Empty and full

Last night I sewed.  and sewed and sewed and sewed.

Yesterday my friend lost her fight with leukemia.  Her husband sent me a text around lunch.  I was in class with 9th grade.  A coworker covered for me and I ran to the bathroom to cry and let the shock set in with some privacy.
This week (this month? this summer? this year?) my mind and heart have been struggling with so many challenges.  Life choices. Changes. Possibilities and options.  None of them ideal, none perfect.  I have been consumed wondering which direction my life will take, how much effort I should put in choosing the course and how risky it is to just wait and see where circumstances lead me.

But then, she died.
And through the course of the day yesterday all of my thoughts cleared out and my heart was left with a hollow empty feeling.  Loss.  Sadness and loss.

(with a baby Jack in April, 2013)

She was a good friend.  Kind, caring, thoughtful.  She had made me many small items over the years and as I hid out with my sorrow and grief in my sewing room last night, I was struck by just how many gifts I have received.  She is all over in there.  Her friendship had permeated my life much more than I thought.  As I accidentally swiped the space bar while texting last night and switched to Japanese input, I paused and remembered how I installed it just for her.

Healing will take time.

But last night when I went to sew, the fabrics didn't look right.  I didn't know how to put them together.  My heart felt heavy.   My energy was blocked and I just sewed until it flowed through my hands and I was free, clear, and open.  Ready to accept new energy.  I let Tao fill all the places where sorrow was hiding and it felt so good to accept and let go.  To trust completely that my hands have the ability to heal my soul.  The universe will guide me.

My spiritual journey is one of the things I have hesitated to write about here, but last night it was so clear.  Making and feeling, trusting and healing are so tied together for me.  All of my quilts are healing quilts.  And that is why I will keep sewing.  Keep moving forward.  Follow Tao and trust in the path I'm on.  Action in non-action.  Things will sort themselves out as they should.

Greater than

Lately I've been feeling a little.. frustrated.  Plans I've made have fallen through, goals I've set don't seem like they'll ever happen-- just one set back after another.  I have been trying to stay positive and cheerful, ever optimistic, but the truth is, all the bumps in the road were taking their toll.
I needed a  pick me up, so I set my timer for 15 minutes, and I just pieced and pieced, cut and ironed, and finally that box of crumbs I was saving for "some day" started to take shape.
Another sewing session after the kids went to bed and I've got a start on something..

I have wanted a mini quilt for the wall of our apartment here in Athens for a looooong time, so I think that's where this piece is headed.  Something to remind me to keep my chin up, something to help me get my creative energy back and centered.  A piece to remind me I am greater than all the crap that's trying to pull me down. 

I feel better.
It needs to be bigger still, but not tonight.

I think I need a bigger design wall..

but that means we'd have to raise the ceiling a few feet...
I've been making steady progress on my Orphan Block Soup quilt.  This morning I finished the pink slabs (they measure roughly 16.5" square):

 Then I paired them with the taupe and made HSTs.  I haven't trimmed them down yet but just threw them up on the wall to see how it was going.  I pulled out the blue circle block from the bottom of a "I'll work on this when I have the time" bin and gave it a good press.  Only one of the circles is appliqued.  I really want to use that block, and I'd love to do up one or three more, but I know me and when I start to add on to quilts with hand appliqued plans, they usually end up back in the bin.

I have tons more of the taupe fabric (I bought some years ago, loved it and went back to buy the rest of the bolt), so I guess I could test out a bunch of options, but that's really not like me.  I think I'll look at it for a while longer, make a decision and dive in.  I'm liking it so far though.  Thoughts?

Pink

So today, with some encouragement from Frederick and Chase, I'm working on this quilt.  I stripped away some of the blocks and a clearer design came into focus..

I've been reading (actually reading, not just looking at the pictures) Sunday Morning Quilts this week and I finally felt ready to build up some slabs of pink with crumbs and strings, in hopes of making giant HSTs (not unlike Lori's quilt, here) and turning this into a cheery medallion of a sort.

The crumb piecing is slow and the kids are needy interested in hanging out with me in the sewing room, but the idea is clear in my mind, so I'm determined to work on this as long as the mood keeps me.

 It's turning into a pretty beautiful Mother's Day-- the big guys are outside gardening, the little guy is asleep.. so it looks like I may get in a blog post AND sewing time this afternoon.  Hope you're just as lucky~
Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there~

(Btw, I finished the baby quilt, it will get it's own post once it's out of the wash.)

My design wall is shrinking

or maybe i should try finishing one project before starting a new one and then they wouldn't have to fight for space and attention up there..

This weekend I went a little berzerk with a new variety of wonky log cabins.. Inspired by the upcoming bee at 15minutesplay, I wanted to work sew through some ideas and see what would happen if I tried "making" strips of color by crumb piecing my logs.  Here's my first:

nice, but I needed another go at it, I wasn't getting what I wanted in terms of the proportions:

I really liked how the fabrics played together in this one, though that bit with the house was a pain in the neck.  I also liked the light-square-in-a-dark-square thing going on once I put it on the design wall.  At this point I was feeling a sort of addiction take hold..so then I made a third:

As much as I wanted to do these, by the third round I was feeling a bit frustrated in the amount of time each "log" was taking to construct.  See, since last year (the start of my Spiderweb piecing, incidentally), I have been sorting my scraps by size and then shape:

• smaller than a Fat Quarter
• strips (separate piles for width of fabric, wider than 3", long and narrow, short and narrow, over 6"..)
• bits (in the same drawer go odd shaped pieces less than 10" square, stacks of same sized squares, baggies of leftover pieces from my own or inherited projects)
• small strips (5" or less)
• crumbs
• small triangles & corners

then there's a tub for unsorted scraps (freshly washed but not ironed, etc), and a big bag at the back of the door for any scraps i found on the floor when I rearranged the furniture-- mostly washed but unsorted. 

These are the bins, shoeboxes & drawers I usually pull from before I go to yardage.  I like having them all sorted by size because I can always find the size I need without having to wade thorough a huge scrap bin of irrelevant fabric when I'm looking for 2.5" squares..  But here I was challenging myself to stick with a specific color... and I found that starting with the crumb box just made me really frustrated.  who wants to sew together 2"x1.5" tiny bricks to make up big logs?  Yeah, they'll look great, but i couldn't find enough of the right shade of blue to make 2 logs the thickness I wanted.  so I pulled out the small strips bin, and then started rooting through the unsorted scrap bin, and for the life of me i can't find the small triangle & corners shoebox and it was driving me nuts!  Now don't get me wrong, I love crumb piecing and I'm a huge fan of the concepts behind the 15minutesplay group.. but this was taking waaaaay longer than 15 minutes, and I was getting more and more frustrated and discouraged that what i wanted/needed wasn't within arms' reach and it was getting tiring having to get up in the middle of every log to search for the right shade/right sized fabric scrap.  All the sudden my exercize in free piecing wasn't very freeing..
So after the third block I gave myself a rest and just zipped through some mindless wonky log cabins with no real thought to color, only choosing logs that were the right size and shape. 

ahhh.  now that was fun and relaxing.
Visually I love what the crumb logs can do for a block, but I think I'll need to do more prepwork and get really organized before I try them again.  maybe I'll spend an afternoon teaching George about colors as we sort crumbs into 10 different tupperware bins..