A new house, a new life!

I can hear Norma’s voice telling me I haven’t written a new blog in a long time and I’d better get to it. This one’s for you Norma.

My life has been in a changing mode for many moons now and it’s finally stopped being chaos and turning into life again. I got wise to the ways of apartment living and started looking for a house when I got a new dog. I miss Angus and Fiona a lot. Eubha was a charming young lady but she had no personality and did not understand she was even a dog until the last few months of her 17 years. The new puppy, Jake, has mighty big paws to fill to come close to Angus, but he is capable of filling them. He is a character.

My studio in Cuyahoga Falls is as different to quilt in as living in an apartment was to living in a house. I live in a home again. I still quilt in the studio in CF. It’s nice. I don’t miss the cars zooming up and down the boulevard because it was a convenient cut through for hundreds each day. I don’t miss having to sleep with closed windows to drown the sound.

I will dispense with the words and go straight to the pictures. This is a smattering of customer quilts and my quilts for the past 14 or 15 months. I have many more to share, but it will be another day, as my internet is being stinky.

Change is good

It has been a busy year. I had put my sewing on the shelf, so to speak, to get through each day. Yesterday I put the sewing machine to work again and picked up a long forgotten project and sewed a few rows together.

Tom and I have moved into a very small apartment. My quilting business has been moved into a very small studio space about a mile from the apartment. The sewing room was the last thing to get organized in the move. The house has sold and our lives go on.

Today as I drove to the gym before through the blowing snow spits I was very thankful that getting up and lighting a fire was no longer the first thing I do every morning.  My priorities have changed! I go to the gym first thing. Next on the list of things to do is to go to the studio and quilt.

I don’t have internet at the studio so my quilting routine has also changed. I sit and read on my kindle for a few minutes when I am ready to take a break. I feel guilty when I’m reading and not quilting so I don’t read for long before I am back at the machine.

The biggest change of all is when I leave to go home the quilting on customer quilts is done for the day. No going back into the other room after supper to do another pass. I have to be more determined when a project stretches into longer than I wanted it to. I have not fallen behind and I am not too old to learn a new trick or two.

I have had the good fortune to have such excellent customers they were willing to find me in my new place and keep on keeping me busy.

My new studio is cozy, only 400 square feet. ¼ of that area is an enclosed space where i can keep my “to do” quilts on a shelf.

Finding clever ways to hang the pantographs and to store all my tools required a very good lot of thinking. I have many of my studio quilts that were displayed still in a storage locker. I am not sure yet how to utilize them.

Looking out the window as the fine snow was blowing made me feel like I was inside of a snow globe. The world goes by outside. I see the cars waiting at the traffic light each morning during rush hour. I hear sirens as the ambulances go down the street on the rare occasion one rushes by. I see an occasional walker and once in a while someone walks into the studio and asks something of me.

The first day a man stopped in and asked if I would consider hemming pants for him. No. Yesterday a young fellow stopped in and asked what tree quilting was. His dad cut down trees and they had a lot of wood that they needed to find someone to sell to. I explained that I quilt for people and it has nothing to do with trees. Well thanks anyway for stopping in. He didn’t have a clue.

Life goes on.