A Blog is Born

 This year (as in, 2025) I am going to have some fun textile adventures - not just quilty ones either.

And I decided to go back to blogging about these kinds of things. It's been... kind of rough in the last little while. How do I blog my feelings when I can't do it perfectly. And I really, really can't. I have all these visions of what "blogging" and "vlogging" and social media and being a great writer and influencer and and and mean, but I just can't accomplish any of them perfectly, and it's prevented me from engaging in this craft for a while now. Which, hey, that's kind of sad - I have always loved expressing myself in this dorky online way. Like, ever since age 14! It's a big part of my identity, and something's been missing ever since I've let perfect be the enemy of good.

I mean, it's kind of already saying something that this blog will be "good". It probably won't. Meh. Who cares. It's for me and maybe a few of my close ones. I'm not going to be able to monetize anything this way - it's just not realistic. Or desirable.

So yeah. As we have accustomed ourselves to the new move to Utah, I have gotten in kind of a nice routine vis-a-vis textile habits. I probably should try to get in similar routines with meal prep and cleaning, but I just find that really uninspiring, whereas doing stuff with textiles really fills my bucket.

For example, I recently learned how to spin. I love spinning.

I also recently left a toxic (for me) quilting Facebook group that was serving the purpose of a quilt guild. It just isn't working for me there, so I'm going to try to find a place in the real world. I decided to start by meeting with the charity quilt ladies who meet every week at the stake center, but that's not going to start until the new year. So I hope it works out.

In no particular order, here are a few of the goals I have for 2025. I will probably flesh these out a lot better in future posts, but I just want to mind dump. 

I told you this was probably not going to be a good blog post. You have been warned; it's just brain barf, nothing organized or well crafted. And I'm kind of struggling with that fact in my mind. I just... I can't go back to trying/longing to be a perfect blogger, because then I won't ever do it. Argh.

Okay, anyway -

For starters, there are my 3 century quilts.

1925

Marie D. Webster's "May Tulips", which you can check out several copies here.

1825

Mary Morris's embroidered quilt, which you can find here.

1725

The Deerfield coverlet, made totally of wool! So beautiful. You can find that here.

The quilting pattern! Thanks to the curators for including it.

And here's the wholecloth coverlet.

Yeah. So those three projects are pretty massive. I'm not planning on doing perfect replicas, but I do want them to be very heavily influenced by the originals.

Other projects I'm excited about at the moment:

I want to get a loom and start learning how to weave.

I'm doing the "Year of Scrappy Triangles" quilt that my friend Leila designed.

Czech Bounding Projects, which include building a mitten loom to weave me some mittens. Yes, I did say weave.

I need to finish the sweater I started. The pattern is kind of terrible. I followed it and it isn't really working out. I need to learn how to judge sweater patterns better. But a friend from choir who is an expert knitter photocopied me a pattern which I shall endeavor to try - although I've literally no idea how to even approach cables. But she said it is pretty easy. I really hope so.

But for now, I'm going to go read some of the super cheap quilting books I got from Abe Books. One of them is a reprint of Ruby Short McKim's 1930 book about quilt patterns. Will write more about that later.

I've found that the best way to get my mind calm enough to be in a state of mind where I am able to sleep is to read on a topic that is fully engaging AND fully calming. And this happens to be textiles for me now. Quilting books, quilting history books, anything about fabric - I really enjoy reading about this deep interest. If I read on my phone, I'll read forever. Reading a book forces me to read even the "boring" parts, which actually just kind of helps shut down my very active brain. It's soothing. It also helps because I look forward to this kind of reading every night. It's been about six months, and I fully intend to keep up this little ritual. So maybe this blog will include book reports, too.