Crafting as Healing

Recently, I've been going through a tough time with the loss of a pretty big piece of my life (job). I'm struggling with being back at the job search, missing the work I was doing,  and finding somewhere where my skills and desire to help people fit. It's a process. Part of my process for dealing with change has always been healing hurts in my life through crafting, so of course a trip to visit my parents resulted in my mom and I going to a quilting show, buying some fabric (thanks Mom!) and making some fancy pillows for my couch. My partner always jokes that we don't ever just hang out, we "work' which is true in a sense, but I think that my mom and I do our best hanging out while we are tackling a sewing project or an organizing project. Or maybe my family is just weird, who's to say?

At any rate, I've wanted some of these pillows for a long time. My mom has some pillows like this on her couch and has also made some for my sister. The awesome part about them is that they're stuffed with all the scraps of fabric and batting from all of my mom's other projects, which makes them reusable friendly and super heavy and firm, which is amazing for couch pillows that need to stand up to lots of use! They're roughly 19' by 19", have a zipper so the covers can be removed to wash them, and are quilted free-hand with a walking foot on the sewing machine. My mom's good advice for the free-hand quilting was to have a plan and to let the fabric guide you as to the design that you make. I think they turned out pretty great! The inside of the pillows is lined with flour sack tea towels and the actual pillow part is also made of this flour sack material. There is just something amazing and healing about taking some fabric, gathering other materials and creating something out of nothing that is useful, taps into your creativity and allows you to spend some time creating and chatting with wonderful people.

Other things I'm currently loving for their healing properties:

• Audio books to keep me focused-especially ones on minimalism. I just finished The Year of Less by Cait Flanders and I'm currently listening to You are a Badass by Jen Singero. Hoopla is amazing and free with a library card. 
• New car! Bad timing, but I just purchased my first car and am loving being able to easily go for a family or friend visit, as well as expand the regions I'm able to job search in
• Harry Potter Rifftrax-combining my love of Harry Potter with my love of making fun of movies.
• Puppy cuddles. 
• Sunshine and things growing in the park
• Amazing and supportive friends in my life.
• "Unicorns are real" bullet journal for keeping me organized
• Remembering the amazing healing of blogging and journaling to help me document my accomplishments and actions

String Quilting up a Storm

It's been ages since I've blogged again, but I do still want to use this space to keep track of some of my projects and to help give me a creative boost when I need one! So I'll try to pop in and at least share some of the projects I've done or have been working on.

Here's a quilt that my mom and I made together. It's a string quilt, which uses scraps of material cut into strips. We tried to keep to a palette of browns and oranges and greens and tans mostly,and used the blue strips in the middle to tie everything together. My mom is a serious quilter, so we had lots of variety to choose from.

This was a fun and easy quilt to do, just a lot of sewing, as it's a sew as you go quilt. Basically, this means that you start with a square of plain fabric and sew all the strips onto the square, trim it and then sew all the bigger blocks together. Then you sandwich the quilt tip, batting and backing together, sew and turn. We did a few hand-stitched x'es to tack the quilt top to the backing and we were done! It was a huge job and SO much ironing and sewing though, but given that we used a flannel sleep inside instead of batting, this quilt is so warm, and just the right size to curl up with on the couch.

Here's a good string quilt tutorial if you're interested in making your own-just looking at the pictures makes me want to make another one!

Craft hope---quilt all done

I'm feeling inspired today, I'm going to be dropping off my donation to the Craft Hope/Margaret's Hope Chest Quilt drive which makes me feel good, as well as putting to use the baby quilt that I finished and have not been quite sure what to do with. It feels nice to exercise a bit of "craftivism" to help make the world a little bit of a better place.

Next Crafty project along these lines : Baby wraps for the June Callwood Centre for Teenages (http://torontocraftalert.ca/2009/10/16/help-wanted-wrap-up-baby-and-mom/)

I used to volunteer here in the nursery back when it was still called Jessie's Centre, and I think this would be an easy and rewarding project as well!

Adventures in my craft closet

So the greatest part about my new roommate moving in so far has been the motivation to clean out the craft closet, and all the other random craft supplies that have been taking up residence around the apartment, smushed into bags in the storage room, hiding in tote bags in my closet, stuffed under the bed. I went through it all. I organized it. I GOT RID of some stuff that I just know that I'll never use. I even bought a new bookcase that houses the craft supplies and tools so that I ACTUALLY might be able to find what I'm looking for when I want to do something! It's sort of an amazing feeling, and while there might be a little bit more organizing to do, I can at least get started again on some projects that I've let slip by the wayside or simply couldn't find to finish.

Amidst all the projects I found was this baby quilt that I started originally for a friend when she told me she was pregnant, but never finished as she miscarried early on. At the time, I wasn't sure of the sex of the baby, so wanted to do something neutral and fun for a baby, but also keeping to my opinion (not always a shared opinion) that bright colours =better. Plus, bugs and stuff always scream FUN and KIDS and OMG THIS IS MY FAV BLANKIE EVER. There's really minimal work left to finish - I just finished trimming up the border pieces the other day while watching my new obsession Six Feet Under, which is amazing so far. All people can seem to say about this show is 1) it's amazing and 2) you will cry and cry and cry at the last episode, so be prepared. Unfortunately, I hadn't quite re-located all the craft supplies to the living room closet, so actually getting to the point where I could trim up the border pieces involved a mad cap search to locate my self healing cutting mat, which I eventually found stuck in a bag with paintings of horses in nurse's hats I did when I was 4 and which my mom saved for me, for some reason. Exactly where I'd think to look-not.

Quilt thus far:

Fabric for backing:

Jesse tries to help: