Stress and Quilting

It has been an incredibly stressful week -- stuff going on with both the house we are buying and with the buyers of this house... so stressful that it culminated in a total meltdown on my part on Thursday. Total, complete, utter, sitting-on-the-floor-sobbing-hysterically meltdown. I don't want to talk about it. :-) Really... it is too stressful still to write, think, or talk about. Hopefully it will all be over soon -- I REALLY need a light at the end of this tunnel.

On Friday I decided to take the WHOLE morning off -- I went to the fancy quilt store and bought a couple of small pieces of fun fabric with absolutely no plan in mind. I brought it home and sat with it for a while... then I decided that the fabric wanted to be placemats for the kids. I quickly threw these three placemats together:

Since they are just two layers of fabric they were too thin and floppy to free-motion quilt like I had originally planned... so I did quilting in the shape of a rocket on one and I am going to do simple geometric lines on the others.

Then, feeling like three placemats were an odd number, I made a smaller placemat with the remaining scraps of fabric I had. So, by lunchtime, I had run out of fabric.

After lunch I was sitting on the porch and looking at the pretty dogwood leaves when inspiration struck. I pulled some leaves off of our dogwood and used the kids' water-soluble soft pastels to do a leaf rubbing on the leftover white fabric from Nik's costume. It came out too bright and cartoony so I am overdying it with tea as I type.

It feels SO good to be playing again.