so i live in hawaii now

So there's a longer story that I may at some point share--it's not that interesting, I'm just tired at the end of a long work day--but my partner and I moved to Hawaii in January! It has been a really intense transition, but I'm finding my equilibrium here, and after a frustrating hiatus, I'm also rebuilding my sewing practice. 

I have a pretty amazing studio space that I'm letting myself organize slowly. I've been working mostly on a quilt I started working on at least two years ago. 

 

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I cut and sewed about half of the half square triangles for this quilt back in Oakland (and Wisconsin, actually--most of the fabric is my dad's old work shirts). I tried to work on the design as a whole quilt and kept changing my mind. I couldn't decide on an approach, so I just put it all away. When I finally got my studio set up here in Kona, I pulled out all my works in progress to try to find things I could actually finish, and this immediately felt like the quilt I needed to finish. I started assembling individual blocks and just decided to trust that all of those blocks would eventually fit together somehow, and it's gone so well. I decided to handquilt this one, so it may be awhile before it's finished, but it feels amazing to actually make steady progress on such a huge project. 

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Thinking of what I'm doing as a practice has been a shift in approach, I think for the better. I can be a pretty intense perfectionist if I don't keep myself in check, and thinking of what I'm doing as a daily effort to work on, refine, and improve my skills as an artist has been really freeing.