It's all about the timing

My Lavender quilt-in-progress....

How now, suddenly, my heart is drawn to the Lavender EPP quilt when not long ago I didn't think I'd ever finish it. (And now that translates to other things, like certain novel series, Enran ahem....)

Over five years ago I started basting shapes for Jodi Godfrey's Lavender quilt. It's from her book The Seedling Quilts, and in Godfrey's pattern, the EPP is surrounded by negative space. I first made the pattern with her Seeding Quilt sampler and I FELL IN LOVE with it, once I understood it. That took a while, staring at this beautiful design but not quite able to get my head around it.

Then it was yet another English paper pieced quilt I just HAD TO MAKE. Several of those over the years, lol, but I've completed some. Yet for all my initial love of Lavender, other shinies overtook it. Shunted it to the end of the queue. Demoted it into a tote that despite being feet away from where I sit at night to stitch, it might as well have been shipped to the moon. It was THE LAST QUILT I WAS GOING TO EVER FINISH.

A lot of all caps in this post, hmmm. I don't mean to be so shouty, but I want to make the point that the Lavender quilt was going to be perhaps one I didn't complete. And yet (AND YET), a few nights ago I got it out, looked it over, admiring it with newfound interest. And then (AND THEN!) I saw that Past Me had arranged the next row of the quilt to be sewn.

I want to put that previous sentence in all caps, but I won't. Yet I hope my enthusiasm isn't missed, and I can see Past Me tapping her toes, the biggest smile on her face. She knows, and now I do too, that sometimes things that lose their luster merely need time hidden away. Nearly, but not completely, forgotten. Put so low on the list that, well, eventually they are driven to muscle their dang ways back toward the top because sometimes that is how life works.

Lavender has done that. Now I'm hooked on it. Maybe because it requires very little bending around corners and provides four-inch long sides to sew at one time, which is GREAT when sewing with one's non-dominant hand. Maybe that's why it had to wait until now to shine, as I've come to a stage in aging when I need to switch it up to keep doing what I love. I LOVE SEWING BY HAND. Especially when it doesn't make my right shoulder ache!

Anyway.... How does that fit into rekindling my affection for The Enran Chronicles? Writing a novel instead of a short story for Suze and family is part of it, but I can't only tell their stories. Those other stories are beginning to look enticing, listening to tunes today related to those tales helps. And thinking that what could be the next novel includes a B story about a young man who starts out as a seven-year-old kid in Life Stories.... Oh yeah! Why not put Luiz Sorenson-Wentz up front, huh? Why not indeed....

Last night after attaching a little bit of a Lavender row to the quilt top-in-progress, I placed the quilt top-in-progess over my lap and took the photo at the start of this entry. It's not going to be a small quilt, lol, and for several seconds I wondered, "What in the WORLD was I thinking in making this quilt so big?" I didn't have the guts to get up, find a tape measure, and see just how wide it is, but probably sixty inches, maybe a little more? (Maybe I'll actually find a tape measure, and, um, measure it: fifty-six inches wide, whew!) And knowing me, or Past Me rather, it's at least that long, maybe longer? Maybe. Yet that sense of facepalm swiftly flitted away as the colourful triangles and assorted low volume prints for the half-hexagons wove a magical spell on my heart, easing my mind about the heft of what remains to complete this quilt top. Which is very similar to all that needs to be done to finish The Enran Chronicles, in a figurative/literal way. So much of that story to tell, so many characters both on Earth and out in space. My love for EPP and my equal infatuation with lengthy fictional sagas seem, well, similar. I won't delve into what that means about my personality. Suffice to say, I like being busy, LOL. Ignoring the fact that I'm NOT getting younger, I'll take these challenges for what they are, creative calls to my crafting soul, and not worry about the when's or even the if's. If these slow quilts and long tales are meant to be completed, they will be. And if not....

I don't see Future Me anywhere, but Past Me is still tapping her toes. Don't get weird about it, she seems to say.

She looks about forty, maybe forty-two. I was just getting into writing then, now I'm a couple decades older. Definitely slower. But still writing, still sewing. Well, I wasn't sewing twenty years ago. This is a different Past Me, a non-quilting Past Me, but one who wanted to write. I remember that self, aching to craft another version of the Great American Novel, wanting to tell my stories, wanting to.... Wishing to communicate what sat in my heart. This Past Me knows squat about sewing, and between you and me, dear reader, she doesn't know much about writing fiction either.

Yet we learned, and twenty years later here we are, all my Past Selves and me, with still more yarns to spin. With that said, it's nearly dinner time, my husband's doing the cooking. Maybe this post will lead me to writing the one about twenty years since I started writing. Or another bright shiny will send me on a detour. Stay tuned to find out which it is!