Back due to "popular demand" :-)

Following two comments left by ForestJane and Sharon, I feel inclined to state to myself and everybody interested: No. I will not go away!

I am currently trying to reorganise myself, my mind, my outlook, in short: my life. Somehow, bad health, pressure - real and imagined - as well as all those little jobs we've got have gotten in the way of mine. Instead of actually doing something with myself and my time, I found myself merely consuming other people's lives.

So give me a little while to sort through the rubble in my head and I should be back in full force.

Thanks for your concern, everyone!

"No" is a complete sentence.

Use it.

That's one piece of advice from Oprah.com that I need to learn to heed!!! I keep on piling stuff on my plate in order to be supportive and not let people down, in the name of "good vibes" etc. And it's sucking me dry.

I also need to learn how to say "no" to the constant lure of the web, on which I spend way too much time instead of actually living my life.

Said, done, logged off ;-)

All Drive & Energy lost ...

... in part because I have been ill pretty much since last November. This is just sucking me dry, my ears are ringing, I'm coughing and just basically feel drained. Looking around all those quilting blogs is only partially a good remedy. It gets my motivation up for some time but then the exhaustion and bad conscience (considering everything else I should be doing) set in. The fact that I acquired a stomach bug on Saturday isn't helping either.

Whenever I finish one quilt, I have a hard time starting a new project. Also, since my planned projects are meant to be machined quilts, there is nothing for me to work on while lounging on the sofa. That's another source of discontent for me. Therefore I decided to start a new knitting project to tide me over. I will frog a cardie I made for Carola and use up the rest of some wool bought on sale ages ago to turn that into an argyle blankie. Don't ask me who the recipient will be, he/she will have to be small because it's not a lot of wool. I'll also frog two other projects I made of the scratchiest wool ever.

And then, one day, I may be motivated enough to cut fabric and get a start on my Noah's quilt. The one, where I calculated the enlargement needed only to find out that the copier couldn't cope with the size. Sigh.

Lay-Out done!

I'm happy to report that I decided on a lay-out for the Noah quilt. It's along the "crazy quilting" line with some appliqué thrown in.

I will appliqué the animal in pairs - it's the Arch after all, then quilt in overlapping circles around each pair. Hopefully, this will be all the quilting that's needed so that the back will be one solid piece of fabric with quilted circles. The animals, one boat and one Noah will be appliqué-ed onto the dark blue fabric, whereas the sun and wave patterned fabric will be used for patches without any appliqué, symbolising the sky and the sea. The border will be made up of the border fabric shown and the whole thing will be 100 cm * 150 cm.

Now I have to take my design to the copy shop, blow it up to 685% of the original ... hm, not really feasible. So: blow up to 137%, copy it once, cut out the individual patches, blow those up to 500% so that I have the templates to start cutting. (What would I do without Excel?!?)

Spring Cleaning!

Now that spring is naigh and Kristin suggested a swap, I finally managed to sort through my stash. The amount of fabric I own boggles my mind, especially given that I have:

(1) a lot that I have ideas for and
(2) a lot that I don't have ideas for.

This is my mess:




As soon as my newly designated arts storage wardrobe is stocked, I shall proudly post the fruits of my hard labour. In the meantime, there are about 25 men's shirts to dissemble as well as a trip to IKEA planned for a sewing table and two roll-ey container thingies.

365 Days of Art

I just discovered Red Shoe Rambling's365 Days of Art. I like the fact that she takes out time everyday to think about her art and really how she perceives her world. There's a lot of discipline going into this. Discipline - my new obsession! Possibly because I feel I am terribly lacking in that department. But I am trying to get better by planning more, prioritising, making time for certain things on certain days.

I hope all this planning will help me find my world and long list of duties less overwhelming one day. Otherwise, I'll just have to muddle through until my kids are semi-adults and off to college - hey, that would be another 16 years. Where was that list again? What did I need to be doing? Ok ...

Moving on: my next project

And no, contrary to popular belief, it is NOT the Quadrature!

It is another baby / toddler quilt for my soon to be godson Harrison. He seems the perfect match for my Noah's Ark fabrics:




But, alas, can you see my problem. It's a panel style design and doesn't lend itself to being used whole (too busy and not enough fabric), but cutting it up will be a nightmare too.

I'm thinking: pairing the animals because that's what Noah's Ark is all about and then assembling the whole thing crazy style. I have no idea yet how to incorporate the star and wave pattern yet, nor do I have a clue as to how to use the border style fabric. Sigh. Maybe I should draw up a design first?

And because it is now officially - meteorologically - spring time: the only flower near or far:


The flower on the Chinese Yuan coin. Beautiful. Because my garden looks like this: