star and cross log cabin

I still was making sure I knew how to do the log cabin and made this quilt for the living room in the pinks and greens I had tried to make that first quilt on my own. I felt like I really had this log cabin pattern well into my head as to the process of making the blocks now. This quilt I call my 'cross and star' pattern quilt. For me it was my faith in God and in the ability of my girls and me, and of my husband too, to faithfully get through this next hurdle. The funny thing was that once my husband said he wanted out, a couple months later he said something to the affect of ... Kathy you know I love you guys and I'm sorry that I just don't know how to have the strength to live with your disability and our situation but I want to keep trying. I want to stay married and be with you guys. I was happy! My prayers were answered!
This quilt took me 2 days to make! BUT I'd put aside everything else I was supposed to do in order to get it done. I felt that this star on the outside was my guiding star, and the cross on this inside was God's ear to our needs! AND it sure looked better as a quilt in our living room, than my first attempt at quilting had. I displayed both quilts with pride though in that room! I felt like I was on my way, one piece of fabric, one quilt at a time, my brain was healing and our lives were being stitched together in the process, wherever it took us!
shoot dr apt I will finish this later....

This is the first quilt I made after my brain damage. I had been trying to figure out since 1989 how to tell which side of the fabric was the right side and the wrong sides because I knew you had to put right sides together in order to qult, or sew anything for the most part. I really struggled with this quilt that was to go into our new house we'd bought with these colors in the formal living room. I don't remember now if I bought these fabrics or had them in some stash of mine from when I had quilted before. I knew back then that I didn't want to do this quilt like my mom and grandmother had, with cardboard templates. I had watched quilting shows on TV over the last year and saw they were doing something called 'strip quilting' and that looked like a lot of time saving effort. AND to me, for myself , with my no energy status these days, it just seemed like the right thing to try. So I thought about the size of quilt I wanted, how many blocks I wanted by how many in length and started to rip the strips to the right width. Then I sewed the colors together in what I THOUGHT was the right way I'd seen on the Quilt in a Day show. Once I got those sewn, I put them in rows and started sewing the rows together into the main part of the quilt. I did it in a day and was so proud of myself. The next day I added the borders and then didn't know what to do for a backing so I grabbed a sheet that looked like the right color, layered it all together, pinned it and tied it on the living room floor, using embroidery floss I had from an old project. The next day I bound the quilt by bringing the backing over the front, pinned and sewed it and it was done! I was so proud of myself for figuring this out on my own and put it on the couch for the night.
When I looked it the following morning though, I realized I didn't do it very well, and knew I needed help in learning how to quilt properly, again. I could see back then and especially now all the mistakes I made in not matching corners, not using the right fabrics (don't use a sheet if its not all cotton, when every things is else IS all cotton in your quilts) and more. BUT for me that day was a celebration for me to realize that all I needed was someone to show me how to do it right and it would unlock more of what I hadn't gotten on my own.
I was still learning it was OK to ask for help, because I was relearning something. I still couldn't make clothes at all but here WAS something of my old life, that was coming back, albeit slowly.
This quilt is one that I still display proudly as a piece of my past, and to remind me how far I had come from 1987 as a bedridden mother, with a 3 and 10 year old daughter, incapable of most things needed to survive, and now I had in 6 years begun to create again! I felt so excited, even if that quilt had tons of mistakes... I HAD MADE IT, and that was a new milestone for me! Even today in 2011 I display this quilt on my quilt rack, though in the back of it, as a testiment to my craft, to my TRYING to do something right, and LEARNING to accept that SOME THINGS OF BEAUTY ARE FLAWED. AND I learned that in those flaws, THAT IS WHERE THE BEAUTY LIES!

peace by piece I learn as I go

here is what I woke up with this morning.... for the direction my blog will now take. Its been swirling around in my head how to proceed, but I woke up suddenly at 430 this morning, and HAD to write this down I will add it to my blog after I swim in my PT class this morning, unless I can do a copy paste.: copy paste works... yay.. I LOVE easy buttons!
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Finding a great me in the forgotten sea... peace by piece.

Peace by piece I have traveled into a place of knowing myself, loving the new me that had to be and making peace with my brain damage, my illness (chronic Fatigue Syndrome), and my 'DIS- ability becoming instead 'differently abled', whatever that meant at the time. And while doing that I was still trying to be the great mom, wife, daughter, friend, girl scout leader I had been along with any other hat I had worn before. Quilting and DIS ability walked hand in hand stitch by stitch, in time piece-fully and peacefully. BUT like anything, it was a process that came to be, over time, trial and error, a great learning curve with great results.
This blog was to be only about the quilts I have made, but instead has become more now as I realize the role each quilt I have made since 1987 has truly been a part of both journeys - the journey recovering from the darkness of brain damage, and making peace with my CFS and Fibromyalgia and all the other things taken away from me. It is about those things given back to me in a jumbled mess of puzzle pieces as well. What 'life' picture would these pieces make when I was done? What would each quilt look like when I finished them? What had I learned about myself in the process? did any memories come back to the surface, when I had held so many years of blankness in the beginning and still do after more than 22 years? What short cuts had I learned in quilting techniques? When had I realized that as I pieced quilts, ripped out seams and made something whole and beautiful out of strips, scraps and torn pieces of fabric - that I gained peace in these pieces!!
Now I see in retrospect why quilting has been so rewarding for me! As I piece together quilts from scraps, I too am piecing together the broken parts of my brain, my 'dis' ability helped me make peace with my past and now I am merely differently-abled than I used to be. I am putting together a puzzle full of multitudes of pieces into something whole, beautiful and awesome in my new me. And it is the same with my quilting, all those pieces are becoming something new from what they used to be as well. As I quilt, I am finding a new me in the forgotten sea - each wave, each quilt, each piece finding its right place stitched in time, stitched in place... piece by piece I've made peace with myself and I find not only an awesome woman coming out of darkness but too I have found an almost Zen like inner state of peacefulness while quilting that carries over into my daily life away from my quilts..



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`Two roads diverged in a wood,
and I --I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~Robert Frost