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I made myself a blanket! My queen-sized quilt is now complete. It’s 100% pillowy cotton and you could easily sleep inside of it, like a cloud.
Spring is the perfect time of year to bundle up. Protect yourself from wind by keeping the back of your neck covered to prevent pathogens (like COVID-19!) from penetrating inside from the exterior environment. (The nape of the neck is one of the ways that viruses enter your system, according to Chinese Medicine thinking.)
Spring is also the perfect time to get a little wild.
The Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen (Yellow Emperor’s Classic on Internal Medicine, circa 400 BC) advises that in spring we should:
“Dishevel the hair and relax the physical appearance,
Thereby cause the mind [to orient itself on] life.” (translation by Paul Unschuld)
This spring, I invite you to start shedding some of those superfluous layers as the weather warms. Maybe you’re ready to ditch that second skin (or that one pair of soft pants) that you’ve grown a little too comfortable in on those non-windy days.
When I started this quilting project (which was mostly my first, other than the tiny baby quilt I made for my nephew via youtube tutorials), I wasn’t sure that a queen-sized quilt was going to fit through my $99 Costco sewing machine, but it totally did.
Other than selecting beautiful fabric and Italian thread so expensive that my dad audibly gasped when I checked out at the quilt store, I had not much of a plan in terms of design. Trying to follow a pattern sounded super stressful, given that I very much identify as a recovering-perfectionist, so I followed my intuition and (literally) just stitched it all together from there.
There were definitely some mistakes, and some patch jobs where I thought I was sewing straight but was actually riding along a not-so-subtle curve, but I loved the fabric I selected (and that Italian thread) so much that the unintentional “errors” became not seamless (there are definitely some random seams) but part of the fabric of my finished project, so to speak.
Spring is the season of imagination, innovation, and fresh delights.
Try something daring this spring. Invite yourself to be curious and maybe even surprised.
It’s still feeling pretty wintery in Philadelphia, but the flowers are appearing. Spring has sprung.
Wishing you new possibilities this season.