This was my Monday.

Each of these little pictures shows a different variation of those corners around the crop circles.

Do you ever have days like this the more you try to get ahead the further behind you are?  So, no sewing.  Just cutting.  And one tiny trip to our local fabric store just to see what her section of Kaffe Fassetts had to offer.  That’s how I got the green gradation in the upper left corner to smooth out (thank you Martha Negley!).  Still not happy with the lower right corner, but I’m going to start sewing SOMETHING.

School starts tomorrow, and one reason why today went so slowly was not only because I was working on getting ready for the first day of class, but also because I wasn’t in The Zone.  I used to teach in the Black and White Photo Lab at our local university, and I had this one student who would sometimes stay in the lab for hours, working on his photographs.  Then there were other days, when he’d get all his equipment out, get set up, print for a short time then leave.  “Not in the Zone,” he’d say.  As a creative writing major, I could relate.  There were some days the words would get all twisted up in my head, and the characters would say wooden lines–like they were in some dorky sitcom or something.  Then there were other days, yep–I’d be in The Zone and when I’d finally take a break, three hours would have gone by.

Lately, my life resembles a mosaic of tiny pieces of time, bits and shards and corners where I try to cram in the creativity.  While mosaics are lovely (and certainly one might argue that I am making a fabric mosaic), there are days when I want plates of time.  Whole huge platters of time.

Okay, compared to Red Pepper, I’m awfully slow.  She gets a quilt done in a day, it seems, but here’s what I’ve been able to do in a few days.  Two almost-done wheels!  Yay–only 10 more to go.  I originally thought there were sixteen wheels, but no, only twelve.  That suits me fine.

You know that old adage about how what we quilters do is take perfectly good fabric, cut it into small pieces just so we can sew it up again?  That idea has played through my mind more than once, as I’ve worked on this quilt.

Here’s the board of pieces that I keep next to the sewing machine, painstakingly trying to be random when choosing.  The little machine–the Featherweight–has been pressed into service for this one.  I like my bigger electronic machine, but there’s a different connection to the fabric and the process when I use this tiny sewing machine.  It’s just me, the belts and gears and all those little pieces of fabric.

Okay, the one downer will be when I have to peel all the paper off the backs of these arcs at the end, but Becky Goldsmith and Linda Jenkins of Piece O’ Cake Designs (who designed this quilt) said to use parchment paper.  So I went down to my local Kelly Paper store and bought a ream, choking on the price.  But I really dislike peeling paper off of paper-pieced quilts, so I was ready to try their recommendation.

This quilt is from the book Quilts with a Spin, and is on sale now at their website.  Yes, I see all that applique on the outside of the quilt. This must be my applique year.  The other night at quilt night we were discussing how chaotic our lives seemed to be, and I mentioned that this coming year was the Year of the Rabbit on the Chinese calendar.  To a woman, they all said they were ready for a year of calm and quilt, a rabbit-like year.  Maybe that’s why I’ve inadvertently chosen applique quilts this year–calm, quiet–sewing on my applique while I stream down something from Netflix on our AppleTV.