Some Days It All Comes Together . . .

I’ve been struggling with a creative block the last week or so. I had pieces I needed to get done for a retail shop that carries my work and a new commission to design, but nothing seemed to be working. The creative spark had gone into hiding–not a good thing!

Thankfully, I woke up yesterday with an idea. I pulled out my favorite bright spring colors and went to work cutting them up and sewing them back together again in new combinations. One idea led to another and I was able to get two pillow tops completed that I’ll finish this week to take to the shop, plus “Signs of Spring” at left.

This piece started out as a “What if” question. I was looking at some old sketches and I wondered, what if I combined wonky quarter circles with wonky stripes? I use both of these units often, but I’d never combined them into one quilt before. I was thrilled with the result.

In many ways this piece goes back in time for me–it uses lots of patterned fabric instead of solids and I’ll probably quilt it accordingly with a fairly simple design since the stitching won’t show very much. But that’s OK–it got me out of the slump and I see lots of ways I can interpret this design in different fabrics.

The most important lesson here is the importance of going into the studio every day and putting in the time. Pull out the fabrics and look at them, cut some of them up to see what happens, look at old sketches to see what ideas might be percolating that I haven’t explored yet. It’s a good start to the year.

I’ll finish this one and put it up in my Etsy shop hopefully next week–stay tuned!