This past week I taught myself how to sew and did a painting just for me. I was able to take a few moments for the first time in a while and do it just for me.
I took a visit with my mom to see the woman who taught me how to knit socks, Peggy, and her husband, Steve. When we were there she showed us her quilting collection and it gave me a super spark of inspiration. Especially when she showed me a felt piece she made with a bunch of animal appliques.
When I got home, I dug up some spare fabric from the basement. I even found a super cute Winnie the Pooh pattern that I cut some squares from. I taught myself how to sew on the machine my mom has using plenty of guidance from YouTube and made a tiny quilt with the fabric. It was very simple and was just straight stitching all the way through. It took all of five minutes to become emotionally attached to that tiny quilt.
The next day I took my very first trip to Joann’s. I picked out a gorgeous blue crane pattern, a very colorful accent pattern, a black, silver, and gold pattern for the liner, and some marbled white fabric for trim and other accents. I figure the leap from tiny quilt to quilted jacket was small enough.
So that’s just what I made 🙂 a quilted jacket for myself with beautiful patterns. I learned how to change out the feet on the machine for different stitches, learned how to free form quilt, and did MUCH better bindings. I even made pockets that fit my phone both horizontally and vertically!
It reminds me of an Ed Hardy jacket I used to have when I was younger. I’m in love with it and I can’t believe I made it in two days.
Then last night I made a painting just for me, in fact the first painting I’ve ever made for myself. I saw another painting on Instagram of a beautiful apiary with gorgeous lighting under some trees and it spoke to me. I painted my own little bee hive with some moody lighting and tiny dots for bees and I love it so much. I think I’ll have it professionally framed so I can hang it in my room. I bought some orange paint recently and somehow it worked perfectly in the sky next to the baby blue I have. It turned it almost pink and looks like perfect sunset clouds.
Taking the time to do creative projects for myself has been so rewarding and even more its given me more motivation to create for others. I can’t really explain it. It was like creative self care and it worked 🙂 I want to try painting larger pieces for myself in the future.
I also finished the Pride 2021 collection that I’m releasing June 28th. All of the paintings are on the home page. I can’t wait for the release! It was a great week.
