A Contemplative Life

The Warm Hearted quilt neatly folded and resting on the back of the couch.   I so badly want to sew on the Warm Hearted Quilt this evening, but my forearm still has an Aquaphor-covered wound and I don't want to slap a band-aid on it because band-aids of all varieties (plastic or fabric) give me a rash. I did receive good news today that the spot biopsied was benign, which is GREAT! I juxtapose that with a dear friend's youngest son, who is in his forties and suffering from lung cancer. Enduring toxic chemotherapy in the hopes he'll survive long enough so his youngest child, three years old, will remember him. Sigh. We can't plan life other than daft outlines for what we'd love to occur. A week ago, when I had the biopsy, I stitched hearts like all the other days I'd been stitching hearts; I had a piece of gauze taped over the wound and no Aquaphor in sight. Since then, I've done very little sewing on that quilt. This afternoon I managed some Peace Round the ...

The title says it all. Yes I have shingles, but it's a very mild case and I'm on an anti viral. My knee is achy unless I take ibuprofen. Mandolin blocks are designed, and I left out the fabrics, (pictured above) also used for the Myrtle quilt, which needs four blocks arranged, which I'll sort later today. But not everything makes it onto this blog; in a week I'm supposed to join my eldest daughter's family on holiday. Flight is involved, travel out of our home state. Suddenly my participation is in doubt, especially for how wonky my knee feels this morning. Shingles isn't the issue, or it's not at this moment, lol. More is how feasible is loads of walking when one's meniscus is dodgy. How difficult is life when delightful plans are thrown askew by ailments (and I won't mention an abysmal government); it's not a crisis of MASSIVE proportions, yet I am stymied by what to do, or more rightly I am (not so) patiently waiting until Monday to make a dec...

Hexagon block quilt top photographed in March 2021. The quilt above lives in the Midwest. Initially I made the EPP blocks assuming I would connect them not appliqued on solid squares but sewn together by hand. Yet my hands were achy back in late 2020, so that idea was scuppered for a more friendly version, which actually resulted in a twin being fashioned from excess blocks, call that a win. The photo was taken in our old Silicon Valley backyard not long before we moved to the North Coast. Relatives in Wisconsin were to be the recipients of the quilt, but it wasn't going to live in their Midwestern home; it was going to dwell in Humboldt County where they would visit us when their winters were bitter and ours merely cool. We had our retirement house then, but weren't yet living in it full time. That quilt top was carefully folded, then packed away. Then my husband and I made the big decision to jumpstart retirement living, and all our belongings were placed into boxes, heading ...

These calendulas were flattened by a tree but one would never guess from their amazing recovery. Certainly something for me to remember. Last night I was perusing blogs, one of my own long forgotten and a few quilting sites that brought me to where I am today in the sewing. Two quotes gave me plenty of pause for thought, one about fabrics, the other more personal. Yet Sarah Ruiz's statement concerning quilting struck a deep chord, that after a decade she still isn't sure about who or what she wished to be in the quilting world. I SO NEEDED TO READ THAT, although my insecurities are wholly related to the noveling. As a quilter, I am totally an amateur. Sewing triangles scares me, I have no desire to learn partial seams, and y-seams are great only if I can baste paper pieces and sew them by hand. But as an author, jeez Louise.... Yes I write books. And some of them are pretty good, if I might say so myself. However what does a career as an author mean to me, indie or traditional...