Spring 2021

June 11, 2021

I am feeling drawn back to this space. Hello. It’s been a little while. I have to admit, while Quiltcon was amazing and uplifting during a very hard pandemic winter, it was also really tiring and exciting, so much so that I needed to take a step back to regroup and recharge. I was on social media less and spending lots of time with my family. We got a sweet puppy to join our 14-year-old dog and suddenly it was nearly summer.

One thing that I never wrote about here was a workshop that I took at the very end of 2020 to choose a guiding word for 2021. I don’t usually make resolutions or try to change on New Year’s Day, so I was skeptical, but it was a really powerful exercise for me. It made me think about who I am, what I want, and who I want to be. So after talking it through with some people in a breakout room and trying a few words on for a day or two apiece, I landed on HONOR. I wanted to honor my inner self and do better to listen to my intuition. I wanted to honor the people I love and honor the humanity of all people. Then I stitched a mini quilt with the word, honoring the work and awesomeness of Chawne Kimber with an improv letter technique that she inspired.

So after Quiltcon, I felt the need to honor a desire for quiet, space, and rest. I took some time to work on some writing, including Q&As for improv quilter spotlights. I hope you’ll check out the interview that I did with Jen Broemel for The Art of Improv here. I’ll also have an improv article in the July issue of Curated Quilts magazine.

During this time I also dove into quilting the top that I had made as a part of Anne and my improv class, which was piecing that took direction from a story. The story was about my anxiety surrounding the presidential election, compounded by the pandemic. Not light stuff, but I’ve found that using my feelings in my quilts has been monumentally helpful. Hand quilting such a big piece gave me a lot of space to think about what had happened, what was happening in the world, and how I wanted to honor myself. The meditation gave me the quiet and space that I needed to work through everything stirred up in the pandemic, the election (and subsequent insurrection), and the stresses of re-opening.

That’s how I ended up going back to therapy. It all felt too big to work through in a quilt, even a big quilt with lots of time. I needed help navigating this ocean of emotion. Usually the quilting process is my therapy, but this was the first time that the quilt told me that I needed more than it could give me. I think that it’s important to share and de-stigmatize getting help when it’s needed.