I organize my life and balance my responsibilities so I can enjoy it! Quilting is always waiting for me in the background if life does get crazy and I need to put it on the back burner.
Quilting motivates me first of all so I can live a long healthy life to execute and complete all the amazing things I dream to create. I love my family and want to be healthy like eating well and exercising so I can hopefully avoid unnecessary disease and pain to be fully functional and capable of doing the many things I day dream about long into life.
There are so many ideas buzzing around in my head that I want to execute that I hope that long healthy life is waiting for me.
That’s the beauty of quilting; there are so many different things you can do from piecing a quilt top together, strip piecing for easier quilt, to complicated piecing, machine appliqué, hand appliqué, domestic machine quilting, long arm machine quilting, hand quilting, hand piecing…. too much to name.
Secondly, quilting motivates me to live an organized life. By living an organized life, I will have more rewarding time stitching away.
Thirdly, quilting is my reward! I get every room put back together after an evening of children being home, clean the kitchen, throw a load of wash in, prepare dinner, get necessary mundane tasks completed like paying bills and then quilt, quilt, quilt away! It feels great; even if it is only for a short bit of time.
When I worked on my master’s degree while at the same time worked at my husband’s office and managing kiddos at home, there was not much time for quilting. There was just no room for creativity to flow BUT I longed for it. I couldn’t wait to finish and for life to settle down to enjoy the colors and fabrics and creation of beautiful things for loved ones. There is a time and season to all things. Well as I was working on my master’s thesis and to break the barrier for motivation, I bought some special fabrics for a quilt pattern that I had longed to complete from many years prior. The pattern came from an old quilting book that I had admired and tucked away.
Then I LITERALLY slept with the fabrics under my pillow and in my bed with me every night. I would fall asleep touching the fabrics and admiring the color collection carefully fanned out, after a long day of forcing myself to be disciplined on my project. In the morning I would wake up and again touch them then turn with the determination to get my mountain work done each day.
Finally, the day arrived and I finished my master’s thesis. I had done all the work for whatever reason comfortably sitting in my bed on my laptop. When I pressed send on the email to my professor with the master’s thesis attached, I turned to my fabric and smiled!
I then went down stairs to my sewing room, dusted off the sewing machine, rotary cutter and mat and started playing with the fabrics. It was just a sweet quilt for my son that played soccer that would become a wall hanging in his room. But that quilt represented so much to me, the freedom that I know had to be creative again and the discipline I used to do hard things.
The quilt now years later still hangs in his room as he is now on a competitive soccer team. I have made several more quilts for him in his room for him to feel the warmth of his mother’s love. That mother’s love spills over as I attend all those soccer games taking amazing photographs of him with quilts to sit on or keep me warm. That mother’s love also spilled over as I went to all the amazing wrestling matches for his older brother and sat there hand appliquéing wrestlers with a tiger head and took pictures there.
