carrying on with the quilting

Two posts in one day? Say what?? This is a result of two things- needing to clear my phone of photos (so I am posting them here so I do not lose them) and wanting to share about something I want to do after I share the latest quilts and I want my new goal/project to begin on July 1.

So. Like I said earlier, I've been quilting away the sorrow of missing my husband, and as it turns out, I can sure fill some time with fabric stitching. I have been trying to focus on making things that truly make me happy, and that is generally a combination of beautiful fabric and fairly straight forward design. Let's just say no one has ever described my quilting style as overly complicated :)

After I made the custom quilt I mentioned here, I wanted to make another but infusing pink into the blue.

My third time making this design, and I still love it. 

Pretty sure I will be making it again soon, because it just makes me smile.

Simple quilting to echo the frames, with one whimsical line you can see in the next photo.

While making this quilt, it was especially stormy, and while I love a good summer storm, the grayness was playing with my mood. So one night I decided to cut into a couple charm packs of Heather Bailey fabric I'd been keeping for a long time, thinking sewing with sunshiney fabric would be the equivalent of being in sunshine. I was right about that, but wrong about thinking the charm packs were in tact. Halfway through the patchwork rows, I realized I was missing many squares and the quilt would be very small. So I set it aside.

I came back to it a couple weeks ago and decided to make it work, I folded my rectangle of squares together in half and in half again and then sliced it at an angle. I added a thick sashing in Kona Snow to all 4 sides and then stitched the piece I cut off back on. And what I had was a patchwork diamond, framed in snow, with more patchwork in each corner. Still slightly small, I added another border of Snow. None of this would happen if I planned and created like MOST people, but since I make on the fly, I am constantly in 'okay, so what can be plan B' mode. Which is a pain in my backside, but.....I actually like how this quilt turned out. So....... Plus, I am old set in my ways, so I should just embrace it, right?

Heather Bailey fabric sure is good for the soul.

I wasn't sure what to make of all the negative space, so I added some big stitch hand quilting in pink Valdani Pearl Cotton, size 12, that I grabbed from Sunny Day Supply.

I went with a scrappy binding because I could not decide. This quilt is so sunny and delightful. It's in my shop here. 

And finally a simple patchwork quilt in pinks and grays. In my opinion, simple patchwork never goes out of style. 

all or nothing as far as quilting goes

I have always been like this, but it still catches me off guard how I can go without making for quite some time, and then I make almost manically. It's like my mind decides I need a pause, and when it hits play again, boy does it. When my husband is gone and I miss him tremendously, quilting helps. It busies me, settles my mind some, and lets me feel productive and creative and that helps ease the burden of missing him.

So here is what I have been making as of late. It all started with the first custom quilt.

This sweet customer purchased a quilt I made last year for his granddaughter (you can see that quilt here) and asked me if I could make on just like it for his new grandson.

I mimicked the design, just had the focal square be on the left instead of the right.

There is nothing more humbling to me than someone coming back to me, asking me to make another quilt. 

I loved how the blues played off each other in this quilt. And stripey bindings forever!!

This next quilt.....I LOVE everything Alexia Abegg designs and her Sienna line is no exception. I could not wait to make something with it!!! 

Big, chunky strips of beautiful fabric. The focus gets to be on the color play and the fabrics and this is a design I will make again. 

I love simple design. 

I really enjoyed quilting this one. This one is available in my shop! 

Still feeling blue, I started on this one.

My take on a classic design. Big ol patchwork and scrappy low volume fabric in the background. 

I decided to not quilt the star, something I don't usually do, and instead framed it. The result was a drapey, sort of puffed star.

I have had Nicole's Stack Quilt pattern for a bit, and I guess I was waiting for the color scheme to hit me. In this case, I based the color palette on the Leah Duncan backing I wanted to use, and voila!

The Stack Quilt pattern is simple and quick and speaks to my simple, plenty of negative space loving heart!! This is the second pattern of Nicole's I have made - you can see the Peak Quilt I made here - and I love how simple they are. This coming from a girl who rarely makes from a pattern, or at least, sticks to a pattern. 

Look at that gorgeous backing!! 

Quilting this was super fun!! It is also listed in my shop!! 

I have a few more quilts I have recently finished, along with some in progress, and my GLORIOUS #pinkquiltbee2018 blocks that have been arriving!! So much to share. 

my own curated quilt

Have you seen any of the amazing little quilts popping up in your social media feed, all using color and a design element linking them, and hash tagged with #curatedquilt ?

I have been seeing them for some time, and every time I see one, I get the itch to join in and make something, but talk myself out of it.

First, about Curated Quilts. The challenge is fairly simple. They give you a color palette and a design element and the only real steadfast rule is that the mini be between 10 inches square and 16 inches square. The colors described are to be used all, or in part, and are not necessarily Kona colors. What this means is that we don't necessarily have to rush out and buy fabrics. We can use what we have to take part in this.

Here is the inspiration picture.

Image found on Curated Quilts post Triangle Mini Quilts

What first caught me was the triangle aspect. Geese and triangles are one of my favorite blocks. And one of my favorite things to do with triangles is soften them up.

For example, with this quilt below, I let the sharp geese be the focus, but I created a background with mixed fabrics, hoping to relax the lines a bit.

I thought a lot of people might be doing geese and I challenged myself to thing of other ways you can soften the angles of the triangle. So I came up with curves. 

I omitted the orange from the challenge inspo photo. I didn't really have a solid that matched, or a print that read as a solid, and I didn't want a print to take away from the vision I was working towards.

I decided that even though the star was the triangle shape, to continue to soften it, I quilted it following a curve.

I got out my quilting marker (I use a blunt edged tracing wheel that my wonderful quilty friend Brooke sent me!!) and was just about to mark the curves when I decided to not do that and instead embrace the wonkiness of "organic" quilting-- my fancy name for quilting without guides, a method that ends up wonky and looking very human rather than straight and precise.

I was struggling with binding color and how to bind when I stepped off the "what if I did xxx" deep end! I happened to look over and see a lime green thread in my thread basket- it was a recent gift in a swap I did. I was thinking 'how can I use this??' when I remembered a post about binding I read several years ago. The post can be found on Jolene's blog here . In the post, she mentions several methods of binding and talks about zig zag stitching the binding to the front. I have always been intrigued but have yet to give it a go. It flashed in my head and I thought it would be perfect for this mini because the lime thread would highlight the binding stitches and incorporate the triangle shape in an unexpected way.

So here it is!! My Curated Quilts mini quilt, that I am lovingly calling Soft Angles. It finishes at precisely 16 inches square and taught me a lot of about challenging myself to try new things and trust myself. I waste so much creative time trying to come up with something truly unique and original that I talk myself out of things or do not even begin because I don't want to be redundant. I am working on that, and this mini was like a great big jump forward!!

from scratch, again

We took North Carolina license plates off our car this week and replaced them with Alabama plates. That felt like a plot twist.

This week was hard. The excitement of moving and all the newness fizzled some, and we were left with a somewhat flat, overflowing glass of reality. Being in a new town, not knowing a soul (though one of my very favorite friends is a town above me, just about a 35 minute drive away THANK THE LORD), and beginning again from scratch.

Well, not entirely from scratch. We have each other. And that is a lot. But also.....

Also why I think sending them off to school, each to their new classrooms, felt so unnerving and raw for me. They had to go off on their own, without a sibling beside them, without me behind them, and it felt scary. For some of them. Probably all of them, actually, some just hide it better. And for me.

For me.

As loud as they are and as crazy as they make me, I always feel better when we are all together. The whole lot of us. Even with the fighting and again the loud.....it is for sure worth mentioning twice because we are already loud, but a big house without rugs or carpet and not very furnished and I feel like I am in a shout tunnel trying to find quiet so I can work and basically just yelling over them FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING WILL YOU PLEASE LOWER YOUR VOICES AND STOP RUNNING!!

Back to me not wanting to let them go. I really didn't want to let them go and considered keeping them home longer. But I knew the longer we waited the harder it would be, and those questions in my heart would not go away even if I allowed them to miss a couple extra days of school. Will they find friends? Will people be nice? Will they feel welcomed? Will they struggle? Will they know they are loved? Did we - DID I - make a bad decision moving here?

Y'all. Let me just say.....I love adventure and fresh starts and learning new places and new people and new ideas and new cultures. But I also feel very deeply and my feelings often fill every space of me, and I understand that my children aren't like me in the chase-after-adventure respect.  So I carry the weight of my children's "will they"s with me and it has been overwhelming.

Also. A terrible trait, one of several, of mine, is that I am a second-guesser of my own decisions. My husband reminded me today that I have done this with every. single. move. So it is not unique to our move to Alabama, but that doesn't comfort me much. Should we have stayed in North Carolina? Was this a good decision? Did I do the wrong thing?

But even with all the hushed second-guessing thoughts springing to mind at every turn, I am also a jump anyway-er.

I feel strongly that we should not NOT make a decision because we are scared or apprehensive. Life is short. There is a whole world filled with people and places and I feel like we were meant to not stay in one place. (If you are the opposite and feel roots are better to plant, I think that's amazing. Sometimes I wish I was like that, too. So please don't feel I am cutting down a different way of thinking.)  So I find myself very much on team 'jump anyway', despite the inner turmoil that often follows the jumping. And I am hoping that when my kids see me jumping that they inch a little closer, content to follow my lead, so they can jump too.

And I am hopeful that what we are jumping into is welcoming and warm water that envelops us. And not the opposite.

So. We made it to Friday. Two days of school. Today was better than yesterday, and I will take progress, no matter how small. It will take time, I know. Change is hard and it is a process that is not likely to be OKAY WE ARE ALL ADJUSTED AND SO HAPPY TO HAVE MOVED overnight.

Talking to a friend tonight, she said "So do you love it?". And I was kind of at a loss.

Do I love it here? Wellllllll. Honestly, no. Not yet. I love my house. I love the sunshine. I love that 49 degrees was freezing here and people were cursing winter for making them wear jackets. I love that I am down the road from my amazing friend. I love that we are ten minutes from the beach. I love that there is a Starbucks drive through 6 minutes from my house, and I love that every morning I have stepped outside I have been greeted by birds singing in a new season.

But I left behind friends, AMAZING friends, a big beautiful unspoiled view of the sky, familiarity - the feeling of home. Finding your people, your place, your spot that makes you feel at peace, that all takes time. And I am not prone to falling in love fast.

So here we are. Starting over, from not quite scratch, praying my kiddos find friends and goodness, wanting to slow the days before my husband deploys, and hoping that each day sinks us further into that "this is where we were meant to be" feeling.