The Catharsis in Seam Allowances

People often comment that it's surprising I get anything done with 4 kids, or that I have the patience to quilt.  It has very little to do with quilting, and everything to do with release.

Quilting, for me, is release.  It's relief.  It's a chance to think about life and my next steps, without any interference or judgment.  It's me, a machine, and silence.  Making something from nothing.  Taking all the chaos of my brain and making it orderly and beautiful.

For that reason, all the quilts I've made after my initial 'learning to quilt' time have a strong theme in my mind.

While I was learning to quilt, I made these.  They were more "learning steps" so don't have any theme beyond that:

1) Sam's throw
2) Izzy's throw
3) Abby's throw
4) Alexander's throw
5) Thomas Quilt (for Alexander)

These are all the quilts I've made since:

6) pink quilt - sent to mom
7) Star Wars Quilt - Sam for Christmas
8) Stripe Throw - sent to Katie Biron
9) Abby's Pinwheel Quilt - 1/1/14
10) Izzy's Pinwheel Quilt - 1/25/14
11) Snapshot Quilt - queen - 2/27/14 (89"x101")
12) Forest Animals One Block Wonder throw - 5/17/14 (54"x62")
13) Rainbow Chevrons - 5/28/14 (74"x97")

The dictionary defines catharsis as the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions.

I can state, with no question, that the last years of my marriage were filled almost entirely of strong repressed emotions.  Quilting, quite accidentally, has become my release.

Each quilt I have made has been an essential piece of the healing process.  Some, quite unexpectedly.

Since my first five 'learning to quilt' projects, the physical steps in quilting haven't changed, but my thought process has.  I quilt for me, and end up with a beautiful item in the end.

*Pink Quilt
When I started the pink quilt I sent to my mom, it was maybe 2009?  I don't even remember.  I sewed the quilt top, the seam allowances were slightly too big, and then I got stuck.  I didn't know how to finish it, so I stuck it in the basement for a few years.  I found it once I had started quilting my kids' throws, and thought about finishing it.  The entire project was full of imperfections.  The seam allowances were 'off', I couldn't find more fabric to match it, and I thought the whole thing was ugly.

Slowly, and with lots of thought, I solved each of those problems.  I added an inner border to deal with the seam allowance differences, I looked through my entire fabric stash and discovered that I had bought more of the same fabrics and misplaced them, so I had matching fabric.  But most of all, I just kept going.  I called it 'the ugly quilt' the entire time I was sewing it.  But once I finished it, I fell in love.  It wasn't my taste, but it was beautiful.  While I was making this quilt, toward the end when I was realizing its beauty, I started thinking about things that seem ugly but turn out beautiful.  I thought about unexpected turns in life and about doing the next thing.  The release in this quilt was my slow, beginning realization that not everything has to be beautiful and shiny and perfect.

*Star Wars Quilt
For the rest of my life, when I think about the Star Wars quilt, one mental image will come to mind.  It is me sitting in my sewing chair, turned around looking at all the blocks on the floor, and talking to J, who was sitting across the room, about divorce.  This is the quilt that was laid out on the ground while we discussed divorce.  This was the quilt that sat in a bag at Kayli's house while I lived there for 2 months because I was homeless and waiting for support.  This is the quilt that I finished for Sam for Christmas, while I lived at Kayli's house, knowing that it was for a bed that didn't exist, in a house I had never seen.

In my mind, I call this Sam's divorce quilt.  I thought about how the divorce will affect him as I quilted it.  I thought about the baby he was, and how excited and hopeful I was to have him, and about watching him grow up and about how I felt like I was losing my way as a mom because I couldn't help him.  Quilting this, I thought about how much I love him, and how much I worry about him.  I desperately hoped that he would be ok in this divorce process.  There are so many sobbing tears sewn into this quilt - not of hopelessness, but of change.  This quilt showed me how very little control I have over my life, related to Sam.

*Stripe Throw
In between working on quilts for the kids, I signed up for a Christmas gift swap on Make Laugh Love.  I chose Katie Biron as my partner, and knew I wanted to make a throw in her favorite colors.  I had seen a similar quilt, I thought, but couldn't find it online when I wanted to make mine.  So, I just figured it out as I went.  I chose a jelly roll in 'sunset' and went to work sewing the strips together.  It went together smoothly and then I meandered the quilting.  I thought about Katie and her sweet girls and Andrew and all the ups and downs in his birth and first few months.  I thought about unexpected events in life, about rolling with changes, and about how much I love the friends who hold me up.

*Abby's Pinwheel Quilt and

*Izzy's Pinwheel Quilt
When I moved to Florida in June of 2013, it was with 4 kids.  Their dad was still in Seattle for 6 more weeks, so it was just me.  Sam was sleeping 2 hours at a time, and then in 15 minute stretches.  Rather than be woken up thirty or more times a night, I chose to stay up late until he fell asleep for his 2 hour stretch.  That meant I had hours every night to spend sewing.  It also meant I spent hours online talking to my ex, reassuring him that everything was going okay, I was trying to work on marriage issues, etc.

While I babysat online and dealt with Sam's night wandering, I sewed.  I started by sewing a few pinwheel blocks from a swap I had done online several years prior.  Then, I sewed more.  And more.  And more.  Eventually, between June and December, I sewed 320 pinwheel blocks.

I laid out Abby's pinwheel quilt in Kayli's living room, with her telling me which blocks looked better where.  The colors came together better than I could have imagined, and I sewed the blocks to the sashing and into a quilt top in my new condo during late nights.  Tears upon tears went into the creation of the quilt.  I worried about the effect divorce would have on Abby.  I worried that she would blame me or hate me.  I worried that she would feel unloved.  I hoped and prayed that she would come out the other side stronger and more confident.  Finally, I finished the quilting the day she broke her arm.  It was wonderful to go home and place a quilt on her as a comfort and hug from mom as she was hurting.

I also laid out Izzy's pinwheel quilt in Kayli's house.  I chose rainbow order and a crazy bright border, which fits everything about Miss Iz.  I joined all the pieces to the sashing, and then quilted it all in the first weeks in my condo.  I spent so much time worrying about Izzy's sweet tender heart, and if she would ever recover from the feelings of fear and betrayal she felt at being away from me.  Sobbing tears were quilted into her 'divorce quilt', in the hope that her life would see more joy after that.


There were more catharsis quilts to follow, but I'll save those for later.

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Quilting Imitates Life

Wrote this draft in September 2014.  There's more to the story than this girl ever knew.

The more I consider which quilting posts to write next, the more I realize how inextricably my life and its events are linked to my learning to quilt.  And how writing only about quilting is hollow to me.  It tells only a fraction of the story.

But starting at the beginning seems both unwieldy and unnecessarily boring.  So I'll start with the good stuff - the sewing.

For years, I made quit tops and never did anything with them.  I loved the math, the symmetry, the challenge of choosing colors that worked well together, and the beauty and art in the orderly.  But I didn't know the next step.  I watched a few tutorials about quilting, but never took the next step and tried it.

This also corresponded to a time in life when I was busy having babies and being a full time mama.  Maybe it's just me, but there's something in full time stay at home motherhood that, while rewarding for what it is, made me wonder if I had lost brain cells and skills.  I doubted that I could learn anything new.

So my quilt tops sat in a box, moved between houses as more and more children entered the family, I lost more and more of myself.

At the end of 2012, I decided that something needed to change.  I was tired of feeling unaccomplished. I could make a budget, run a household, mow the lawn and make a home, but those seemed so. . . repetitive.  Unfulfilling.  It likely didn't help that I had the constant "you're not enough" being whispered in my ear by my ex-husband.  He never directly said it, but he would ask what I did all day, or he would comment "if you were smart like us" to me when he was around friends.  I started to believe it.  I believed that I couldn't learn new skills or make decisions or control my own life.

For Christmas 2012, I quilted little doll quilts for my girls.  Then, I decided to make Christmas gift throw quilts for my kids.  I didn't actually finish them by Christmas, but they were great January gifts.  And I started something and saw it through to completion.  And I learned a new skill.  And something in my brain changed in a dramatic way.

My new desire to be more independent and more in control of my life didn't go over well everywhere.  My husband felt very threatened by any desire on my part to change.  Several times, he told me "I liked the girl I married."  I agreed that she was sweet at 22, but no one stays 22 forever.  People grow and mature and become something new.

To be continued...

Resolution Update

In January, I wrote a list of areas of life I planned to improve
.  Here is the update.

This year, I will work toward:

1.  Loving my kids well.
If I have succeeded in nothing else, I am doing this.  My entire outlook on mothering has changed. I treasure my time with my children, and they constantly ask to spend more time with me.  I love it.  I spoke with each of them separately as they fell asleep last night, and each affirmed what I have known in my heart for awhile now - they feel loved and safe.

As for the honest side:
This is hard.  I often wonder if parenting his this difficult, exhausting, and intense for everyone.  Does this somehow mean I'm doing it wrong?  Or that I'm not cut out for it?  Or that I'm somehow inadequate?

In reading books by Brene' Brown, Glennon Melton, and similar, I am coming to realize that maybe I am feeling parenthood as an intense experience because it is.  I am giving everything I have and more, and it leaves me absolutely empty and drained at the end of the day, sometimes even crying at the sheer exhaustion.  Then I go to sleep, wake up, and do the same the next day.  In this way - in this beautiful, brutal calling to empty myself daily, I am doing exactly what is meant for me in this stage of life.  Maybe this is difficult because I'm all in, trying to keep treading in the deep end, while the water rages.

2.  Developing a plan for Sam.
If effort counted for anything, I would be lightyears ahead of where I am now.

I interviewed the director of the perfect school for him.  But it requires that he have ABA set up.  Sam's dad changed jobs on May 1, which changed his insurance to one that specifically excludes ABA.  So.....back to square one, and in the last week of the school year.  This is causing quite a bit of stress, and feelings of inadequacy.  It's difficult to count on someone else to look out for my boy's best interests, when it seems to me that's clearly not his first priority.

3.  Enjoying singleness
I have made great strides in this area.  I still find myself deeply lonely at times, but this no longer means I look for short term relationships.  I am learning to enjoy time to myself.  It's a small, but dramatic change.  I still have considerable work to do in this area, because I don't know that I'm anywhere close to ready to date.

4.  Finding a job that suits my talents better (with insurance)
Hmmm.  Can't say I've done this.  But I'm moving to something better.  A week ago, I signed up for real estate courses, and am progressing through them well.  If all goes as planned, I should be able to take the licensing exam by the end of June.  It won't provide great insurance, but it is a flexible job that will utilize my talents.

5.  Better balancing work and parenting
I am happy to report that this one is being done.  One day a week, Alexander visits "kid sitter" while I work.  Otherwise, I've been working while the kids are gone.  My workload is much lighter, so I am enjoying free time while kids aren't with me, too.

6.  Blogging consistently and honestly
Um, oops!  I've been thinking of blog posts, but they haven't come to fruition.  There have been massive changes with Sam, mostly good, and I haven't really updated them.  He is also back to very intermittent sleeping, which has made doing anything else. . . trying.

7.  Publishing 2 patterns on Etsy
Haven't done this at all.  Not even the first step.  But I'm sewing again, which is making me happy.  And I have patterns in my brain.  So it's possible by December.

8.  Making a five year plan
I do have a five year plan.  I need to write it out.  It involves real estate, learning house repair and millwork, and paying off debt.

9.  Making my house a home
I am doing this!  I'm proud to say my house, for the first time in 10+ years, feels like home to me.  We live here.  It is a place we are happy and safe.  It is not just a place for our stuff.

This year has been nothing like I expected, but I am making positive steps.  Onward and upward!