This time last year I was working on a little quilt I made from a vintage embroidered napkin and a bag of thrift store scraps. This past month it gave me great pleasure to finally hang up this quilt in my home office. I think it's probably the best totally improvised art quilt I've ever made.
At present I'm working on preserving some crazy quilted fragments with my calendar project, but I haven't been quilting much at all this year. My hands have gotten so crippled it's become basically impossible to hand stitch, and I'm still having trouble mentally transitioning to machine quilting.
So I've been crocheting -- a lot. I'm currently working on three crochet projects at the same time, beginning with this throw version of the Ocean Tranquility pattern in a pretty sea glass light green for a friend.
I'm also crocheting a scarf with superfine yarn for the very first time, and slowly getting the hang of that. There's a third project in the works, but I'm holding off on showing that on the blog until it's finished, alongside my disastrous first attempt.
I'm a bit off-kilter these days, especially with working on multiple projects at one time. I wanted to try that for once to see if I like having many WIPs versus one (nope) and if multitasking my WIPs helps me be more productive (not really). I'm annoyed with myself, honestly. I keep thinking "If I were quilting I'd never do this." I still think of myself as a quilter, sadly, when I can't really call myself that anymore.
Life changes, and I try to be a good sport about that. I've been extremely lucky that I was able to hand stitch for as long as I have, considering my condition. Yet I still struggle with my increasing limitations, and how they've obviously forced me to give up what I love. Making peace means finding a new way to do it instead of mourning losing the old. I'll be working on that in June.
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