maybe most of you have completed and moved on (?) while my cqr project continues. i think a story is forming . . .

all these threads from unravelling cloth, from bits of floss . . .

WHAT IF i smoosh them together

and couch them babies down along a seam line and call it decoration?

the R in CQR does stand for remedial, right?

okay. not that you won’t pick up on this from the pictures, but i’ll say it right here and now just in case: i know crazy from experience and example. and i know quilting from example, experience, reading, and the occasional workshop. but the extent of my knowledge about crazy quilts is 7 words deep: i-know-one-when-i-see-one.

that’s it.

i raised my hand and said count me in with jude’s CQR idea, thinking WHAT IF i really do participate this time. (i am bad to sign up for online courses and challenges, envisioning the marvelous things i’m going to learn and create only to get to the last week and have to scramble to download all the handouts.) but today, after my sinus headache abated enough to allow me to operate scissors without fear of self mutilation, i decided to Start.

now i know we are revisiting the whole crazy quilt thing (whatever that is), and i know i need – i really need – to do something without thinking myself into a catatonic stupor. so before my brain knew what i was doing, i threaded a needle . . . then realized that while i had the idea of what i wanted the finished product to look like (sketched it in my studio art journal that i bought when i signed up for and intended to participate in that recent online studio art journal workshop), i had absolutely NO idea how to get there. rather than let my brain rev up, i cut out a base (that i would eventually attach my cqr to) and started stitching pieces of fabric together using the sewing machine because it was already so late and i had to have something to post today.

i listened to “the almost moon” by alice sebold (thinking of paula with each word), and as the main character wrestled with how to do something she‘d never done before (dispose of her mother’s body after she murdered her mother on a whim that had been building for a lifetime), i stitched this fabric to that fabric, figuring out how to do what i wanted to do: prune them into the shape and size i want; fold them over onto each other when they pucker in protest, saying “WHAT IF this isn’t perfect” when all else failed.

tomorrow – or maybe even tonight i’ll find a way to attach this crazy thing to the base. (you probably see where i’m going with this.)

my assistant, like cathie’s, was a tremendous help.

sometimes we line the jagged holes with shiny, smooth pearls and tell ourselves the oyster story over and over and over again until we are convinced.

you can line the holes in your life with beautiful ribbon, she said, and they’ll carry you like a boat in the water.

what if this is FUN? using an xacto knife i’d forgotten i had, i made three cutouts then wrapped one of them using 4 strands of floss (2 of each color). used 4 for no particular reason – certainly not for additional coverage because this fabric doesn’t ravel. that was so much fun, i (ambitiously) went ahead and bugged-up the entire leaf. what if we see what else we can do with this? i have a stray idea or two. others will show-up, no doubt, once i get going. might need some magnifying glasses, tho.

what if . . . is one of my favorite motivational tools. when i’m having a fog-covered, moving-at-the-speed-of-cold-molasses day, i play “what if” with myself and first thing you know, i’m perking again. it’s a little bait-and-switch trick i learned/taught myself as a child.

and it still works like a charm. (used it quite effectively just yesterday and again today, as you’ll see . . .)

jude plays a mean game of what if. acey does, too. so does paula, and judith, and cathie.

so today i got to thinking . . .
what if i join in and play with jude, too?
what if i do something i seldom-if-ever do and detour from my current project, setting it aside before it”s finished?
what if i take a placemat that just happens to be shaped like a leaf and use it for something else?

what if i remove the vein that’s shaped with wire?

what if i ponder and sketch and sketch and ponder and eventually come up with an aha that tickles me?
what if i have more show-and-tell tomorrow?