Creating

Too Many Variations!

Elizabeth E.1 Comment

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.

Creating · Quilts

Crop Circles

Elizabeth E.2 Comments

All day long, when I show up for meals, or to change the laundry, my husband would ask what I was doing.

“Making crop circles,” I would say.

Crop circles–you know, when the-aliens-have-landed-and-want-to-eat-your-brain kind of crop circles.

I’m going downstairs to make dinner, and change the laundry and try to escape the aliens that are eating my brain.

Now having finished the billions of pieces in the center circles, I’m adding the outer edges.  And thinking that in spite of yards and yards and yards of fabric in my house, I still don’t have the exact right piece.  But I think it’s coming along.  I’m hoping to finish this inner section before school starts on Tuesday.  Think I’ll make it?

And maybe it should be considered that that my brain was pretty far gone before the aliens landed with their crop circles, because there are only NINE circles I had to make.  In spite of what I’ve written earlier.  Off to the laundry.

Quilts

SIX!!

Elizabeth E.1 Comment

No, not six quilts.  That wouldn’t be normal, would it.

Six dotty circles!!

I was kind of commenting on how many pieces it takes to my quilty pal, Rhonda, who lives on the Other Coast.

Three arcs per 1/4 block.  Eleven pieces on the larger outside arc, eleven pieces (smaller) on the second arc, and 4 on the center quarter-circle arc. One hundred and four pieces per block.  I haven’t even put the four pieces on the outside of the circles to square it up.  And this is only the center section.

Well, the truth is I was kind of moaning a wee bit to Rhonda, as it seems to go sooo slowly.  But she noted that “It’s also theraputic, isn’t it?”  She’s right.  I can listen to the radio, to podcasts, to novels (my mother and I are listening to Things Fall Apart), and just let my mind wander and stitch.  She called me this morning to tell me she’d dragged her dotty circles quilt pieces out of the closet and had started to work on them again.  I loved the coincidence that I was working on something that she’d already started–great serendipity.

The repetitive motion allows me to think about Gabby Giffords, the tragedy there, the speeches, and how I fit into the equation of more civil conversation.  I don’t really traffic in the political sphere, so it doesn’t affect me directly, but I can practice not rolling my eyes when someone I’m not crazy about is speaking on the TV, or listen more carefully, expanding my “moral imaginations” as President Obama suggested.  I should do these things not just because it’s a good idea, but also because as these dotty circles suggest, what goes around, comes around.  And I want good things to come back around to me.