Deborah Carney

Where I Celebrate Life

Skill Building, Creativity and Letting Go

Why am I working on a quilt when I have a gazillion other things to be doing including 2 other quilts I started and stopped to make more sense out of this one?

This quilt started as a very orderly English Garden pattern from Missouri Star Quilt Co. I had this layer cake (precut 10″ squares of a line of fabrics) of sea themed fabrics and decided to use it and not use the solids that the pattern called for. Also during the beginning phases of this one a shipment from Michael Miller Fabrics showed up with a bolt of areally cool sea turtle batik fabric and a bolt of solid blue called Midnight that had been out of stock.

I am also doing this quilt as a “Quilt as you Go” meaning I am going to make blocks and quilt them to a backing and then sash them together instead of just making the whole quilt top first.

I had it all planned out in my head. The purple squares would be the sea turtle batik and the sashing would be the Midnight. The “solid” fabric of the pinwheels would be similar pieces of the squares that were most present in the package and a few from a second package.

I sewed the blocks together and here comes the skill building. Not just sewing skills. Apparently I can’t sew a straight line when it is pretty critical to do just that. I sew a lot of stuff that needs straight lines and do it well. Not on these. Skill built: Patience.

Cut the blocks up and cut up the corner pieces and sewed all those one. Took WAAAAAAAY longer than I expected. 120 blocks with 2 on each. And 2 I did wrong after I already trimmed extra fabric off so had to just sew two more corners on to make it kinda work. Skill built: Patience. Letting Go of expectations.

Now today I started the part that really ramped up the creativity and letting go. I started to create the blocks of four that make up the pinwheels. It was a little challenging to get 4 different fabrics on each block of four but I thought I was doing ok. I had the pinwheels in order – or so I thought. Skill built: logical creativity

Start building the blocks of four of the blocks of four that I will quilt then sash to the rest. Ut oh. All of a sudden the fabrics that were supposed to be in place of the solids were in the place of the prints. I do not rip out perfectly good seams just because something is out of place. Skill built: LETTING GO – let the creativity flow and just go with it

No one except ME knows which fabrics were substituted for the solid wedges. You might be able to figure it out if you stared long enough but really – who cares? Water is fluid. What is in the ocean moves around. So that is what happened here. Skill built: Adaptability!

What you see here is the next to last stage of this quilt. It will NOT even end up in the order seen here because the pieces and parts are still going to the ironing board and sewing machine for backing, batting and quilting. That is the “Quilt as you Go” part. It gets done in parts instead of the WHOLE thing having to go into the sewing machine and be quilted.

Skill building: Lots of practice with new sewing techniques that I will apply to the products that I sew to sell.

Creativity: I am a visual artist – photography, digital art, and now fabric. And things don’t always come out as planned. But they come out looking fabulous.

Letting go: Don’t be OCD and think just because you are following a pattern created by someone or even created by yourself that if things don’t come out as planned that it means it is a bad thing. I love the original pattern and may do it with other fabric more true to it in the future. Or I may go crazy with it again. I also LOVE how the quilt is ACTUALLY looking.

Aquarius. Ocean. The Sea.

The Sea Turtles will be the backing of the quilt so will be very present and not just the little diamonds and triangles.

This is how we are #makingitfun. This is how to adapt and grow.

I am 64 and learning new skills. And January 2020 I had no sewing machine, no fabric, nothing sewing related – not even a good pair of scissors, in the house. Nada. Skill built: Adapting to what 2020 brought to us.

2021 All About Passion

I am part of a 30 day challenge to grow my businesses over the next 30 days and I figure this is a good place to be accountable for it 🙂 We wrote a letter to ourself to detail what we would accomplish the next 30 days.

I had a plan for 2020 and had already done a LOT of groundwork for a new digital downloads business. I had to wait until after a conference in January 2020 where I had planned a large surprise celebration for founders of said conference that had sold the conference (talk about timing!!!). I detailed a lot of this in a private Facebook group so will be revisiting that group this month to reacquaint myself with the specifics I had built out.

I came home February 1st and already knew there was something brewing. Las Vegas already had cases of the “China Virus” from tourists and people that had traveled there for the major January conferences.

When I got home I had to work on my main business and had laid the groundwork to hire my grandson to upload products to Etsy and Shopify for me but got sidetracked.

Then BOOM March. I borrowed a sewing machine and got some curtains and sheets and started making masks. A friend hooked me up with a fabric manufacturer and a friend in Arizona shopped for me on Facetime and sent me fabric.
Our stores here in NYC were already shut down and online retailers were out of fabric. My daughter was also able to get me some fabric and sewing supplies in Las Vegas however by now the USPS was losing packages. A friend sent me mask making supplies from Oregon that took 2 months to get to me.

I found a manufacturer in NY that I was able to get enough fabric from to start making masks and selling them on Etsy. I hadn’t sewn in 30 years but I used to make all my own clothes.

Something to know about us is that we lost our house and all of the contents in Hurricane Sandy so I had ZERO sewing supplies, no fabric, no scraps, no old clothes, no scissors, no sewing machine, no thread. Vinny’s mom gave me some things so I could figure out if I could make masks. Then the machine she gave me broke and I ordered a machine from Singer. Fortunately a decent one was in stock. Amazon and all other online vendors were out of stock or price gouging.

The reason I am explaining this is that 2020 was a huge pivot – several of them. I work from home, I have my own businesses that are online based so didn’t suffer in that regard. But I needed to do something to help people and friends across the country rallied to buy and send me what I needed when their stores were open still and mine were not.

I now have 3 sewing machines and selling masks is a minor thing for me. Of course I donated a lot of them in the beginning and helped out getting them where they needed to go.

I have developed 3 other fabric based businesses that will continue to grow in 2021. I have the digital products business that needs to come to fruition since there are thousands of hours of work invested. And my main business needs to thrive and grow since it also helps others. I have an existing inventory of many crystal based products that need to fly to their new homes. I have combined fabric, sewing and aromatherapy into a new product that people love.

So while my letter to myself is rather vague it encompasses a lot of stuff that I will take this challenge and develop. By the end of the 30 days we will see what is going to be the biggest early winner. They will all be winners by the end of 2021.