WIP

I Am A Work in Progress

Elizabeth E.5 Comments

I hardly know how to pick up a rotary cutter, let alone sew a seam, and find the new thing that I am capable of creating.

I am a work in progress this year.

I just had cancer surgery, a sure-fire way to whack me upside the head and force a look at the musty, over-stuffed closet of a life I’d been leading.  Too much shoved in, with the door slammed shut. A veritable chifforobe of clutter.

I had a birthday–Happy #58 to me, and also to Krista, my microbiologist blog-buddy (although I don’t know how old she is).

While trying to locate the surface of my ironing board today, I found detritus from two recent trips: Montreal in October and New York City in November.

I fell in love with Julia Ritson’s blog, a habit I could indulge while haunting my bed while in recovery, and especially this recent collage she made of a city (I asked for permission to post it here).  I think I could never make something this intriguing with hidden layers, ideas, textures.  I sometimes feel like I’ll never make anything else again. When I feel like this, it’s just empty inside.

My mother consoles me by saying it’s an after-effect of anesthesia (yet I’m ready to be back who I was).  I can feel the pull to colors, shapes, cutting, cloth, but resist.  It takes too much energy, and there was that syllabus I had to write.  Luckily my husband gave me Ringle and Kerr’s latest quilt book, so I consoled myself with their transparency brilliance.

I’m a crazy quilt, a wonky log cabin, a beginner’s Shoo-fly block with points cut off.

Talking exhausts me.

Writing feeds me, but I don’t spend enough time doing that because I’m talking.

A day of quiet restores me.  I hope this quirk doesn’t persist much longer because most everyone I love lives at the other end of the phone line, and talking is the only way we have to keep in touch.

I haven’t bought this year’s diary and my days are slipping away.  I didn’t realize it was Wednesday until I saw Cindy’s post about her fabulous quilt.  (Can I use her Work in Progress for Lee’s blog?  Didn’t think so.)

I’m in pretty good spirits today as I went to Target for a shower cap, Michael’s for medium treat bags, and Costco for dinner rolls.  They didn’t have the rolls done yet (“40 more minutes”) and I suddenly realized that I was crashing into a wall of tired, so pushed my empty cart back out into the parking lot, drove home and took a nap.  Even though I feel like a pathetic dishrag at times, I am making progress in recovery not only from the cancer blippiness but also from the bronchitis and double ear infections.  “Sick, sick no more” should be a slogan on my T-shirt.

I’m a riddle, a collection of wishes, a basket of fears, and a quilt without her borders.

Things I’m Working On (Quilt-wise):
(I would have photos, but the camera batteries died.  In all three cameras.)
Getting the borders on the autumn quilt
Deciding whether or not to take all the Christmas quilt squares off the wall, or to try to sew them up.
Figuring out how I want to spend my Fat Quarter gift card from my son
Lollypop Trees
Friendship Quilt

Getting the stitches out of ME–this Friday.  The margins are clear.  All is well.  Now to find the brain cells.

And that beginner’s block?  It was my mother’s, when she was a girl and it’s about 75 years old.  It’s one of my treasures.

Many thanks to Lee, who threw me this lifeline of a deadline today.  Check out her lovely bee block!

Happy Old Year Ending (Wrap-up) · Something to Think About

Happy New Year 2012: List of Plans

Elizabeth E.6 Comments

I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions.  I figure if January was the only time I turned over a new leaf, I’d be in trouble.  I like to think about things in a new way all the time, which gives to a very big habit of blog strolling to see what other new things are out there.  Or like my daughter said to me today, “Now that you’re still convalescing from your surgery, it’s time to do Pinterest!”  I think that might be a hole I’d never climb out of as it would be way too alluring.

But January is my birthday month (as an adult, as a mother, you are allowed a whole month) so I would like to Make Some Plans.  Not resolutions.  For if these plans don’t come to fruition, my pride won’t be wounded.  Like those stand-by passengers on airplanes today, any unfinished plans will just be carried forward to the next List of Plans.

Some Quilting Plans for 2012

1. Make some Cross-X Blocks. I want to do wordy fabrics in the backgrounds somewhere, in order to take advantage of my stash of wordy fabrics. (Photo from janejellyby.)

2. Basket Blocks.  I collected, in my earlier days, an entire group of food fabrics.  (That’s the first batch of selvages I cut off and sent to Cindy of Live a Colorful Life.)  My goal has always been to make a quilt of basket blocks with these fabrics. (Photo from Gray Cat Quilts.)

3. Get back to work on my Lollypop Tree blocks.  I started them last year, and should have followed the advice I saw on several blogs, which was to lay out all the fabrics for each block all at once.  Then I could be sewing them all year long.

4. Get the borders on this harvest/autumn quilt before autumn comes again.  I need need need to get that stack of fabrics tucked back up on the shelves and I won’t as long as the border isn’t on this one.  Like most things quilty, I am over-thinking these borders, but I don’t feel like a plain 4″ all around would suit this quilt.

5. Play around with the QR code quilt idea.  Don’t know if it will pan out into anything, but I just like thinking about it.

5. Spend the Fat Quarter Shop Gift Certificate my son and his wife gave me for Christmas.  I have this in mind, although any colorway will do:

6. Leave time to quilt and listen to audio books in between work (grading & teaching), church service, spending time with friends and family.  I read a piece by Pico Iyer today in the New York Times and he talked about the necessity for quiet space, free from distractions, away from the constant flow of noise and information.  I think many of us struggle with the demands of the things I’ve listed above, plus trying to be a thoughtful and interesting blogger as well as a good member of the blogging community, in responding to our favorite blogs.

It sometimes can be too much, can’t it?  When this happens, I try to get around to comment on those bloggers who I have a special connection to, whose ideas have really sparked me to be a better quilter.  I also try to include a few new ones occasionally in order to keep my ideas fresh, and to sample what’s out there.  I can’t comment on everyone’s blog, although at times I have left the quilting behind in order to attend to the rigors of commenting.  Not a good trade-off, as the comments get more and more brief and tend to be “drive-by” blurbs that don’t really show my appreciation for what I’m reading, and for the creativity I do want to notice, and to allow me to create my own online community with those who interact with what I’m doing.

It’s a balance, and Iyer quotes Marshall McLuhan: “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Here’s hoping this new year allows us all to enjoy the fruits of our labors,  allowing us to fully reconnect with who we are in the process of quilting.

Happy New Year!

Something to Think About

Crazy Quilt, Crazy Life

Elizabeth E.8 Comments

“Crazy Quilt,” by Tess Taylor

(picture of antique crazy quilt by Carolyn Aune)

Our grandma taught her nine-patch, strip-piecing,
how to measure, how a fabric falls.

My sister heard her and came out a maker.
She garners fabrics, hoards a jumble-pile.

She’s skilled enough to half ignore geometry,
to spread out winter evenings

and ignore us. Obbligato with the treadle’s whir, she leans
into a tag-sale apron, Japanese cottons,

cambrics dyed one summer in the yard.
She likes found fabric, asymmetries:

She’s taught herself to work by instinct
basting light to dark, canary

to an emerald paisley. We all watch
her coverlets grow wider.

Her expression’s almost revenant
as she rips, re-hems, and irons, mouth

full of pins, cloth billowing around her.
Tonight she sliced our mother’s raw silk saris.

Dark ribbons bloomed and I admired
her fierce concentration to resettle

all her scraps at staggered angles,
the way her body stores her making,

how she destroys each thing she’s salvaged
to harvest it as her exploding star.

***********************

An explanation:  The week before Christmas, I was diagnosed with malignant melanoma–a small spot on my leg that threatened to turn my world upside physically, yet did upend my world emotionally and mentally and in most every other way.  Before this story gets too scary, I should say that I am now home from surgery, convalescing, finding that reading poems on Poetry Daily is about all my anesthesia-fogged-in-mind can comprehend, besides feeling really grateful that the the surgeon excised a chunk of my leg to take out the offending spot and that the adjoining lymph node came up clear — free of cancer.

But it kind of puts a dead stop to things such as preparations for Christmas, as I harbored this little horrid secret away from everyone, not willing to go thunk into their holiday preparations, wanting instead to read only about sweetness and light and those tender feelings that I treasure so about this time of year.  So I went silent, instead, the cloth laying idle on the table while I shuttled to lab appointments and doctor’s appointments. Silent, here as well, on this blog, with pictures of holiday cheer a hopeful substitute for the writing.  (I did write about it on my other blog.)

The night we found out the news and the big awfulness of it all hovered over us like a black shroud was the same night we had decided to celebrate our Christmas (we were headed off to Ohio to my son’s for the actual holiday).  I cooked a full fancy meal, and we sat savoring the good food, the chaotic news, the uncertainty, the tenderness and love we felt for each other in our joined journey together as man and wife and wondered how we would ever bear it if the news should be bad.  Turned out two weeks later that it wasn’t, that I can anticipate many more happy years of seeing oncologists and dermatologists and that now I check over every spot on my husband’s arms and back like a mother looks at her child’s face, searching to make sure only happiness is written there, easing away gloom and fright by attention.

So poetry, short and rich and condensed in word and meaning, is my companion tonight and I found this poem which celebrates what we do as quilters: harvesting those quilts which are sown from destruction.  I felt it echoed my somewhat somber mood, as I struggle to make sense of things, still too fresh from surgery to sit (it hurts) and finger the cloth.  We cannot know how the bumps in our roads will shape us, inform us, or teach us, but I hope to have many more days cutting and sewing, willing my body to “store [my] making.”

I wish you all a Happy New Year. Good things are ahead.  Good quilts are in our future.

Take care.