Permission to Make What You MOST Need to Create

Do you have a project you’ve been wanting to make for years, but just keep putting off? I sure do! This week I decided to clear the decks which means shelving a book I’ve been working on for months so I can focus on another book that’s much more important. Hear all about my decision in this episode:

Listen to the podcast or download it to your computer using this player:

Jump ahead to time: 21:55 to get straight to the topic of the podcast.

I apologize for the rambling nature of this podcast. I had a cold last week, then got hay fever after working outside, so I was a bit feverish when I recorded this!

Make sure to watch the podcast with Frank Bennett from two weeks ago and you can see the difference between my energy level. I found this helpful just to remember that I don’t run at full speed all the time!

Quilting News

I didn’t post a podcast last week because I was busy with a huge book edit (more on that later). Book editing is the one thing that is so all-consuming, I just can’t focus on anything else.

So that means I haven’t been doing very much creative work outside of that project. I got a tiny bit of work done on a Ms. Bunny Spoonflower panel. I’ll run a test of that next week and see how it’s looking.

I celebrated a big finish with my Tree of Life Quilt! I absolutely love how this quilt turned out and I love the Curvy Chevron pantograph I used to quilt it.

I love the texture of this Curvy Chevron over the Tree of Life quilt!

Click here to find the last tutorial I shared about quilting right to the edges of the quilt.

I also finished up the hand applique for the Eye of Calm goddess quilt and shared my ideas for securing this big applique to the background fabric. I’m planning to put this on my longarm frame as well and to baste it using water soluble thread. I think that will work best to stabilize the layers and prep for Trapunto as well.

By the way, you can learn about trapunto in the Heart and Feather Wholecloth workshop, which includes a small wholecloth quilt and all the steps to making your quilting motifs super puffy!

Permission to Make What You MOST Want to Create

I began the book Rise to the Challenge of Your Life on Christmas Eve and finished the last story before the end of January. Since then, I’ve been editing. And editing, and editing. Memoir writing is a lot harder than I thought and this first draft had a lot of issues!

After another solid week of editing, I decided to shelve this book. This may be something I publish in a few years, or it may never be published. It will probably take at least another 8 weeks to finish editing and I just don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze.

This was a really hard choice, but I’m shelving it so I can work on a project that’s much closer to my heart – my goddess quilt book. While writing Rise to the Challenge, I realized I’ve been living in regret about this for many years. This forced me to get serious and stop putting off the thing I really wanted to create most.

Clear the Decks

I publish one book a year on average. Did I want this year’s book to be Rise to the Challenge, or the Goddess Quilt Book?

The answer to this question made everything simple. I want to write the book about my goddess quilts. That means I need to clear the decks and get serious about making this a reality THIS YEAR!

In a lot of ways this is like giving yourself permission to work on a fantastic quilt that you been wanting to tackle but have been too afraid to try. It’s not difficult to focus on the easy, the fast, the quick, and the pretty and miss out on the incredible journey of making something more challenging.

It’s also scary to clear the decks and stop work on a project that’s taken a lot of time and energy already. For a few days, I struggled with feeling like a quitter.

Quitting is Good

But is quitting such a bad thing in this case? After a lot of journaling and thinking, I realized quitting isn’t always a bad thing.

Quitting work on this book is the best thing I can do. Rise to the Challenge was basically a two-month intensive class on memoir writing. The experience I gained with this book was huge! I learned how to write in the past tense, how to tell my story without apologizing, and how to share without oversharing.

Sharing personal experience is tricky and I would not have understood that without writing this book. For that reason, it was absolutely not a waste of time. If anything, Rise to the Challenge has given me the skills, the ability, the strength, and the knowledge I needed to write a book about my goddess quilts. I didn’t waste a single second working on that book because it taught me everything I needed to know.

But that doesn’t mean I have to finish it. I can happily set it aside now and focus on writing the beautiful book I’ve been needing to create for many years.

What do YOU Need to Create?

I hope this rambling podcast will help you identify the things you want to make and give yourself permission to clear the decks so that you can work on them.

Yes, a quilt can be far more than a blanket you curl up with in bed. Making a special quilt can change your life and that is exactly what many quilts have done for me over the years.

I cannot wait to share this journey with you! More to share very soon!

Don’t forget to support the podcast by joining the Quilt Friends Club. This membership club is filled with supportive, kind quilters from around the world. It’s also a great place to ask questions and post your pretty quilt pictures too! We have over 330 members at the time being and no matter the time of day, there’s something going on!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day

Click the links below to find more Hello My Quilting Friends Podcasts:

• #97 – Running the National Quilt Museum with Frank Bennett
• #96 – Creative Ways to Beat the Winter Blues
• #95 – From Fire Fighter to Fiber Artist with Brandy Maslowski
• #94 – Cleaning Up to Be Creative
• #93 – Fixing Quilting Mistakes with Beth Collins
• #92 – Rising to Unexpected Challenges
• #91 – Quilt Blogging in 2019 with Vicki Holloway
• #90 – Tracing a New Goddess Quilt
• #89 – My Word of the Year for 2019