Back to it, almost

When I was younger I liked spontaneity, impulse and the sense of freedom that they can bring, but as I have grown older I find, more and more, that I also love routine, the rhythm of ordinary day-to-day living.  I have come to understand that, for me at least, it is this regular pattern to things that allows me to keep going and to fit in the things that are most important to me.  To be explicit, I am not talking about the regular, humdrum, family life stuff, although I think it holds true there too.  I am talking about how it is that I find the time to exercise (swim Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1pm, yoga every possible evening at 6pm and so on), or learn a language, or sew. Not only that, but the habit then keeps me going when I might otherwise stop.

Holidays, of course, break these routines and that is a good thing, in that time away can give an opportunity to look at things with new eyes.  It can also be a pause that it is hard to escape from.  When I am in my routine I just keep ticking along but sometimes, as now, I find it hard to step back into it.  The sheer effort of picking all that up again seems too much.  So I come back from my break (if you want a tiny taste of what I've been doing you can check out the AHIQ blog) and look at my piles of fabric then just wander off to make a cuppa.  I know I'll be fine once I'm up and running, but it's clearly going to take a few more days to get there.

In the meantime, I have at least a small bit of quilting to share.  I took my individual lighthouses away with me and thanks to a particularly nasty wasp sting which left my foot too big for my shoe, I have almost completed one.

At some point soon, once my sewing mojo returns, I will try turning it into a cushion.

Pausing...

No sewing happening this week and now I'm taking a pause for a couple more.  Back soon!

Thinking about Birmingham

I haven't done much sewing.  In fact I haven't done any.  But I haven't been entirely unproductive.  

I have taken to pieces the shirts I'm using for this quilt.  Sometimes they have already been prepared and are sitting in the box in nice neat rows but not always and not this time.  The dress/tunic/shirt thing was quite pleat-y and though I didn't think it looked very nice as a garment, it has yielded an encouraging amount of fabric. 

I have also been playing with my piles (photos below) and doing a lot of thinking.  

Here's where I've got to.  I think a lot about place/belonging/journeying.  This is a consistent preoccupation for me - what makes us feel like we belong? Is it people? Or a connection to the land, to a specific location?  Is it history? Can it  be a choice, a conscious decision?

Clearly I can't expect one quilt to answer all those questions for me so I tried thinking about specific times/places in my life.

When I was studying for my PhD I lived in Birmingham and was researching and writing around particular areas of local history.  Looking back I would say that understanding the city, knowing its past, the way it had grown, the ideas that had shaped it, were a big part of my sense of belonging.  I liked that I could stand on a nondescript street, just at the back of the city centre, waiting for the number 45 bus to take me down the Pershore Road, knowing the names of the roads that had been there a hundred years previously (though they had all been cleared to make way for the railway station).  I knew what sort of people had lived there and in what conditions, where they had come from, what they did for a living.  In some cases I knew their names, their family relationships, their ages. 

I am thinking that I will use maps of some of these areas as a starting point.  I'm not undertaking a literal translation of a map into quilt form and as yet only the vaguest idea of where this might head, but that's enough for now. 

Here I go again...

I'm mulling over the notion of maps.  Like Cathy I don't make art quilts, so am thinking about how to go at the subject in a way that fits with my natural inclinations.  Fabric always help me think, so today I pulled this pile.

Three shirts (well, actually two shirts and something that may be a blouse or may be a dress; sometimes these days I honestly don't think there's a difference).  And a pile of things that seem to go with them.  Ideally I'd like more shirt in the mix so may go looking for another one, but I know I haven't got anything that fits the bill so that will be shopping rather than just digging in boxes.  This will do for now though.

Saturday photos #91

Prompted by my resolution to join in with Wandering Camera, I went into the garden.

Mostly it looks like this

but I managed to find some colour too.

Last but not least

This is the third lighthouse and I'll be stopping for now, though I've found making these smaller pieces much more enjoyable than I expected. 

It's not quite finished.  You can see that it's still in two pieces and  I will probably add one more strip at the bottom.  The lighthouse in this one is quite squat (based on South Foreland) so the balance isn't quite right at the moment, but I think that just that extra bit below the lighthouse will sort it out.

I've pieced the sky to try and stretch the bird fabric - there's barely a snippet of it left now, but it's done three lighthouses, which seems like pretty good going.

So two more seams then I'm off to contemplate maps.

AHIQ challenge day and a bit of an update

First things first: the new AHIQ challenge can now be found here and Ann's come up with something really interesting.  I would normally put up a post on the AHIQ blog too (this being the 4th Tuesday) but it seems more appropriate this time to let the challenge post to be the focus, so I will content myself with urging you to go and check it out.

While Ann has been dreaming up new vistas for to explore, I have been pootling along making my little lighthouses (and arguing, endlessly, with BT - for those of you in the UK).  It has occurred to me that if I sort out some wadding and backing these would be the perfect thing to roll up and stick in my holiday suitcase, since Mr SewSlowly tells me very firmly that I can't take a whole quilt with me (and we are flying, so I guess that's fair enough).

I have finished no. 2

 and made a start on a third.

In case you are wondering the strange state of my cutting mat is due to having stencilled on top of it without remembering to put down newspaper. 

This will be the last one for a while, as I want to take a run at the new challenge.

I am still quilting too, every day, with dogged determination.  Why is it that some quilts seem to be done surprisingly fast while others take forever.  I swear that after a week of quilting I have barely dented the amount still to be done.  Ho hum.  Nothing for it but to keep going.