Hello and welcome! This will be my first blog post EVER, and I sincerely hope that the quality improves over time!
It’s taken me a long time to get to this point - to actually sitting down and 'blogging’ about…anything really. I’ve been in quite the slump for the past few months, no inspiration, no drive to create. I think it all stemmed from my attempt at creating something unique, something that was organized chaos. It was more chaos than organized, and I hated it. I couldn’t get it to work the way I had pictured in my head, so I kept cutting up my blocks and putting them back together a different way.
Those disaster blocks are currently hidden in my office under a big pile of scraps. Whenever the pile gets shifted or I’m rummaging through it, I see those blocks and I’m reminded how I ‘wasted’ that beautiful fabric, the hours I put into it.
The next project - same thing. I thought I would use these gorgeous Batik scraps and create this scrappy rainbow flower. Well my petals weren’t symmetrical, and this impacted my design more than I naively thought. I tried to fix it by spreading the petals out, overlapping them, adding a scrappy centre…nothing worked.
The pieces are currently under a pile on my ironing board, hiding from view, less I start cutting them up and putting them back together.
So, all that to say I’ve been stuck behind a Quilter’s Block. Have you ever experienced one? I just sit there and look through patterns, pour over fabric, pick up my scissors and rotary cutter, put them back down…Too indecisive to settle on a pattern, lacking confidence and a plan to start cutting. What to do?
I took my problem to my Quilting Guild. Who better to talk through a quilter’s block than a chat room full of ladies who have been quilting for decades?? They had some great suggestions:
- Leaders and enders
- Organize your scraps
- Cut some fabric scraps into usable pieces/squares
I decided to cut some fat quarters into 5” and 2.5” squares, bag them up, and set them aside for my upcoming retreat. I also flipped through a new pattern book with my 5 year old and let him pick a pattern we could work through together. He picked an adorable (and easy) Halloween pattern, which I happened to have enough material for. So it’s been cut and bagged and it’s ready to take to my retreats. Finally, this past weekend (after a week of sleeping as soon as my kiddos were asleep), I picked out 3 patterns that I wanted to do and headed out to my local fabric shop. They were having a SALE (my favourite word) on precuts, and the patterns I chose coincidentally used precuts!
I left the store feeling energized and ready to begin again. I keep picturing the fabrics in my head, the patterns, thinking about how to cut the fabric, colours for thread, and quilting patterns. I’d lost that lovin’ feeling but it’s back! At least for now.
I attend my first ever quilting retreat this coming weekend. I have no idea what to expect, what supplies to take (grateful for the list my guild sent!), and no gauge of how much I’ll actually be able to get done, but I’m excited. Excitedly anxious maybe. I hope to share some pictures of progress over the weekend, and will hopefully have a fully finished quilt in a few weeks time (binding and all)!
Stay tuned for some binding posts. I detest binding. I have not found a method I prefer. I’ll chronicle my quest for the easiest and most eye-pleasing binding methods in posts to come!