Postcard made from felted wool; needlefelted acrylic-wool yarn, wool roving, and novelty yarn; and seed beads

Back to quilting

It seems like ages since I quilted anything. Yesterday, I paid a visit to the sewing room, looking for something little to ease my way back into creating. A fabric postcard was sitting on the cutting board, started sometime in March when I finally broke out the Embellisher. The base is a Goodwill find: a grey wool skirt that felted nicely. An acrylic-wool blend chunky yarn needle felted wonderfully onto the wool. I added a novelty yarn that also felted better than I expected. I free-motion quilted around the novelty yarn, with mixed results. I used Aurifil thread in the bobbin, which I love to use in the bobbin and needle when piecing. However, I can't seem to get the tension set correctly when I use Aurifil in the bobbin with any other kind of thread in the needle.

After quilting the postcard, I added some seed beads to the design, which makes me think of a picture of new stars. I pulled out a couple of drawers of beads from the nuts-and-bolts-type of storage unit and proceeded to dump an entire drawer of seed beads all over the plush carpet. Arrrgggh. A few choice words and a lot of picking later, I had most of the beads back in the drawer. That is, until I reached for it again to dump a few more in. Result: beads all over the floor again. At that point, I went to the linen closet, grabbed the vacuum, and smilingly sucked up the blasted beads. The experience just reinforced that old lesson: Don't sweat the small stuff. Too bad I hadn't thought of that before I started picking up the beads...

Back from vacation

We're back from vacation, tanned (them) and slightly sunburned (me), and ready for a few days to get back into the groove of things. Why is it that at the end of a vacation, you're so tired that you need another one to recuperate? We went on a week-long Disney cruise with our four- and six-year-old that we had planned a year ago (the result of a company award that my husband received--no way would I have been convinced to spend that much money out of pocket). Well, after 12 months of obsessive planning on my husband's part, the vacation came off without a hitch. Of course, the kids came down with bronchitis the week before we left, causing panic and fears of quarantine, but the antibiotic came through! We sprang the vacation news on the kids the morning we left, after a week of surreptitious packing and errands.

The kids had a blast on the ship. Simple things made their trip: getting to sleep in a pull-down bed, eating ice cream whenever they liked, playing on the beach, staying up late. I loved the sound of the ocean, the beautiful views, and the peace of sitting on the veranda and reading. I could, however, have taken a pass on the seasickness... Luckily, that didn't last long, and Mark came armed to the teeth with every motion sickness remedy available.

I brought along my sketchbook, which got no use since I forgot to pack the colored pencils in the last-minute suitcase stuffing. The digital camera and Mark's 35-mm got a workout, though. At least one picture seems worth translating into cloth. Once the laundry is done and the piles of stuff are put away.

Ahhh, the closet...very appealing to my occasional obsessive-compulsive tendencies. And the source of most of the stuff that appears all over the place in the other pictures.  

More mess. 

Room 'o doom from the doorway, which can't be entered without removing piles of stuff and another view from the door.  

Thanks to Gevalia

It must have been that large mug of Gevalia Dark Roast at 3:00 p.m. yesterday that did it. I was so wired last night that I couldn't drift off to sleep. Somewhere around midnight, I began thinking about what I had written yesterday about fear. That emotion has characterized so much of my life.

Growing up in rural western Pennsylvania and the youngest of six children by many years, I spent much of my time alone. It amazes me now to think of the things I did routinely that I would never allow my children to do now. Either my parents had blind faith in the universe, or they were just too overworked and tired to worry that much about my activities. One of my favorite things to do as a little girl of eight or nine was to walk the railroad tracks, sometimes with my elder sister and cousin (when they deemed me acceptable company) or most often by myself. One section of the tracks traveled over a bridge, if you could call it that. The water far below glimmered through the gaps between the trestles, and I don't really remember any rails along the sides. Walking the length of the bridge seemed to take an eternity, and I was always sure I could hear a train whistle somewhere in the distance. I wrestled with both the fear of loosing my footing while hurriedly stepping from one trestle to the next and the fear of moving too slowly. By the time I reached the end of the bridge, looking over my shoulder along the way, I was convinced that I had just barely escaped death by speeding locomotive, even if there wasn't a train for miles. The fear I experienced on the bridge wasn't the disabling kind I've slogged through so many times since. It was exhilerating, challenging me to do something that may have been foolhardy, but that also resulted in a bolstering of my confidence once I completed the task. There's a quilt in those train trestles...

The Room of Doom

I finally made it back into the sewing room, although only for as long as it took the kids to play in the bath water. It's been weeks, it seems, since I've done anything remotely creative, mainly because the sewing room has been a total pit and I've lacked the focus or motivation to get it together, then actually launch into a project. I know, I know, it seems like everyone with a quilting blog has caught the spring cleaning bug, but this has been brewing for me since January, when the sewing room experienced what looked like projectile vomiting. I'll post pictures taken to shame myself into at least creating a path to the sewing cabinet. After about a week's worth of dragging assorted bins, books, and do-dads out of the room, and reorganizing the fabric inside the closet, I can actually see the floor. Okay, so the perimeters of the room are still stacked with stuff, but I'm out of space in the closet...

The other challenge to getting started is my mood: angry, depressed (as in clinical), frustrated. So far, this has been a bumpy year for my marriage (okay, so what year hasn't??), and tensions are running high. Add to this stew a heaping helping of fear (of failure, change, divorce, my work not being good enough), and most of my output has been in the form of tears.

Part of the anger, I know, is disapointment with myself. I'm furious that I haven't made time for art, or any other theraputic activity that would improve my outlook. I'm frustrated that I haven't produced anything, especially since I was invited to exhibit some things at an art event at the end of April.

There's currently a discussion on the Quiltart list about this same problem. It's good to know that I'm not the only person who's caught on the anxiety hamster wheel. Now to get the damn thing to slow down a little. Wait a minute, what if I just run a little slower? Or just jump off of it altogther; that is, choose peace over anxiety. As corny as it sounds, I've been praying a little every day, asking for help with the anger and depression. Letting go is something I've never done well.

So, I have a relatively ordered sewing room. I'm working on the chaos in my head and heart. Now to dive into the work.