Despite being the end of the month, my year has yet to really get off the ground.
Unfortunately for yours truly, I caught Covid on New Year’s Eve and was feeling poor by the 2nd. I stayed sick, and alone in quarantine (first house-sitting an empty place, then at home while my husband stayed with friends) for two full weeks. No other people, no day job, no studio work, no real output at all. Just me, my pajamas, a bed, a couch, endless cups of tea, my dog, and sleep. Then predictions came rolling in for a nasty winter storm, and my husband came home just in time for the power to go out, snow and ice to blanket everything, and the city to shut down for days on end. We wore masks and stayed as far apart as we could; not far, in an 800 square foot house. We slept in different rooms, ate our meals in different rooms. Did crossword puzzles by calling clues back and forth to each other from the kitchen table to the living room couch. He never caught it, and eventually (17 days after exposure) I started testing negative, though even now I still feel and sound rather cruddy. The day I tested negative, the extreme ice began, and buildings and businesses across the city closed. Streets, sidewalks — our yard, porch, stairs — were all impassible. To say that by the end of last week I was feeling a bit cabin-feverish would be a wild understatement.
My neighborhood, but thankfully not my house.
But there is much positive to focus on. Despite temperatures in the teens (extremely low for the PNW climate, where buildings are not constructed with this possibility in mind) my pipes did not freeze or burst, unlike many of my neighbors’. We only lost power for one day during this week-long storm, unlike many folks who didn’t have heat or electricity for four days straight or more and whose inside temperature bottomed out in the 30s. We kept warm under our choice of many, many quilts to reach for. No trees or sizable branches came down on my home, or even all that nearby — a real anomaly, considering nearly 700 large trees have been reported down, and approximately 30 in our beloved nearby park. The scene above is only a short walk from my front door. So, gratitude.
I am also aware, keenly, that even without power or heat or the ability to move about freely, I am not suffering all of those things while also being bombed for over 100 days.
Quilts on quilts. The newly finished commission (R) atop the barn-raising quilt from this post, exactly a year ago.
My convalescence and my frustrations at being cooped up also spurred me to finish two separate long-overdue projects I had on-hand, at home. One, a tedious but worthwhile sweater-mending task for a friend, the other a queen-sized quilt I have been working on as part of trade for more than a year. Considering the task that is hand-quilting a 90 x 93” quilt in rows 1—1.5” apart, it was a behemoth that had been hanging over me, and I felt elated to finish it. Sweater-mending, too, is a beast of a time commitment, and something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. It’s my hope to muse on that a bit more here, in the future. As is typical for me, the completion of these two undertakings felt like the opening of a heavy door into sunlight, and as if my creative practice has permission to go out and run.
And so in spite (or because?) of my inability to get into my studio during all this time, my brain has been on fire with ideas and the deep desire to get to work. It’s not always like this for me; sometimes I show up grudgingly to my work even though it’s ostensibly the thing I want to do most in the world. (Apparently that’s the state I was in all last summer.) But just before the year ended I had put a lot of irons in the fire, and thankfully I find myself eager and anxious to return to all of them:
In December I bought and cut the fabric I needed to pursue an HST idea that’s at least 5 years old. Just before the year turned over I started a top for a friend who will welcome a new baby this year; then those design choices inspired a darker, more improvisational version. Though Acid Vat has been through seemingly endless waffling, since I took it off the wall last I have been unable to get one of those choices out of my mind’s eye and so it seems, hallelujah, the decision’s been made. Lastly, I decided to finally make a bed-sized quilt for myself, this year — something I have somehow, in a decade of this craft, never done. (It will be log cabin, of course.) And I still have the red “Sister” to finish, as seen on the design wall here, a whole year ago.
That puts us at six quilt tops actively in the works, with two more in the quilting/finishing stage. (We’re not counting projects that are temporarily abandoned, out of sight and mind.) So with the warmer weather this week, the thaw and the melting of the ice, I hope to spend many long hours in the studio, pushing many of these further forward. Here’s hoping for sunlight and a plethora of textile photos for next week, and more to record than the “weeks that weren’t."
But today, we have the ICJ ruling, and a hearing in US federal court of the lawsuit filed by CCR against the US President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Today is a being called an International Day of Action, and so I plan to be in the streets. I hope to see you there.