This whole Halloween season was odd for me — I was on the west coast doing book-tour and family-related travels and even missed Halloween at home! While I decorated and celebrated with my west coast family, I felt unmoored from my usual routines, and after six weeks away, I was more than ready to return home.
I returned on November 2nd and started to settle back in… except the gloom of the impending election suddenly got to me. I felt paralyzed and anxious and unable to do anything about what I worried was coming. The day before the USA election, I began to sew a healing puff quilt for a family member.
A puff quilt consists of squares that you fold to create little puffs (I think of them as ravioli), which you sew into rows to create the warmest, coziest quilt you’ll ever meet. It’s one of my favourite sewing projects and among the easiest one can tackle.
Art is both refuge and rebellion, and the act of creation is active enough to stir me from almost any mood I may be in. I love losing myself to the work.
I finished the quilt in three days, from selecting the fabric (all from scraps I had on hand) to sending the finished quilt off in a box to its recipient — including the hand-stitching (border and back ties).
Which is to say it carried me through the election and the day after when I fluctuated between blind rage and a chilling numbness. And rather than dwell in those feelings, I focused instead on pouring love and healing into each and every stitch of the quilt with wholehearted intention. While the quilt is meant to aid the healing of another, it began its healing acts with me.
The Art of Finishing a Project is its own momentum and magic, and if you’re stuck in a drowning place, I highly recommend selecting an easy task and seeing it all the way through to completion without interruption. The power created when you apply that last touch to the project heals all sorts of wounds and gives one the energy to keep moving forward.
Which is what we have to do, after all, no matter what we face, if we are lucky enough to still be around to face it.
The only way out is through.
Love and Monsters,
Iza