanus shot—and turned his attention to the final part of the installation.

The bases had to be wired, the fixtures had to be clipped into place, and the bulbs had to go in. One by one, the tracks were mounted, wired, and fitted with their adjustable light heads. After all the measuring, drywall dust, ladders, fishing wires through walls, barking dogs, fiberglass insulation, attic crawling, blood, and one future tetanus shot, the studio ceiling was finally finished.

Daniel restored the power. Nothing exploded, which is always an encouraging sign. Then he looked at me and asked, “Would you like the honor?”

I stood by the switch. Above me were twelve track lights waiting to illuminate the room. I flipped it.

Light flooded the room—not the dim yellow pool of light we had started with, but light everywhere. It stretched across the cutting table, the sewing machine, the walls, and the place where the longarm sat. Bright, glorious light.

I looked around my quilting studio.

“Let there be light.”

And it was good.