It’s been a while since I posted last, round about the time lockdown started.

I said then that I was going to go on making the small things that I make, whether or not anyone was in a position to buy them. But that, it turned out, was a lie.

Since I last posted here, until yesterday I had made, in fact, precisely nothing.

As lockdown started I finished off the one doll I had already begun:It was like pulling teeth to get him finished – and took over a week.

And then… nothing. My creativity dried up like someone had turned off a tap. The little doll above used up the last dribbles and then it was gone. Over. Finished.

I found that I was having trouble sleeping. Often, I found that I wanted to cry during the day. I couldn’t concentrate to read, or sew, or do anything much, apart from online jigsaws – which were the only way I seemed to be able to get into that feeling of concentration and “flow” that I had previously got from making things, but that was now otherwise impossible to access.

So I kept doing jigsaws. I cleaned the house a bit, weeded the garden, painted the shed, and waited for my creative self to re-emerge from whatever hidey-hole it had retreated to.

But it didn’t.Yes, there are practical reasons that go some way towards explaining why continuing to create as before is more difficult in lockdown. My partner is working from home, often at the kitchen table where I usually spread out my stuff and make dolls. My lad, too, is around in the living room, where my sewing machine is, and I don’t want to disturb him when he’s busy trying to do his schoolwork.

Both of them need food and drink periodically during the day, some of which I provide, some of which they make themselves, all of which is consumed in the kitchen. There is a lack of solitude – and more washing up! – than I am used to. Don’t get me wrong, spending time together is lovely and we all get along fine, but my routine has gone and my working space is curtailed. The local post office has also been closed, so posting out orders wasn’t possible and even if it was, the post is suffering long delays.

Despite that, I know that really, the barrier to my continuing to make things comes from within. My work felt trivial and pointless. I have read that other artists have felt similar… a lack of ability to create, feelings of discombobulation, lack of concentration and in some cases out and out depression brought about by what’s happening in the world. All those deaths. So much suffering. Out of our control.

Some have responded by sewing face masks and PPE, or volunteering to help feed others, or providing whatever useful services they can for free. I feel guilty that I am not amongst them. But I have felt paralysed. And angry – so angry! – that those “in charge” have proved so bloody useless when it comes down to us, the people they serve, actually needing them to step up.

The last time I felt like this was when I left my horrible job, nearly ten years ago now.

I was being bullied by a senior manager and disciplined for being unable to meet deliberately impossible targets. After a few months of hell, in which I was working 12 hour days and regularly cried in the toilets at work, I resigned. I think I had a bit of a breakdown after that, to be honest. I’d worked my socks off and all I’d got was abuse and blame. I didn’t understand work, or myself, any more.

Patchwork saved me. I did a class, discovered craft as therapy and immersed myself in patchwork’s rhythmic processes of cutting, stitching, pressing.

The other day, whilst looking at photos, I wondered idly whether it would be possible to make a full-sized patchwork quilt like the ones I had previously made for dolls…I decided it would. If I treated each doll-sized quilt as a quilt block, I could join them all together and end up with a person-sized quilt. I had no other thought than it would be a good reason to post an old photo, not having any new work to share.

So I posted about it on Facebook and discovered that such quilts, made up of tiny tiny scraps, were called “crumb quilts”. They use whatever irregular scraps are available but too tiny for anything else. They differ from “postage stamp quilts”, which are made up of regular shapes (usually one inch squares) and each patch in a true postage stamp quilt is cut from a different fabric – no repeats.

I posted as an idle thought, not really with the intention of doing anything about it, but the more I read people’s comments on my post and the more I researched, the more the idea grew.

When I made the doll quilts (pictured above) I picked out fabrics I liked, cut tiny weeny bits out of them and sewed them all together in strips, then trimmed them straight with my rotary cutter and ruler and sewed these strips into a little rectangle.

I decided that whilst I could follow this method, which is fine for a tiny dolls’ quilt, there might be a quicker way out there. If I was going to contemplate the prospect of a large quilt, I didn’t want to still be making it years later. Also, postage stamp quilts are beautiful, but I wanted something less precise and more forgiving, that I could make from scraps I have on hand. I didn’t want to beat myself up for every little error, I wanted a process that would be a means to an end, a way to spark those feelings of flow and creativity, with the prospect of something beautiful created in the process of finding my mojo and eventually taking me back to creating dolls (hopefully, anyway).

So a big thank you goes out to bloggers Crazy Mom Quilts and Sewn Up, whose methods I’ve studied and adapted for my own purposes.

Amanda of Crazy Mom Quilts made this Scrap Vortex Quilt, and it’s her method I’m following primarily…My quilt will probably not end up as large as Amanda’s and I’m using smaller scraps than she does (her largest scrap is over 7 inches long) as I prefer to work small, using up the bits in my scrap bag. Honestly, what some people call scraps are nothing of the sort to me, working small as I do. But her quilt is marvellous, and her method is easy and quick.

To begin, I pressed a load of my scraps and cut them up into narrow strips of varying widths – anything up to an inch and a half wide – and then into small squares and rectangles of various sizes. If, like Amanda, your scraps are mainly regular rectangles and squares, or you want to work with larger, or more irregular pieces, then you might not need to do this pre-cutting step: just press your scraps first to make stitching them easier.

I popped all my cut square and rectangular scraps into a basket next to my sewing machine and sewed pairs of similar-sized scraps together. You take two scraps that are approximately the same length and sew them together on the machine, right sides facing each other. Chain piecing (where you don’t cut your thread in between sewing each pair of scraps, just keep feeding new pairs through your machine until you have a long “chain” of them) makes this much quicker and less wasteful of thread. Make loads of pairs, snip them apart and press them, with the seams to one side, preferably toward the darker fabric. Be sure to use a short stitch length on your sewing machine, so the pieces won’t start to come apart when you handle them.

When you have lots of pairs of scraps all sewn and pressed, you sew the pairs together, matching up ones that are the same length along the side you are sewing, as before. You can sew them any ways round, as you can see from the picture below. To change it up a bit, sometimes instead of sewing a pair to another pair, I sew on a third scrap. I want a random look and this will help with that.

Then as you progress, you match up these little three and four patch blocks, picking ones that are the same length along the edge you are sewing, in exactly the same way (add more patches to a block if necessary, to get blocks to match up in length) and sew them together. Hopefully you can see what I mean from the picture above, which shows some of my pairs, some of my next-stage “blocks” (threes, or a pair + a pair) and some in the stage after that, made up of up to six patches.

You just continue combining your pairs, then combining your pairs of pairs / three patch blocks like this, and then combining those bigger blocks, until the blocks are the size you want them. They don’t all have to be the same size when done, in fact Amanda recommends that they are not, as this hides the “blocks” in the overall pattern when they are sewn together into the quilt top, keeping the look irregular. Similarly, she recommends that you deliberately don’t match up any seam lines, just the edges of your fabric, when sewing patches together – again, to help with the randomness.

Her full instructions and method, handily published as a weekly quilt-along, can be found here:
Scrap Vortex instructions – week one
Scrap Vortex instructions – week two
Scrap Vortex instructions – week three
Scrap Vortex instructions – week four
Scrap Vortex instructions – week five

There are plenty of photos, tips and answers to questions included in her posts linked to above.

I’ll also be speeding things along with strip-pieced inclusions using this method from Sewn Up:

As you will see from the video, this is a really quick way to piece a crumb quilt! Unfortunately however, my rotary cutter needs a new blade, so I can’t really do this at the moment as I am reliant on my trusty scissors until I can order a blade that actually cuts fabric!

The picture at the very top of this post is where I’ve got to so far, at the end of day one of snipping and stitching (actually, just part of an afternoon, not a full day). That’s all of my two, three and more patch-ed blocks so far, laid out on a white canvas I use as a background for taking photos.

As a variation, just to keep things interesting, in my quilt I’m planning to make a smattering of wonky star blocks to insert here and there. This tutorial shows how to go about making wonky stars. Mine will have the stars in white, with the squares for the background made from my pieced scrappy blocks instead of from a solid colour (white is used in the tutorial). The idea I have in my mind’s eye is that the white stars will “float” in the random scrappy chaos, like little islands of sanity in the madness.

I’ve made wonky stars before – in fact I based a whole quilt on them, here – but I’ve yet to make one on a pieced background, so we’ll have to see how it goes – I’m not sure if the additional seams in the scrappy background squares will cause problems. I’ll let you know.Anyway, that was a much longer post than I intended, but I promised that I would share the methods I’m using, for anyone who also needs a bit of patchwork as therapy, or just fancies having a go themselves.

I don’t know how far I’ll get with this lockdown quilt and it certainly won’t be a work of art if it does get finished, but hopefully this craft as therapy will help me to dig deep into the soil of my creative drought and dredge up something propitious.

In any case, it will be a better use of my time than doing online jigsaws – or crying. ♥