A blue bear made from tragedy.

I don’t actually know how I want to word this post. Recently my dad passed away. I was with him that morning before going to work, we had a rather mundane everyday talk that mirrored every other day in a normal life, he seemed fine, he was fine, I went to work and two hours later got a call he had died and my whole world felt like it was torn apart. This was very much an unexpected death. The weird thing was I really didn’t want to leave him that morning, everything felt off that day. Even though I was at work when he died, the moment he fell (I was told the time later) I had felt like the wind was knocked out of me and I had a feeling of I just want to go. It was the most disconcerting feeling I have ever felt, the call came an hour after that.

I was very much a daddy’s girl, we were close and did a lot together, we loved hiking together and spending time just being together. The day before he died I worked on hand sewing while he watched golf (his hobby not mine) and the thing that made it special is we were just in the same room together existing in the same place it didn’t have to be anything grand we just got along.

He still had a few of his old work shirts so I salvaged one and turned it into a bear. My whole life up until he retired he wore a blue work uniform. The shades of blue may have varied but they were always blue so I always associated the work uniform with him, even after he retired he would wear the shirts to do grungy jobs around the house. The pattern is simplicity # 8716 a pattern someone gave me and I kind of thought I would never use it, but then I did, so I was glad I had it, that way I didn't have to think about too much about a pattern to use.

This has been a really rough year, and I just really miss my dad.

My mom and I doing some serious missing next to flowers my dad planted at a garden where my dad volunteered.

* This blog is not to be used for training AI*

wide leg cargos

Superman quilt

I decided to make a quilt for a friend who is expecting and I like to try to personalize a little for the family and this family seems to like superman alot. So I went with a superman theme. I spent a good little bit of time trying to find a simple superman shield block for this quilt. I found a few that were simple but I didn’t like the way they looked and I kept coming back to this one. It's paper pieced and I have never done paper piecing. I’ve been told by a few people that paper piecing was really difficult and had to be taught in hours-long classes. Basically I was told it was far too advanced for me to even try so it always felt intimidating. Well I really liked this block and after staring at the pattern for a while I thought well I could always just try it. It doesn’t look that hard. The pattern itself didn’t have any instructions with it. I guess they assume you will already know how to paper piece if you are trying this. It's literally just a pattern with numbers and colors. I’m sure I could have looked up tutorials but I decided to try it on my own. And here is what I found. Paper piecing is really basic, it's not that hard to figure out, but it is time consuming. That is the only reason I can figure the people told me it was really hard. I didn’t find it any harder than piecing together traditional quilting. And honestly I am sure there are plenty of quick tutorials out there describing how to do paper piecing (the site I got the pattern from does have a tutorial section, I’ve just never looked at it). I did admittedly mess up on the first block at the beginning, I started putting it together backwards, I however realized this fairly quickly and started over and the rest of the shield blocks went together without too much trouble. The rest of the quilt I did just simple blocks that I came up with. I really liked working with the bright primary colors; it added a bit of happiness to it. I was happy with the way this turned out. And I really like that fandom in stitches offers patterns for free. This is the first pattern I have tried from there but probably not the last.

Anytime someone tries to quash your creativity by telling you something is too hard for you and you could never do it. Try it anyway. Even if you mess up, or have to try several times, don't stop trying. Question everytime someone tells you you aren’t good enough and prove them wrong. If you love what you are creating, keep creating. The more you do it the better it becomes. Just remember sometimes it takes time to get there.

Patten for the superman shield Its in the justice league category
If paper piecing seems too intimidating or time consuming they also have a good applique block.

Superman shield block Designed by Lilja Björk Sigurdórsdóttir

* This blog is not to be used for training AI*