The national power company scheduled a 6-hour power cut for repair and maintenance to the substation in our area yesterday. No worries, we were prepared, so once the power went off I took myself up to my studio to read, as it’s the lightest brightest room in the house. I had just found, at last, my blank paged notebooks that had been ‘missing’ since I came home from hospital, and their absence from view niggled in my mind from time to time, because I knew they were somewhere around this house. I had turned my studio upside down, and checked all the downstairs bookshelves, but finally found them inside a tote bag inside the larger black tote bag that hosts my biggest longest serving Work In Progress Someone must have tidied them away while I was out of the scene. One of those books I’ve had since about 1990, and going through it reminded me of how often I’ve worked to a diagrammatic plan I drew up and used, and that when I returned to it years later I’ve seen something new to explore with it.

When I’m planning a new work I generally draw a few pencil diagrams, make a sample or two if I’m trying something new technically, and fairly often write some lists of words, although in the case of this one, “Mission Beach” I made very few notes! Once the fabrics were selected and arranged in colour gradients, I just got straight into the incredible amount of cutting and inserting one inch stips of fabric (which give a 1/2″ wide strip on the front) followed by metres and metres of glittery machine stitching and machine quilting to produce what I envisaged. The result follows the diagram amazingly closely when you consider how little evidence of planning I can show you.

As the power cut continued, not being able to machine sew anything, and not having a current work in progress requiring hand stitch, I set about rationalising my work area – and at last had to admit to myself that five or six 20 – 40cm pieces of painted fabric that had been hanging around for months in a little pile were just not successful enough for me to continue working on them as I’d planned 🙂 Perhaps when I painted them I wasn’t thinking straight because of my pending hip crisis… but, anyway, I reclassified them ‘samples’, popped them in with the rest of my samples, and with that acceptance of reality, a weight was lifted off my mind!

So I am still able to claim that I have very few unfinished works, or WIP’s (works in progress) as the quilt world refers to them!