Around The World – Tokyo

Keera from Live Love Sew emailed me last week asking if I’d like to be tagged in an ongoing blog hop thing, and for once, the questions are actually interesting! That and Keera is really lovely and her patterns and quilts are beautiful, so of course I said yes.

What am I working on?

I think the more accurate question is what am I not working on! I am a chronic starter of projects due to wanting to try out so many of my ideas! I have two personal paper piecing projects that have been… ongoing… for a while that get worked on in binge spurts. But I’m someone who works well with deadlines, and I have a quilt due at the end of the month for a friend, so that’s the most pressing, current project. What I actually am not working on is bee blocks because I was smart and worked my bee months out so that I had July and most of August off while the kids are home on summer holidays. Because we all know how hard it is to be productive when the kids are home!

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

This is something I have really struggled with this year. I have had quite the identity crisis as a quilter over the past few months, comparing myself far too much to others. What makes me so special?! Why would anyone care what I have to make/Instagram/blog?! It really effected my desire to sew and blog and I ignored the issues and focused on Project Life for a while instead.

To be honest, I still don’t really know the answer to this question! But I have decided to just stick my head down and do what I love anyway… whatever that may be! To stop comparing and focus on my own goals and dreams instead.

Why do I write/create do what I do?

Because I have to. Because I need to. I’m creative; I need to create and experiment and play with colour and arrangement and design. I love a puzzle; I need to discover how things work and fit together. I have to fill graph books with quilt and block sketches, finding cool ways to make complicated designs easy to piece. I love to teach; I have to blog and share my work, my patterns, my tutorials.

How does my writing/creating process work?

All the time.

My day is filled with sewing or designing or blogging. In what order? Well, chicken or egg?! Actually, not quite, but sometimes it feels like that, in a good way! Most of the time, however, it starts with a purpose. I rarely sew “just because”, and even rarely finish such a project because I need a purpose! Whether it’s a gift, for a pattern or for publication, I work much more productively when there’s a purpose, and even more so when there’s a deadline.

Usually my ‘purposeful’ sewing starts with something in my day-to-day life inspiring a design idea. It might be a pavement I walk along, it may be a stranger’s coat, it may even be Kate Spain’s aunt’s wall hanging (I’m not sure if I’ve even shared that project yet, oops!). It will then become a sketch in my graph book, before pulling fabric and playing with colour for a few hours. Cutting and sewing then commences until the top is finished. The basting and quilting stage is often procrastinated for a while as I um and ah how to quilt the project, but once I start basting, it’s a downhill slope to finishing it completely, even if making binding is my least favourite job!

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Now, theoretically I am supposed to have asked these folks first if they’d like to be tagged to share their answers to these questions, but it’s Sunday afternoon as I’m writing this and instead, I shall just email them and tell them they’ve been tagged should they wish to play along!

I know that Ms Molli Sparkles loves to have a good goss about his work and I think these questions would be right up his alley!

Gemma from Pretty Bobbins may not have time to blog this, given that she’s so busy workin’ her FMQ butt off to get her quilting business happening, but I do know that you would all do well to check out her work and get to know her passion for quilting.

And finally, Steph from Quarter Incher made this purse for me and it arrived this week. I admired her work on Instagram and fell in love with this pattern, but knowing I would never actually get around to making it myself, I asked if she took commissions. She does and she did! I am in love with my purse but don’t know that I can actually bear to bring myself to use it daily – I don’t wanna wreck it! But I will definitely take it to QuiltCon with me. Gotta travel handmade, right? So I shall ask her if she’d like to play along too!