Cooking Cures Writer's Block

My usual way of avoiding work that needs to be done is to do all of the tiny insignificant jobs that I think are holding me up. Getting the planning for the school week and battling with the online banking system that is meant to save time but mostly wastes it, meant that I had to get on with drawing quilting diagrams for my book. I doodled them out in ink then tried to replicate them using a graphics program. The problem is that I think my drawings are not very “arty” - they certainly seem to have been bogging me down. 

The next challenge will be to do actual quilting videos on both the domestic machine and a longarm. I had a sneaky look at some others on Youtube and noticed paper rustling, sniffs, bad lighting and skipped anything that lasted more than one minute. I wonder if it would work better to record the sound separately so you don’t even hear the machine competing with the explanation?

I decided to move on from worrying about how to present the quilting designs after having a bit of a Bake-Off morning. I made and sampled granary bread, sweet potato soup and pumpkin loaf before feeling ready to draft the text for some of the half-dozen simple book projects. I will probably have to make all of them from scratch in order to take high quality photos of each stage. 

Feeling that I had hardly done any sewing, I used the Bernina to do a few yellow and green wonky strip-sets for the Spring totems. I have refined this method now so I don’t bother to iron them until the whole “block” is complete. It was actually quite a keep-fit quilting process previously as I had to get up and walk round to the ironing board after joining every single strip.

I have a hectic week coming up with two parents’ evenings and two other meetings on top of the usual after-school activities. I will relish the days when I am home-alone even more and try to fill every spare moment with writing or sewing - apart from when I am making gingerbread biscuits, suppers made in advance or cutting out 48 felt stockings for my class to sew together...