I am thrilled to report that the current of intensity running through the studio remains. I am working fast, and I find myself involved, invested, enjoying all parts of it. Every moment that I am not there my mind is pushing ideas around, my hands itching to return and push them around physically as well. Ideas are jostling together and competing for the front of the line, and my total attention.
Last week I finished the Paris-bound, yellow ring of stars, took it down off the wall, and set immediately to cobbling together a back full of mismatching florals. When that had come together, I folded them both up, and the wall was free again.
I thought I would go back to Acid Vat, immediately; it’s really only one long day, or perhaps a weekend, away from being ready for a back itself. I also have two other brand new experiments that have bubbled up out of the returning studio energy: a large golden HST piece I’ve ruminated on for the last five years or so, and my first foray into Ohio stars (seen below on the right). Each of these are at the stage of requiring little to no real decision making, but instead long stretches of batch-tasking blocks so that a critical mass might be reached to influence design decisions. Sometimes that batch-tasking work feels tedious and dull, but in my current state I’ve been deeply enjoying putting my head down for hours only to look up in the evening to find a satisfying pile of pieced and ironed triangles. A version of flow state.
But none of those three predictable choices won the jostling war. Instead, to my honest shock and surprise, the blocks of the red “Sister” quilt — a project I had all but decided to fully abandon — were what I reached for, immediately and without hesitation.
I have had the experience a few shocking, fortunate times in my life of being “gifted” the answer to some quilt problem that was vexing me.
What I mean is, sometimes I simply wake up in the morning and know what to do. I know the “answer” to the frustrating, stalled-out feeling of rearranging quilt pieces over and over and over again and finding no relief, never seeing them sing. The few times this has happened — when I have opened my eyes in the morning with a clear vision, a knowing — it doesn’t feel like a hunch, or an idea. It feels like The Answer. When it happens, I know. I feel an unshakeable certainty. And indeed, it’s always been right. It’s always worked. It’s always, also, been made up of an option I haven’t tried, imagined, or played with yet. It’s never been the case that I’ve worked out “three choices,” say, over the course of hours or days or weeks, and then one day I “pick one.” Each time, the vision has been clear and full, and unambiguous, and it has involved some element that I have had yet to imagine. It also almost always inevitably comes after my frustration at a certain seemingly unsolvable issue has been so great that I have given up: put the intractable thing away, out of sight, often for some substantial amount of time and usually without giving it a conscious thought again during that hiatus.
I have referred to this phenomenon as my brain “giving me the answer,” like a gift. It never feels as though it comes “from me,” the me who is present in conversation with myself consistently, throughout all parts of all days. These answers feel as though they arrive from someone else, unbidden and wildly generous. Each time it happens I am overwhelmed with a sense of unimaginable luck, an incredible prosperity. It is a great joy, an electrifying feeling.
This quilt top began as an idea in September of 2022 and then languished throughout the following year, feeling too painful to work on, and not urgent as its blue counterpart (a monumentally painful process in its own right). Last November after I put the final seam in the blue Sister I pulled the red one back out, and rearranged the blocks again and again, and disliked everything about it, and thought: You can give up, if you want to. You can choose to not make this piece. You can leave it behind. And I put it in a drawer. But last week the beloved experience described above — the knowing, the gift of the answer — was there, one morning, when I woke up.
And away we go.