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.