It’s been almost a year since I wrote on my blog. The longest break since I started over 10 years ago. Blogs have been dropping like flies all over the place for years now, but I’ve been feeling a yearning to return. Not to what blogs became - something super sparkly and profesh, to drive Pinterest traffic, but to what blogs were before that - unpolished and open. A way to process and share and learn and connect.

For the past year and beyond, I have felt incredibly disconnected. From myself, from other people, even to some extent from the people I’ve been locked down with for the past couple of years. But mostly from myself. I started this blog when I felt the same way after starting a family. It was the seed that grew into quilting, which grew into my business. I write again with a little spark of hope. That maybe typing my thoughts and stories and creations once more will help grow something new. Not new instead of my quilting or my business, but just a new adventure of some kind, or a fresh view.

I’ve found this year incredibly challenging. More so than last. Perhaps it was just weariness of the thing lasting too long. We had stamina for a year of upheaval but not two. But I think it was more than that. It felt more disrupted. We spent 2020 hunkered down, here together, at home. We built a nice routine with the goal of creating as much peace as possible to withstand the outside world’s chaos. This year, without me really thinking about it, the goals seemed to shift under me. From creating a peaceful home, to ‘getting back to normal’. But every time we finally slipped into some kind of routine, the universe fought back and various things were cancelled. Each time, the rules changing and the uncertainty growing.

So I’m here at the cusp of a new year, wondering how I let the outside world take control of my life, and how to take at leat some of it back. Wondering if it’s even possible in this crazy new world. Wondering what it is I actually need to control, and what I need to let go. And how much peace is actually in the letting go rather than being at the wheel. Surely it’s a bit of both, but what that actually means in my day to day life, I have no clue. And perhaps that’s why I’m back here after this year we’ve had. Blogging is something I can choose, steer. And it used to be something that helped clarify, bring things into focus.

When life is out of my control, something I often turn to is my WIP list. My numerous tubs of unfinished quilts is like an ocean of chaos, but when I write them down and think them through, I bring a little of that to order. It’s an exercise I think my brain turns to, because it’s such an easy way for something that was big and dark and unknown and overwhelming to quickly and easily become understood. Something in me wants me to know that if I face the big unknown, write a list, and make a little progress, than I won’t feel so at sea anymore.

And so, a list:

Basted quillts:

Sandalwood
Scrappy Tuppence
HST picnic quilt
Lest We Forget hexie quilt (a very old one!)

Quilt tops:

Trip around the world - bed quilt
Meadowsweet blue
Plenty of Thyme autumn

Bocks finished:

Wintergreen

In Progress:

Cherish remake
Hexie Harvest
High vol scrappy Wintergreen
New Eden
Saffron
Evensong (scrappy Rose Star)
Happy Stars (6 pt)
Haypenny - Food group
Honeydew - First light
8 pt stars

Fabric pulled, not yet cut:

Nutmeg
Album Quilt

Ahhh. That’s better. If only this list was the only list I needed to work through. Perhaps this holiday period can be for making a health and wellbeing list, a homeschool list, a garden list, a tidy up the house list, and a ‘friends to text hello to’ list. A list of lists. Will that make me feel like I can touch the bottom and rest from frantically swimming this massive ocean? Somehow I doubt it.

Still, I hope blogging again will help.

Hope to see you around here again soon.

Jodi. xx

a new post