Fullness of LIfe

"The fullness of life does not come from the things outside us; we ourselves must create the beauty in which we live."
C. E. Cowman

I've been staring at this quotation for several months, knowing it is true, yet finding it hard to believe that a little outside beauty wouldn't make it easier. As in the accompanying picture that I've also been staring at for awhile on my computer screen, one I took last year on my jaunt out to the Pacific Northwest. This is Pend Orielle Lake, the place I want to move to, the geographic location that I want to believe will help me find fullness of life. Note, I say "help me find' not make it happen. How could I not feel better looking at this every day? Well, I wouldn't exactly be looking at this view, but I'd be very close.

This has been a frustrating week on the moving front, enough so that I found myself in the studio yesterday with a real need to work on something, anything. It felt as much an escape from the current reality as a rebellion against putting so much on hold. For no particular reason, I decided to pull out the pattern and fabric set aside for Irish Eyes (a belated gift for a friend's daughter). I wasn't happy with the greens I had available at the time I first pulled fabric for this and now they looked even less appropriate. But I've added a lot more fabric to my stash since then, so surely I'd have a better choice now. I also needed to find a border fabric, and with the Lone Star all pieced, a hunk of blue hand-dyed fabric is now freed up for other projects - this one! In the course of auditioning fabrics, I changed my mind about a number of things, and am now only using two of the fabrics I originally chose. And that is a good thing.

Although the idea for this quilt started with a pattern from a magazine, I've changed the breakdown of the units totally, eliminating unnecessary seams. Rather than using the same block set block to block, I'm working with two main blocks, some four-patches and a 3 x 6 paper pieced unit. That paper piecing is what I have left to do after today's session.


This is another brighter quilt done in pastels mostly - pinks and blues and greens on a white background, not what I usually think I work with. I'm slipping in batiks and hand-dyes which makes it feel a bit more of a creative endeavor. I think it will be a very pleasant, albeit fairly traditional, quilt when it is done. And one more project I can cross off my lengthy list.