April celebrations

 

 I have been doing blog posts on holidays for a couple of months now.  It is fun to see what people around the world celebrate.  This month I have two.  I just couldn’t decide. 

The first is actually the whole month of April.  It is National Poetry month.  That alone should tell you what I am going to recommend.  Yup, poetry.  Do you read poetry?  If not give it a whirl. 

If you are not sure you will understand poetry, start out with some children’s poems. If you don’t like the structure of poetry, read some freeform poetry.  My favorite poet is Emily Dickinson.

Have you ever tried to write poetry?  Try it.  Know that all the words don’t have to rhyme but that might be a lot of fun to try.  Here is an experiment to try: go to a page in a book or newspaper and randomly pick out 5 words.  No fair picking only words you like.  Then with these words write a 4 line poem.  If you want to start easy, go with a children’s book or the funny pages in the newspaper.  You don’t have to publish it.  You don’t even have to show anyone your poem.  But as a line from a commercial once said, try it, you’ll like it.

The other holiday is April 22, Earth Day.  This holiday was created in the 1970s when the environmental movement was just getting started.  It is one that has special meanung to me.  I recycle and reuse (and reuse and reuse) but it is a holiday when my dad would send me a Happy Earth Day card.  He always tried to find some card with a nature scene on it and make it into his own Earth Day card.

So on this day do something nice for the Earth.  Take your cans and bottles to the recycling center.  Plant some flowers (and if your ground is still frozen, plant some flowers in a pot).  Paint or embroider a picture of a natural scene.  Or take a walk and watch nature (and then come home and write a poem about it.  Ah, you knew I would get these two holidays together.)  Maybe even continue my dad’s tradition and send someone a nice card with a nature scene on it.

So                    Roses are Red

                        Violets are blue

                        Celebrate Earth Day

                        And poetry too.

 

©2018 , 2023Cheryl E. Fillion

 

 

 

Challenge Yourself

 I like doing challenges.  You know when you are given a certain piece of fabric, a theme and maybe a technique or two that you are required to use and you have to come up with a wall-hanging or block. Our quilt guild does them ever year. 

One year our guild’s quilt show theme was ‘Home is where the Heart is’.  We were given a striped fabric with those words on it and we needed to make a house of some sort.  My house ended up on wheels and looked like an upside down heart.

                                                

Another theme dealt with stars. Well, I couldn’t use a plain 5-pointed star, I had to get crazy and used an stretched out 8-point star with a smaller star on top of it.  I did French knots around it in metallic thread to make it sparkle a little. 

Another theme honored out Guild’s ruby (40^th) anniversary so we were given one piece of red fabric.  I had just seen a movie that had a heart shaped ruby in it so that was on my mind.  So I took other red fabrics and created a crazy quilt type heart to hopefully resemble a ruby and I used metallic thread again to make it glimmer a little. 

Well recently I had the need to challenge myself and I had read an article of a quilt artist who had taken all kinds of suggestions of different quilting and embellishing techniques and design ideas like colors and when she got stuck would pick one of the ideas and use it.  So I decided to make my own list and start with 5 ideas and see what I could come up with from those ideas.  It has been so much fun to do that.

My first 5 picks was us to use a big shape, some ugly fabric, cut out an object, use squares, and add some fiber.  Well below is what I came up with.  I started small so this is only about 8 inches square. The big shape is the heart, the ugly fabric and the use of squares are the squares in the piece, The cut-out shape is the circle in the big square fabric and the added fiber is the small needle felted heart.

I like to challenge myself.  It gets my creative juices going and you are fairly sure your piece will be an original.   So if you want to give yourself a set of challenge ideas to work with, make a list.  Ask your friends for ideas, or thumb through quilt magazines and see what techniques or embellishment or color and fabric ideas other quilters might use and add it to your list.  Make sure you have items you are comfortable with and some that will take you out of your comfort zone.  After all it is not called a challenge for nothing.

 

©2023 Cheryl E Fillion