What Are You Working On?

What the world doesn’t know about me is that I am secretly crazy when it comes to my work. I think all artists have a touch of the crazies. We crawl into a stitch in time or some safe little pocket of unconsciousness and do our thing. I usually have about five projects that I am working on at one time. One project is pressing for the next deadline, another one is my long term- five year project, then there is the commissioned project, or the one that I have been dreaming about but have only collected a stack of fabric, and the one that is hanging on the design wall because I am stuck.

So when someone asks me, “What are you working on?” I am stumped for an answer. My mind races around my studio glancing at each project. I ask myself what am I going to say? I weigh the situation all in a half second. If it is a long time quilter I say that I am working a project that has me trying to figure out which way to go. I’m hoping they have some suggestions. If it is a person that I don’t know I say I have a project that is due next week and I am putting the finishing touches on it.

I don’t dare say I have a long term project that I like to pull out every now and then that is going to take me about five years to finish. A five year project seems to agitate people. When they see me working on it after a year or so, they say, “You haven’t finished that quilt yet?” 

Today I want to answer that question with a commission that has proven to be a lot of fun. First of all I made this quilt for an exhibit highlighting recycling and re-using. My brother passed and I acquired the Crown Royal bags he had saved over a period of time. I thought right a way that they would be just the thing to make a quilt out of and show recycling and re-use. Friends teased me about having drank a lot of Crown Royal.

My nephew overheard a man saying that he would love to find someone to make a quilt from his Crown Royal bags. He had been saving them for 20 years. My nephew told him that he knew just the person.

Long story short- I am working on a queen-sized quilt from a big bag of Crown Royal bags. Of course that is not the only thing I am working on. The man also wanted a wall hanging quilt from his bags. I have the top of the queen-sized quilt almost finished. I still have to put those crowns on the empty bags that were originally the back of the bag. I will be quilting it after I put the crowns on it.

In the meantime I have started on the wall hanging. It is coming along well. It is ready to go on the quilting machine. I thought I would be able keep it simple but once I got to this point, I realized that I am going to do a lot of quilting on that gold background.  I want to do some stippling and make the dancers stand out. I will post the finished product next week.