A Divided Heart

I'm going to dinner with a friend tomorrow night.  Actually, I'm taking her out to dinner.  To celebrate.  Her engagement.

Even just thinking about it makes me a little tired.  Don't get me wrong, she's a good friend, and I love spending an evening with her whenever I can get a chance.  But tomorrow night is going to be an endless game I play with myself and my divided heart.

I love her.
I am so happy for her.
I want to be her.

None of us are strangers to jealousy.  If you say you've never felt that deep stomach twinge, you're a liar.  Even the kindest, most humble people have had those moments of "Why me?"  
It's natural.  But it's so dark.

I miss the man I love.  He's been away for a long time, and each day seems a little harder to swallow when I stop to think of it.  I hate each and every mile between us, I hate the circumstances that keep him away, I hate the knowledge that even if he were here, there would still be struggles to overcome and difficulties to face.

I love my friend.  I feel blessed to have her living near me for the time being, that I can be a part of stories she will tell to loved ones in years to come.  But I want to cry and rage and stamp my feet and scream that no one can be happy until I can be happy.

The dark and the light, they live in two places in my heart.  The light is for everyone.  The light is what shines when you run into acquaintances in the gym or when the cashier asks how you're doing today.  The darkness isn't for everyone or every time or everywhere.  The darkness isn't even always for those who would normally take it.  I've shared my dark heart with my friend before, spilling out sadness and anger and doubt about my love, my job, my home.  But I won't lay my darkness about her marriage at her feet.  Does she know?  Oh, I'm sure she knows.  I'm sure she can get 4 from 2 + 2 and knows that my loneliness and yearning make it hard to hold a smile, but I won't tell her that.  She doesn't deserve my darkness in her light.

I'll tell you, though.  I'll tell other dear friends, and I'll even tell myself.  I won't let the darkness fester in dark corners alone, I'll bring it out into my consciousness, out into the world, where light and love can shine and make it a little less dark when I tuck it away again to celebrate with her.

Night Sky Wedding Quilt

I don't even want to admit how long ago I intended to post this blog - let's just say it's been quite a while!  I would have gotten around to it much sooner if I'd been able to access the photos that were meant for this post - it's always something, right?

I first talked about this project in this post.  The Night Sky Quilt was a wedding gift for a friend I have known for almost 18 years, and I designed the pattern myself.  I didn't want to share pictures of it until after she and her husband opened it, just in case they got back to her, so here they finally are!

As you can see, I'm still working on finding an easy place to hang quilts for picture-taking.  I'm on my tiptoes on a chair behind this queen-size, and you're still missing out on some of the edges!

I have a friend in my fabulous long-arm quilter Lyn.  She has done all of the long-arm for my mom and I, and she really truly lets the fabrics speak to her.  If you're in East Central MN and looking for a quilter, let me put you in touch with her!

Night Sky is really a simple pattern - with the exception of the stars, it's all squares!  I think the hardest part of this pattern was laying it out and then keeping it straight while my dog and nephew were busy trying to get in the way!  As you can see here, it has a scrap quilt look to it, but I used mostly fat quarters to give it that feel.  This quilt reminded me of a very important lesson - fat quarters do not cut in the same dimensions as a quarter-yard!  A few of the fabrics came up a few squares short of what I had so meticulously planned for them.  As always in quilting, adapt and overcome!

I hope you love Night Sky!  If you have any questions about my design process, measurements, the finished product, or anything, leave me a comment.

Quilt Designing

Like most females my age, I have an addiction to Pinterest. While I think Pinterest is fantastic with its sea salt body scrub recipes and fastest way to fit abs workout routines, one of the drawbacks of Pinterest is that your pins don't necessarily go anywhere.  This is especially true of my favorite Pinterest subject, quilting. I pin quilts because I love the picture – whether it's the colors, the pattern, or the textures that draw me in – without regard to where that picture leads. 

A couple months back, I spent an afternoon searching through my quilting board, looking for just the right pattern for a childhood friend's wedding gift. I finally found what I wanted in this Flickr picture:

photo credit

Unfortunately, that's all it was, just a photo with no link to a pattern, credit to a designer, description, or even a size.  That left me with few options, now that I was feeling like this had to be the quilt for them.

I decided to design my own pattern for a quilt inspired by the picture.  There are many upsides to making your own patterns, one being that you get the size you're looking for (my best guess would be that the quilt in the picture is twin- or full- sized, and I wanted a queen-sized).  Pattern making in quilting is easier than you might think, especially for a quilt that contains only basic shapes, in this case squares and half-square triangles.

These two items are my quilt designing must-haves: graph paper (any size you choose) and a fabric calculator.  Graph paper is essential.  At the heart, almost every single quilt is based on a series of squares and rectangles manipulated and arranged into beauty, and the graph paper helps get all those shapes into proportion without hours staring at a ruler.  I always have my FabriCalc with me during designing sessions, purely because it's faster to calculate yardage than using a pencil and regular calculator.  I highly suggest buying a fabric calculator only during sales, at a JoAnn/Michaels – my mom and I did so on Black Friday and got ours 50% off.

Other items you'll want to have handy:

• pencil (I think mechanical work best) with an eraser that won't smear
• colored pencils
• a pen to help differentiate between different areas where colors are similar
• scratch paper to write down yardages, do math, or whatever else you might need

With only those supplies and a short amount of time, you can have the pattern you want!  I finished my pattern in less than an hour – it probably wouldn't have taken that long, but I rearranged the stars a half-dozen times or so.

The final product

I will post pictures of the finished quilt in about two weeks, after my friend's wedding.  Right now, it is complete except for the binding, and I am very proud of it.  Here's hoping the happy couple loves it!

Leave any questions about my pattern making process in the comment section, and I'll be happy to answer them!

A Lesson in Patience

About two weeks ago, I packed up and took off to Montana for a week.  My best friend J was getting married, and there was obviously NOTHING that would stop me from being there.

I had prepared myself for the the emotions that were going to come with it.  You see, J's husband is in the Air Force, currently stationed in England, so a lot was about to happen.  In just a few short days, I got to see J again, met her husband for the first time, did everything in my power to help take some of the wedding chaos off her shoulders, put up with some of the more...colorful...guests, spent many many hours alone in the car with another of my close friends, and said goodbye to J before she jets off to her new home outside of London with a question mark where her return date goes.

And yet, weirdly, one of the most painful things to happen that week was a picture message from my mom.

About ten years ago, my dad and I built a nearly 200 sq ft flower bed for my mom, and ever since, she (with, okay, minimal help from me) has been turning it into a perennial garden, which means we spend the spring and summer waiting for everything we've already planted to pop up and bloom again.

I wait for the tulips and the lillies.  Those are "my" flowers.  This year has been a strangely soggy one for us here in Minnesota, and under the average temp too, so the growing season has been delayed.  My lillies still had not bloomed. And then a day after I arrived in Montana, they did. 

This has been a recurring theme for me, this feeling of missing out, of feeling the world's time slipping out of sync with my plan. It's a disaster. Despite my best efforts, at heart I am still a control freak. Losing my place feels like heartbreak – and getting back on track takes more than just hopping on one foot until the hitch in my ankle cures itself.

I cried about it, I did. Not just about the flowers, but about life and angst and feeling lost.  Then I got back on my feet, wiped my face, and moved on – talked to people, put together the wedding, danced the Cupid Shuffle and YMCA. Pretended I was on the right track. 

And when I got back home, I found this.