What A Difference A New Rotary Blade Makes

Every few quilts, I find it helpful to clear my mind by making something that requires no thought whatsoever on my part. No planning or design, just cutting and sewing. I find the techniques in Karla Alexander’s “Stack the Deck” books especially well suited for this exercise. It is also a quick way to make a quilt if you don’t have babies and husbands and jobs. So I have spent the last few days working on a quilt that required absolutely no brain power on my part. I didn’t even pick out the fabrics. I used a pack of 10 ½ batik squares. All I had to do was remember how to change the blade in the rotary cutter.

I started with the squares.

Then cut them into 9 roughly equal squares.

Shuffled the squares and sewed them back together.

Cut the 9 patches into 4 squares.

Shuffled the squares and sewed them back together.

Now I just have to sew the blocks together. I’m getting excited about quilting and embellishing this one. I’m feeling like this quilt wants lots of purple thread. I also feel like I have a clearer idea about what I want from my other projects. I work on multiple projects because I have lots of ideas and I can’t do just one thing at a time. I really like working this way, but sometimes the synapses get all clogged up. I think you can work on multiple projects as long as you are able to maintain focus. Without that, you just have chaos, and my studio is too messy for that. So when I start to loose that focus, I do one of these projects to reboot the system. Now I can get back to my artichoke, which has been languishing. And I have new ideas for the weeping quilt. And I finally have a vision for a pomegranate that I’ve been struggling with all year. Now if I only had 20 more hours in my day.