I'm colour-matching each piece to a plan that I drew up in Illustrator, which is somewhat time-consuming and constraining at times, as I only cut the pieces during daylight hours as it's hard to get a completely accurate colour match in synthetic light, but I love working in this way. It means that the creative part of the process takes place on my laptop, so the cutting and sewing part is an entirely meditative thing, free from stressful pondering, seam-ripping or fabric wastage. I know that playing with the actual fabric is meant to be the relaxing, artistic part, but for a long-term project, I like to cling onto the security blanket of knowing exactly how the final version will look. I also really love messing around with things on a computer screen, so this way it means the whole process is enjoyable for me.
This piece was partly inspired by my mother-in-law asking me a question about something that I was already feeling. She was standing in our hallway one day, admiring a piece that hangs on the wall there, and said 'Do you ever feel like doing anything freer and less structured?' I feel compelled to say, just in case anyone reads her question in the wrong way, as it's easy to misunderstand the tone of things when they're written down, that I'm lucky to have a mother-in-law who's both lovely and incredibly artistic, so this wasn't a criticism, just an open question as part of our on-going conversation about all things textile-related.
Her question tapped in to how I'd been feeling at that time though (it was several months ago now). I'm naturally drawn to order and structure, but I had started to experience a feeling that's similar to when I've been wearing the same shoes all day and my toes crave some room to stretch and wiggle and feel the ground (actually, make that a carpet. Nell has brought about many positive changes in me, but there's no need to sink one's trotters into the mud in midwinter, just because it sounds like the right thing to do). This project has really cured me of that tight-shoed feeling and also breathed fresh air into my love of English paper piecing.
To keep things in order, each set of pieces is numbered and stored carefully in its own compartment until they've been sewn together. I've tended to spend a day cutting enough pieces for several blocks and then pieced them together slowly over the following evenings. It's been an oddly enjoyable process for something that's so repetitive and I've looked forward to refilling the box with fresh pieces and then watching fully-formed blocks take over each compartment all over again.
When I come to piece a block together I lay out a block, referring to my plan to see what should go where...then it's just a case of slowly stitching them together while devouring endless episodes of Grey's Anatomy.
Once a new row has been completed, it's then pinned onto my design wall. The final thing will be made up of two different blocks - I decided to create the main blocks first and to only begin on the secondary blocks that will connect them once I'd finished. I'm excited to have now finally moved onto sewing these connecting blocks, although I do feel a little sad to have left behind this stage of the project - I've really enjoyed it. Without the interconnecting blocks in place, it's still not really apparent where I'm going with this, but it's all matching up to my plan, so we can rest easy! Phew.
It's half-term here this week. We've been on long country walks and, on rainier days, decamped to strange places with wall-to-wall trampolines (along with the tiny twins of the Twin Peaks quilt); met up with family and friends at various points to eat scrambled eggs in our favourite coffee shop; rewatched When Harry Met Sally with my mum, sister and the joyful creature that I mentioned in this post (yes, it seems there are babies everywhere in my life right now! Also, it's funny how much some films date visually - we were shocked by how overtly 1980s When Harry Met Sally now looked); spent a lovely evening looking at our friend's daughter's beautiful textiles coursework, fuelled by prosecco and pizza; and I've also sat stitching with my daughter at times. It's all been quite low-key, with lots of work fitted in around the edges, but I love these kinds of holidays where there's no real plan.
Finally, Valentine's Day. There are so many things that I'd like to go back and tell my younger self (really, I think I could write a whole book on the subject), but one of them would be not to be quite so quick to pour scorn on Valentine's Day. As an 18 year old, I was quick to dismiss it and although my then-boyfriend-now-husband tried to circumvent my stance by arriving with goldfish (complete with awesome tank, gravel and interesting rocks), rather than roses, even that failed to thaw my cold anti-commercialist heart. As I sat chatting with friends today and Valentines plans cropped up in conversation it suddenly hit me that I'd really rather ruined the path to an extra annual day of fun all those years ago. In 2008, we briefly attempted to try Valentine's Day on for size, which was fun, but somehow didn't break down the years of anti-valentine that had accumulated. Damn that foolish young thing who inhabited my mind back then! How do you feel about Valentine's Day?
Florence x