New Year, New Ways:

Necessity is the motherhood of invention.

What had been my newly remodeled craft / writing room created only about six months ago is now gone.  Actually, quite happily, I gave it back to our son, whose first foray into independent living with a bunch of his friends didn't quite work out. We said, "Come on back and re-group!"  So, here I am again, downstairs in the lower level of the house with little natural light, next to the laundry room.  But that's okay; I did that for almost 20 years.

It tends to be quiet, not in the daily flow of foot traffic, warm in the winter and cool in the summer. I can make a mess and leave it, which I was finding it hard to do in the new studio space -- it was just too darn pretty to mess around in.

So yesterday, New Year's Day, I wanted to do some quilting. But my son was snoring away in the room, recuperating from the previous night's party. Did I mention that I had such a huge stash of fabrics and yarns, I left them in the room with him, with a pledge not to stink them up too, too much (mothers are like that!) 

So now what to do? 

Downstairs, I began pulling out bits of exotic papers and specialty threads, little scraps of this and that, then decided to start with a basic one-patch - what quilters would call a basic building block to patchwork quilting. Using some lovely Japanese paper yarns I bought from Habu Textiles, NYC, years ago, I stitched through the papers, using a combination of stitches. The scrap of music score is from an old Dover book on Chopin, I believe (copyright free). "Cedez" means "give" in French. I truly like this idea of "paper quilting," a kind of simple collaging, I suppose.

So you see, I gave my studio to my son with all our love and support, and that move, in turn, gave me the gift of creating something I wouldn't normally have done. I think I'll start working on a 4-patch piece. I have a lovely batch of silk sample squares in a variety of textures, as well as a pile of fun Indian and Nepalese papers. In many ways, this reminds me of the traditional embroidery sampler young girls were required to make years and years ago; a way to learn a variety of stitches that would serve them well in the years to come.

Happy New Year!  

Let's hope for a better year ahead!