Waiting

Wait for your result..

It is for us to make the effort.
The result is always in God's hands.                               - Mahatma Gandhi

I love this quote that I found today.  It is a sort of confirmation of what I have experienced this past six-plus months.  I have finally finished a quilt top that I was asked to make.  It has been a real  hardship to make, and I am still trying to work out why it was such a hard quilt top to make. I certainly had to  make an effort.  Nothing in this quilt top went together easily.  But after all the effort, it's finished, and I hope Jenny didn't mind the very long wait.  I don't have a picture of it finished, but of it spread out waiting for the final sewing up. So, it's not a Work in Progress, which is what WOW is supposed to be for, but I really felt it was an appropriate one for the day, as it has been a WIP for such a long time!  It was started on a Bernina 440QE, but half the small 4 1/2 square in a square blocks were finished on a Singer Featherweight, and they were far more easily pieced accurately on this lovely little machine.  I ended up piecing them all together for the centre square of the quilt by tacking them all by hand.  Otherwise I just couldn't get the seams to match up.  Then piecing the larger blocks to this I had to tack them by  hand again.  And I pulled out so many of the blocks that ended up not square or inaccurate.  I am so happy to have finally finished this quilt!! The final result will rest with the person Jenny is getting to do the quilting of course...and hopefully God will help make it perfect!

Don't Regret...

"Don’t regret any of your past because at the time it felt right and made you smile." - Anna Dickson

I have been looking at fabrics online, needing some fabrics for the quilt I'm working on now, and this range (Lily Ashby's Tradewinds range), seen on Hancock's page made me smile.  It was instant transportation back to the 60s.  I doodled these kinds of images, I wore these patterns and colours.  I loved being in the midst of that wonderful hippie era.  I wore headbands.  I painted flowers on my face.  I went barefoot.  I loved Indian caftan style dresses in wonderful oriental patterns. It was so good to be alive.

Seeing this fabric came hot on the heels of watching a cable movie yesterday about Woodstock.  All that amazing music. Jefferson Airplane's album "Surrealistic Pillow" was the first album I ever bought for myself..loved 'Somebody to Love' and 'White Rabbit'.  Iconic of that era.

So much that was good...the space age, and after the walk on the moon we all believed we'd soon be tripping space like we now fly from continent to continent. Flowers painted on my face.  Discarding shoes I went barefoot everywhere, I wore headbands, Indian kaftans, silver jewellery, went to crazy parties, danced under blue-light.

Not that then was the be all and end all, Now is great too.  I love so much about now.  The internet, e-books, smartphones, digital cameras, cheap air travel, my lovely modern sewing machine, the availability of so much fabric, the sheer wonder of the availability of the whole world in one way or another.  And so saying, despite now being in Dubai, it's actually only 15 flying hours away from home, half a world away.

But looking back to the 60s, it made me smile.  It felt so very right at the time.  And it makes me smile now...and White Rabbit is playing in the background.

“Gentleness towards self and others makes life a little lighter.”

Which is as it may be, but I think I might have been somewhat too gentle with myself of late...and as a consequence have a backload of things to be done.
However, I have been working on a number of things, and one project which I will link to Esther's WOW for Wednesday are some basket blocks I have been making, from Sue Daley's basket template (Patchwork with Busyfingers).  they're an inch or so bigger than a Dear Jane block, and a lot easier! I try to finish a minimum of three a day, doesn't always happen, but I have completed just over 50 now, only 148 to go! They're kind of addictive, but as I'm making them using Sharon Schamber's applique stabiliser as the backing for the blocks it's a kind of labour intensive process.  If I'm not sewing them, I'm preparing them, and they seem to take up a lot of time! Good thing I'm enjoying making them.  I'm hoping to incorporate some other pieced blocks with the basket blocks, and see those little leaf shapes that get cut out of the basket...? I've gone truly mad and I make them into leaf shapes for appliqueing too...I think I'll use them in a border on the quilt.  This is one quilt that I can't wait to get finished...and having decided to try to make three a day, the end is visible...just.

Doing Nothing

"Let my doing nothing when I have nothing to do become untroubled in its depth of peace like the evening in the seashore when the water is silent." - Rabindraganath Tagore (1861-1941)

I've been thinking of how one goes about accomplishing this.  I'm great at doing nothing, but not with an untroubled depth of peace!  A wonderful goal to aim for...achieved by having every skerrick of one's work and obligations up to date.  The peace of achieving that... which means, not doing nothing.

Paradigms

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."  William Shakespeare

I have been thinking this week about what makes for happiness in ones life.  There is a situation in my life that has caused a lot of personal unhappiness for a very long time.  It hasn't gone away, doesn't seem to change, so the unhappiness has lingered, a kind of background, or undercurrent to my life.  Then on Sunday, something happened to change it.  The situation didn't change.  I did.  I suddenly saw it in a new light.  And suddenly I felt the unhappiness lift, it wasn't a burden any more.  I know the situation will always be there unless something outside my life changes it.  I can't change it.  But my thinking about it changed, I had a paradigm shift, an epiphany of sorts, and as a consequence I've felt light, and happy all week.  And more loving and accepting.  And it's all about paradigms, or as William said so eloquently, 'nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so'.

As for the paradigm I see in the current applique I am working on...it keeps changing...I had it fairly firmly set  in my mind what I was going to add to the central applique block  (that I started in a workshop with Sharon Schamber) and blogged about here last week.  I was going to add a sawtooth inner border then some more applique, but I discarded that.  I have been busy making clamshells for the past several days,  and now that I have enough to lay out and look at, I'm not sure if that's what I really want now after all.  Down one side I have put two layers of clamshells, green nearest the centre and the pinks on the outside, at the top there is a single row of alternating pinks and greens.  I rather think, that if I go with the clamshells that the double border looks best.  Then would come another border of applique.  But first I have to decide if I want clamshells there at all.  What do you think?  Another idea for it is to put the centre on point and put more applique in the triangles that would be need to be added, then put the clamshells after that.  I hate it when quilts just grow minds of their own, but don't speak plainly!  And the visual distraction of the quilt off to the side doesn't help the photo of the clamshells and the applique either! :-D

Paradise

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." 
— Jorge Luis Borges

Saw this quote on Google today, and it resonates with me.  I have books everywhere, on everything.  In front of me right now there is Kaffe Fassett's Spectacular Shapes, Brian Tracy's (a business writer) 'Focal Point', a Country Home Ideas magazine, and that's just on the desk in front of me.  On and in my bedside table there are piles of books, next to the bed are more, and the bookshelves aren't full, they're overflowing...and I cull books whenever I can.  But somehow the piles remain...

And I make resolutions not to buy any more, but to just borrow them from the library or the guild, or my cottage group...but guess what, sometimes I just have to have the book I borrowed, or I can't wait long enough for the library to bring it in, or it's one I just absolutely positively can't live without, like Barb Adams and Alma Allen's recent book 'Country Inn'...I carry that one with me everywhere at the moment, it makes me itch to sew, and to cook.  The pictures are gorgeous, the quilts and their fabrics are beautiful.  

But first I have to finish things, like last week's applique block which is on the sewing machine at present, and two quilts waiting pin-basting and quilting, and all the redwork blocks I'm embroidering hoping to get them done by Christmas.  So, this Wednesday, what I'm most working on, are the redworks...

Potential

"Every great (wo)man has become great, every successful (wo)man has succeeded, in proportion as (s)he has confined his(her) powers to one particular channel". Orison Swett Marden (from Brian Tracy's 'Focal Point')

I was lucky last week to get a cancellation in a one day workshop with Sharon Schamber, on her machine applique methods.  If ever there was a great example of Marden's quotation above, it is Sharon Schamber.  She has most certainly focused all her talents in one amazing direction.  The quilts and blocks that she brought for us to see were most amazing.  Her workmanship, her skill, her artistic talent, are all phenomenal, and it is evident why she has won so many quilt shows and awards.  She is a really wonderful example of the power of focus, to unearth and meet one's potential.
I came home and looked at all my various things that I'm interested in and do, some complete, some half complete, but nowhere do I see the focus that is apparent in Sharon's work, in her perfection.  She inspired me to complete the sample piece we started on Friday as soon as possible, so I have been working on it in all of my spare time. I have completed the preparation (the photo below), now I have to do the easy part, the sewing.  Then I plan to make borders on the sides and an appliqued row above and below the central panel, to complete a baby quilt.
And I'm determined to aim for some of the perfection that was evident in Sharon's work.  Not for show, but for my own satisfaction, to see if I can begin to achieve some of the possible potential that is currently hiding in my love of working with fabric.