Contrasts help procrastinating quilter persist!

As long as I persist in doing Something on the design wall and desist procrastination, I will make progress – or so I tell myself!!! When we’re young we think all we need is talent and we’ll make our dreams come true, but time makes it clear that a more necessary requirement is persistence. Because I’m such a procrastinator – and there are so many diversions (the internet being chief!! – the procrastinator’s dream) – I wouldn’t get anywhere without some rules.

My summer rule is to work upstairs in the study (warm sunny with South and West facing windows) in the morning, and downstairs in the dye studio (whose windows face mainly East) in the afternoon. The rooms are different, the light is different and the pieces I'm making in them are very different. Upstairs is a soft busy rooftops piece. It’s based on a memory I have of hanging out of the attic window of the old Victorian house in England.

We lived in town and I was always looking for trees – I loved to climb them and thought living in a tree house would be wonderful. I would count up the few trees I could see and be glad for each one. The colours in the constant drizzle were soft greys and brown with slashes of bold orange tile roofs.

I like to blur the edges, hint at details and put the sections together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Downstairs, I’m in such a different place and mood – simple, elegant, high contrast, black and white and scarlet. The piece is the 12^th I’ve done based on a few photographs of half timbered medieval buildings – the elegance of the strong ancient beams is both stable and hopeful.

If you want to get there, keep on putting one foot in front of the other – even one step a day (which is sometimes the best I can do!!) will get you nearer the goal.

.................and if you have been, thanks for reading! Elizabeth