open :: part one

Into Spring...

We have found a wide open space we love to wander around in and that has kept us busy. We have followed winter into spring - staying outside whenever we can and as long as we can. My boys are suddenly wild and loving it - jumping, leaping and running again - getting dirty. Such a relief to get our hands in the dirt again, working and playing outside.

I was needing to get the colors noted here to remember for the quilt. The deepest brown wet soil, every shade of green and then yellows and purples. My favorite right now are the bluebell blossoms emerging as pinks and then transforming through lavenders to blue. The green mist of leaves unfolding in the tree tops and the sky so so blue days in a row. A little boy so excited about bright yellow dandelions and purple violets and so happy we have so many in his own yard!

Starting the spring panel for the Sleep Pattern quilt, thinking of adding in some nine patch squares. Maybe the colors are too shocking next to the winter panel - but that's what I feel - the color surprises, so different from winter. Spring has so much momentum, it just takes off from barely anything.


Thinking I will will just follow this quilt around through the seasons adding layers of detail as I go. Leaving winter behind now and adding spring and working on that until it's time to move on again. By the time I get back around to winter it will be one big square, but I am so ready to just think about spring now. Watch everything uncurl and open up. stitching as I go...

Sleep Pattern Pup

Winter Blocks

These all part of the imagery I am working towards on the winter panel of the sleep pattern quilt. Posting them here to remember. First photo - my husband called me out at dusk last weekend when he saw this - imprint in the snow of a bird's landing.

Season by Season

The sleep pattern is still bouncing around in my head. Thinking I can make a quilt panel by panel season by season and put them all together after a year or two or three and have something BIG. I started a "Sleep Pattern Quilt" category in the sidebar. Thanks for the comments on that first post on this. I liked Catherine's comment about a net/dream catcher and am thinking this all over stitch pattern would unite panels of the different seasons/colors/cloth in the end - hold it all together - like a net. I am taking Jude's contemporary woven boro workshop over the next few weeks and hope to create some panels for this utilizing her techniques. Really excited about that.

Today my oldest biggest boy will be 7. So today is all about a party. He is growing up and sweeter than ever. He is amazing. It's going to be a great year.

Snow

Lots of snow here, on the ground and in the air. Ideas stirring up from these shapes.
I like the way you can recognize the shapes even in the fragments and incomplete ones...

the differences from one day to the next.
on blue taken today and on black taken yesterday.

Sleep Pattern

I have had no time to start anything new to stitch on but have been sewing this pattern of red stitching over squares in my dreams for weeks now. It has been on my mind each night as I drift off to sleep and the rhythms of it have been comforting to me - as the real act of stitching is. I felt a need to get this pattern out of my head and onto paper tonight as the boys were drawing and coloring. I opened a yet unused little notebook of graph paper - I like the preprinted structure of the little squares for thinking in quilt. As for the red stitches and solid squares pattern - I have to wonder if I have seen it somewhere and it has just moved into my mind for now. I will start something once I complete a happy new year de-cluttering of my sewing room which I absolutely must do. The start of a new year always has me daydreaming and drifting towards simplifying. A new year - and endless possibilities in a simple beginning.

On Holiday

Merry Christmas and happiest holidays to everyone. Stitching here and there but for the most part it has been gingerbread boys, girls, dogs and houses. Lots of playing in the snow. Going here and there. Enjoying time with my boys. Wishing you all peace, love and happiness. Catch you in the new year!