I am fairly open about my mental health issues. I have spent the last few years searching for something that makes me feel better. Just in my short time writing for FFS, I have showed you a plethora of things, I’ve tried. No one is more surprised than me, to find my zen in quilting: English Paper Piecing (EPP) to be exact.
You might be thinking – isn’t that the kind of quilting where you sew everything by hand? Yes, that’s the one. It turns out, our grandparents had this figured out, a long time ago. I say grandparents – male and female – because in my genealogy, the men were as deeply steeped as the women. I come from 5 generations of tailors and sewers, and they were equally adept with needle and thread.
As an adolescent, I enjoyed the slow stitching of needlepoint, but detested machine sewing. My machine sewing was never good enough, for my (evil?) home economics teacher, and I just wanted to get my assignments over with. That experience left me scarred. I would not touch a sewing machine, to save my life. (I recently signed up for a FFS machine embroidery class, with Ruth Lane, and barely made it past threading the machine.) It must be the slow process of hand stitching, that makes the difference for me.
My happiness hand quilting, and all of the positive things I’ve heard about this subject, were not a good enough reason for me to post about it. I needed to offer something solid to our readers. I did a search this morning to see what (if anything) I could find. It turns out this has been looked at, and there are some findings that make sense. This is where the word FLOW comes in to my discussion. On a podcast called “Conscience Chatter,” episode 297 talks with “Lizz Leral, the Executive Director of Quilting for Community.” https://consciouschatter.com/podcast/2023/6/6-episode-297-lizz-leral-quilting-for-community
She states “There’s this idea of being in the FLOW state, or this feeling of being entirely in the moment and hyper-focused, and in a sort of zone.” (Lizz) She says that in today’s rush, in everything we do, we have a difficult time finding the zone we need to refresh. She mentions, a book called Stolen Focus, and I am paraphrasing here… once we are in our stitching zone (or felting zone) and we are interrupted, it takes an average of 23 minutes to return to our zen state. She says, “Hand Oriented activities help transport us” to that special place. This is further backed up by Oxford University, Journal of Public Health, Volume 34, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 54-59: “The relationship between quilting and wellbeing” https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdr041
So, I have been slow stitching crazy quilt hexagon flowers.
I have been enjoying this slow/flow, stitching so much, I joined the Tales of Cloth, 2024 Ice Cream Soda Quilt Along. I started with a limited fabric collection, and quickly discovered my idea wasn’t going to work as planned. A little bit of FLOW made me discover, I can pivot in a different direction: everything will work out. Instead of perfection, I will allow my quilt to become what it needs to be. There is no rush on completion, it will take as long as it takes. It’s meant to be a learning process, and sometimes that takes a little time.
I hope this post, encourages you to…let it flow, too.
Capi