New Goddess Sketches

This year I haven’t had a main goddess quilt to work on, unless you count Duchess Reigns who is folded up in the corner until I can find the thousand hours it will take to finish her. I made some major design mistakes on that quilt…but I will get back to it sometime.

Still, I even though I haven’t started a new quilt, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on several designs. Here’s a few sketches I’m playing with right now:

This quilt came to me after reading a story in a Workaholics Anonymous newsletter. The author wrote something like “I needed to find something more powerful than all my fears.”  Those words – more powerful than all your fears – really resonated with me.

I’ve really struggled with fear and anxiety in the past, even made a quilt on what it looks like to be totally stuck in fear, and the idea of capturing that force of strength and compassion was really compelling. So this quilt is about seeking peace and feeling comforted and safe.

The next design is not really a goddess, but may be incorporated into one eventually. At the beginning of the summer I kept drawing empty spaces with lines running through them.

What was coming to mind is the feeling of having your heart torn out – like a broken heart – and what it takes to mend. There are times I feel like the scars of my past are so faded and old they’re hardly worth noticing.

Other times, and it seems especially in the summer, I find these scars raw and painful once again. I have a scar on my ankle from when I caught myself on fire in 1999. It might just be my imagination, but in the summer it seems to stand out much more clearly than other times of the year.

So that was the more depressing of the designs I’ve been working on, but I find it compelling because I want to play with Sharon Schamber’s corded lattice techniques. It might showcase something painful, but if done beautifully, it will be an amazing quilt.

Later in the summer I began dreaming a lot more and came up with this design:

I was thinking about the days before I had James when I was full of curiosity about this child I hadn’t seen before. Also around that time I began actively pursing my dream of starting a business so I did a lot of day dreaming about what our lives would be like if everything worked out.

This goddess is dreaming, planning, seeking, wishing, and creating a landscape out of her own head. I love this image because I believe it’s such a powerful, positive message: what you wish for can come true.

Right in line with this goddess is one more about creativity and unleashed potential:

This one is really a recreation of Release Your Light, but this time I’m going to use the original name of that quilt – Light In Me.

This design jumped into my head after AQS Charlotte when I began asking What does I Am Enough look like? and What does Creativity look like?

My answer is this design – creativity is an open channel. Her heart is open to share, and her hands are open to receive. The sun isn’t sketched in yet, but like Release Your Light, she will be exploding with light.

So maybe you can see why I haven’t made a true start at any one of these designs – this is a lot to choose from! The one lesson I’ve learned over the years is not to rush it.

I’ve decided to work on all of them, solidifying the piecing / applique design first, then the quilting design, then the construction plan. You never know, one of these may even show up as a quilt along project for next year!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day