Time, Chaos and the Tip of the Iceberg

What happened to March and April?  I have been busy, just not with craft projects to post about. I got into a serious spring cleaning project and totally sorted and reorganized all my cloths, shoes, linens and blanket storage areas. I picked a ton of stuff to clear out and loaded my car trunk with everything nice enough to give away and hauled it all to Goodwill. The remaining items were either trash or to be recycled as rags, or craft materials. I've made many rugs from old sheets, curtains or t-shirts in the past. It's a good feeling to be organized even for a little while. Life always tends toward chaos so this exercise will be repeated again sometime in the future. 

After enjoying the contentment of being organized for awhile I started on my next big project that I have to admit has been planned for a couple years! The goal is to paint the kitchen/dinning room (all one large area) and laundry room. I knew I would need about a month to do it and it would be disruptive and physically tiring for me so I've procrastinated for as long as I can. I had to start it no matter how I felt or what ever else was going on. That's a lot of wall, odd spaces (like behind the fridge), a lot of small and large items to move out of the way and a lot of woodwork to paint on hands and knees. I started in late March and I'm still not done. I was being overly optimistic to think I could get it done in a month. I can't work on it every day. I have bad days (bad weeks) when I can't do anything that physical and I have to rest a day or more after doing something very physical. So the project drags on but now that I've started I will finish it. Eventually. 

So that's what happened to most of March and April and on into May. But I do take time to work on some crafts because they make me happy when everything else feels like work and drudgery. 

I've been working on some fabric designs to print at Spoonflower. I've done a little of this in the past and while I'm still learning how to make the most of this service, I put together files to test print my designs. The fabric prints never look exactly like the digital file. The colors look different, the edges are fuzzier, some colors that are distinctly different in the digital file look nearly the same color printed, and this time some of my design detail was completely missing in the printed fabric version.

This is a one yard piece of Kona cotton fabric printed with designs I'm working on:

This is a collection of indigo prints I designed.  I'm happy for the most part with these but the background color printed as a solid blue and it is suppose to be a scratchier aged looking background. That detail in the digital file was completely lost in the printing process. 

I designed this simple half square triangle geometric using my favorite colors. (digital version)

This is the final printed version of the colorful geometric design shown above.  This photo doesn't show how nice it really came out. 

This is a collection of half square triangle quilt design elements that I use when designing new quilt patterns.  There are 256 different elements and it's a fascinating design process that has intrigued me for years. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this. I just wanted to see it printed on fabric. 

And this is a sample of a pattern I'm trying for a topographic or contour line fabric. In this case the fact that the fabric print comes out just a little fuzzier than the digital file actually helps the appearance  of the design. I'm encouraged by how this looks in this rough form. 

More recently I just sat down and did some sewing. I just feels good to finish something I can use right away.  My husband thinks I'm a little late in getting this done.  I told him I was actually early. 

This is a Christmas table runner. 

I think of end products as the tip of the iceberg. So much of what we do has hidden behind it hours of planning, training, trial and error, time and energy, skill, practice, repeated efforts, anxiety, frustration, maybe even pain and suffering. The thing you admire in the end is the sum total of all that went into it.

Thanks for reading. 

Aileen