Coming off the Christmas Cliff

Ahh….Christmas is over! Yes, that was a sigh of relief, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. The holidays are overwhelming and stressful and the big day of Christmas always looms in my head like a massive mountain that blocks my vision in all directions.

No matter how well I plan or how chill I try to be, the lead up to the big day is always a mess of stress. This year we added a vacation to the beach the week before Christmas and that made things even more complicated!

But now it’s the 26th and I’m sliding off the Christmas cliff and taking stock of what remains of this year and what I’d like to do with these last few precious days.

Because the holidays are so huge and overwhelming, I never plan anything during this time. I leave the whole last week of the year wide open so when we get here it feels wonderfully open and free. I can work on anything!

I have many quilts calling my name, but the one I’m most excited to get back to is Duchess Reigns. I put her on the wall at the beginning of December and I’m finally ready to finish this quilt. It’s not going to finish the way the left side looks – that’s too boring to even contemplate. Instead I’m going to let my freak flag fly and quilt whatever I feel like in the right side.

No, she won’t be symmetrical or perfect or probably even show worthy, but she will be MORE than all of those things to me. I’m actually excited to get back to this, which is surprizing since I haven’t touched this quilt in more than 18 months.

I’m excited because I finally feel ready to let go of the drive for perfection and symmetry and embrace a new idea – that creativity needs to flow spontaneously and freely and I should quilt how I FEEL like quilting that day, with no obsessive worry about what it will look like, or worse, what everyone else will think.

So that is what I’m easing into as I slide off the Christmas cliff and into these quiet, chill weeks before we jump into 2015. I don’t expect to finish all the quilting, but I do plan to take out a massive chunk of it in a very creative, unique way!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day