Coping with COVID

 

Coping with COVID

August 22, 2020

 One week to go and I'll be back physically to work. All our educational institutes closed on the 12th March 2020 and I had to work from home, which was very strange. We're all facing new and strange working conditions for the foreseeable future and who knows how I'll cope with that!

During the lockdown, I was one of the privileged ones. I have a home, a garden, a studio packed full of supplies and equipment and a job. Despite all this I found it very hard to focus and I found that reducing my time on social media and online generally helped calm anxiety. Saying that, keeping contact with a select few kept me sane.

One of the practices that helped the most was and is meeting with a small sewing group every Sunday morning for a few hours through Zoom. We sit and sew, chat and drink tea. One of the ways we found to help dig us all out of a lack of creativity was to set some group challenges. 

The first challenge was to create something with a "layer cake" ( 42 pieces of 10 inch square fabric).

I went rooting for my layer cakes and as usual found a few! My favourite, and newest addition to the stash was "May Morris Studio" by Moda Fabrics. May was the youngest daughter of William Morris, who at the age of 23, took charge of Morris & Co. embroidery department and was responsible for creating some of the company's most iconic textiles and wallpaper designs. 

Next was design inspiration, and some google searches on layer cake quilts led me down several wormholes. The pattern I chose was from modafabrics bake shop and here's the link, where you can download the free pattern: https://my.modafabrics.com/2019/01/moda-love-in 

What I love about the design is that from one layer cake and the equivalent of another fabric (for the background)  I was able to make FOUR quilts, variyng in size, one 72" square, one 32" sq. and two 12" sq. https://www.unitednotions.com/Moda-Love-Layer-Cake-Quilt.pdf

Here's the first one I made, 72" sq. from the 10 inch squares.

And this is the 32" sq. version made from charm squares, which are 5" sq. pieces of fabric that I cut from the left overs from the first quilt.

Finally the two 12" sq. mini quilts which I turned into cushions. I have to admit it took all I had to finish the last one, I knew if I didn't it would never get done.

The four together !