Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Joy


Oh my God I feel happy!

For the first time since my book arrived at the end of April, 




I came into my study first thing and had a burst of joy.

This is what greeted me...




The new patchwork I started yesterday. 

I am so happy I can't even be bothered to haul up the curtains out of shot, so you can't see how when they shrank I never adjusted the hem of the linings.

You can see there isn't much room for writing, but colour and visuals are everything right now. (Don't exaggerate, Sue, that's patently not true or you wouldn't be writing the blog.)

Anyway...the surprising thing is that when I finished the cot quilt last week for a friend, I swore that it would be the last quilt I ever made and I told Dave to never, ever, let me start another, because I always get so frustrated. Getting the design to my liking drives me nuts, and the last large one I did was hard to assemble because of the way it was designed - the seams were on the bias. Ridiculous! 

That one was an abstract sunset quilt, and it was as painful to make as EVEN WHEN THEY KNOW YOU  was to write. 




So why have I succumbed to a new one?

I have a drawer full of fabric already cut (and btw this is all cut from old clothes or fabric remnants from sewing projects because I am a purist about not buying new fabric for quilts, though I did once succumb to some fat quarters in Hobbycraft (a technical term omg a double bracket, you can see my brain is all over the place with happiness) but have never used them) and I was thinking I would give all the stuff away to some other patchwork nut. 

Then I thought, Actually, there are some fabulous colours in there, maybe I'll just play around with them for a bit. So I did. And I also resolved not to cut another piece, not one. I would use what I'd got already cut, and I would also be ruthless about rejecting fabrics I didn't like, and that includes the fat quarters. 

And this patchwork quilt is to please me and no-one else.

So here I am: engaged in a project I want to get stuck into as soon as I wake up - which is how I always feel when I am writing a comic novel like PLOTTING FOR GROWN-UPS.

I hope you can find something today that brings you joy.


Get a load of that symbolism

p.s. Have you ever read Happenstance by Carol Shields? It's one of my favourite Shields novels and happens to be about a professional quilter and her husband.

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