Priming the Other Well

As we're plodding along toward the end of April I thought I'd take a shot of my progress on the March block of my silk crazy quilt project. I've managed to do a little more stitching on the center patch, but I'm not forcing myself to work on it. I don't want to sew or quilt at all, which feels very weird, but it is what it is. Most nights I just write or journal.

Maybe I have two wells: one for writing, and the other for non-writing creative projects. I can always write, and that's also my go-to for when I feel stressed. I've knocked out a lot of work since the pandemic started, and nearly filled up the sojourn journal. But to do other things I draw inspiration from life, I guess, and life has been pretty grim. Or maybe I'm focusing on the wrong things. Maybe in some way we all are.

Anyway. I'm going to make an effort to look through some quilting books and mags for inspiration, and hopefully get back to the project in the days to come.

Comments

nightsmusic said…

I think sometimes the locked-in-the-house thing gets to people but not everyone remembers that while they're locked in, there are people that have nowhere to be locked in. There's always someone who struggles more than us. And then you have the people who always wanted the chance to sit around and do nothing and now that they have that chance, they're complaining about it. I don't know. I have no answers. I do know I'm not seeing any of those movies in my head right now that I normally write my stories from, but I'll wait until we can get back out and active. They'll come back.

My house has never been cleaner though...

April 20, 2020 at 12:04 PM

Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to...

Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.

Valerean

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