It’s been almost five years since I’ve touched this blog, so long that I forgot how to log into it. I’ve seen such a surge lately of people who used to blog but kind of abandoned it for the ease of social media, or even newsletter platforms like Substack, who are now returning to a space where they themselves own and control their content. I’ve even seen Pinterest is making a comeback! Truly, what a time.

That’s not exactly why I’m here, I just left this blog because after we moved to the PNW in 2018 life got busy and I eventually, slowly, just forgot to come back. Yes, Instagram is easier. But also yes, it’s nice to have these photos and thoughts somewhere that I own. But also also, today out of the blue, I just had an urge to get back to it. To add a post that isn’t just my face stuck at the top from the year I turned 40, sort of permanently pinned like a frozen moment in time.

I still write as my full-time day job, and because of what I write and how I write and who I write for, I haven’t had a lot of energy left for this space at the end of the day. It can also get a little confusing about what’s okay to write about, outside my job. But I wrote this guide for work on quilts, which will publish next month, and just getting back in touch with my most favorite textile form sort of gave me this itch to dust off my quilting site here, my posts, and share the things I make?

I truly have no idea where to start, 5 years is so long. There was a pandemic? I was diagnosed with ADHD? I’m a chicken keeper now and our house is now a USDA-designated small (family) farm? A timber farm! But we don’t cut down our forest. You can meet my chickens on IG, and my garden. I’ve made quilts, but not nearly as many as one might think after all this time. I’ve cooked stuff, gone places (but not that many places because, again, there was a whole pandemic). So anyway, I just finished a quilt today that I worked on for a little over a year, so I figured I’d start there.

I started this quilt in December of 2022, after I did some redecorating in my home office. I’d painted two of the walls and the ceiling peach, got a big new desk, and then earlier in 2022 I covered all of the walls in framed prints that made me happy. I got an armchair and ottoman for the space for Christmas that year, and so I decided the armchair and the office needed a quilt. I’ll post photos of that space someday, hopefully, if I keep this blogging thing up here.

Anyway, in addition to becoming obsessed with gardening (and chickens!), I’ve also gotten into houseplants, and I have a bunch of them in my office. Seemed like a good theme to go with for this quilt, so I pulled a bunch of fabrics from my stash and ordered a big assortment as well, and then I started sewing on NYE 2022. I worked on this quilt slowly over the whole year and just finished it today, it’s currently in the washing machine waiting to go in the dryer.

I used to be in such a rush to finish things, and a lot of that was to fuel this blog for 11 years before I sort of burned out on it. I really like the process of going slow, taking my time, seeing where a project takes me. I am patient in middle-age! I think it’s just something in the water in the PNW. It took me a long time to slow down after we moved here from NJ, and now I don’t think I could speed up if I tried.

Sometimes I do still make things in a hurry, like this quilt I made for a retiring teacher at H’s school. I finished it in a couple of weeks last year.

But mostly, these days, I take my time. Here’s the back of the Houseplant Quilt.

I am really out of practice here, I haven’t said anything about how I actually made this quilt. It’s 60″ x 80″, and the front is entirely 5″ finished blocks. Now I thought these blocks were called frames, but every time I google “frames quilt block” I just get suggestions for putting quilts in picture frames, and chaos reigns. It has been so long since I sketched out this design, or since I even lived a very online quilter life, that I do not even remember what it’s called. But I think you get the idea?

I used more than 2 dozen different fabrics. Some of them I had yards of, others just a fat quarter, and the planning and calculating and constructing and arranging to try and keep too many similar fabrics from sitting next to each other was like my own zen garden for the last year.

And the quilting! I do love to MEANDER. That was a delight, and just watching the whole thing come together over time. It does mean I haven’t had a blanket to get under in my office chair since I got it, but as I basically write about blankets full-time for a living, it turns out that I always have something I’m testing for work that helps me manage. I got by.

Okay, I’m going to wrap this up because now I’m just babbling. And I have to figure out all the changes in WordPress over the last 4 years and 8 months, like how I set a top image and tags and all the things my brain has emptied itself of to make room for the names of our 22 chickens, and all the plants in my garden, and the names of all the Seattle sports teams I’ve had to learn over the last nearly-six-years as a Washingtonian. I might need to figure out all my categories, too, that left column is a fever dream of dropdowns. Maybe I should start fresh and just archive all the old stuff. No idea. So, anyway, this is it for now, but I will (hopefully) be back.