Friday, July 10, 2020

Back In the Saddle....



....and holding onto the reins for dear life!  Actually I am grateful that COVID has meant that family, friends and neighbors (those that were informed about my surgery) were even more available and supportive than might have been possible if a pandemic hadn't upended all of our lives.  Much better and sooner than I expected, I was able to sit up (and so commenced the hand work project pictured above), then walk around, then take short and then longer walks all within the week after the procedure.  

As part of the recovery, I've also made a few visits to our community garden and used those trips so my DH and I could harvest our garlic.

Here's some of the garlic curing.

Unfortunately all of this on top of the quarantine has cut into starting seeds for transplants for summer planting.  I've direct sown some pepper plant seeds and we had a few "volunteer" tomato starts that had popped up so we'll see if we wind up getting anything out of our garden bed as the summer progresses.

At the start of the second post-surgery week, I was able to sit up at our house desk top computer and now in week three I'm preparing for a return to working at the sewing machine.  Woo hoo!!  First tasks will be to stitch down the applique on the "Hope QOV" and for a little mini quilt kit that provided some fabric for yet another larger Quarantine project I started that I hope I'll get to work on and share later.


Another downside in the past few weeks was that my laptop (my day-to-day working computer) decided it had "had enough" and stopped booting up the week before the surgery so recovery time was also spent figuring out what I wanted in a new machine.  Fortunately that's been resolved as I type this on the new one I picked up this week.  I have a commission project for a friend that will push me to finally, really learn to use the EQ8 software I purchased last year in order to begin the design work on it.  So that need should put some fire in my belly to get a move on to get comfortable using this new computer equipment and moving the files over from my old one.

Thank you again to all that sent well wishes!  This all is a reminder for all of us to take each day as it comes and cherish it!  I am eternally grateful for being a quilter when it came time to be "down for the count".  A stack of "Haven't Started Yet" hand work projects, the ability to read Bloglovin' posts on my phone and a (maybe too generous) collection of quilt books and magazines (both the latest issue of American Patchwork and Quilting and the release of  the new Fons & Porter Quick & Easy Quilts digital edition arrived just in time!) meant illness wouldn't keep a dedicated quilter down!

So with that, I now continue the forward momentum of both healing and (Semi-)Quarantine Quilting!  Happy to be back quilting with all of you!

2 comments:

Vireya said...

Great to see you up and about again!

Paulette said...

Vivian, I just loved this post about your early quilts and how you got into quilting! So much of it rang true for me, too. I was fascinated by "Simply Quilts" every day, too! I'd come home on my noon hour from working at the law firm and eat my lunch in front of TV while watching each episode. Then, like you, I discovered some quilting blogs. And also like you, I had the idea the quilts were only made (at least mostly) from scraps! Around that time, I got a big bag of scraps from my mom, who was making those puffy baskets to sell at craft fairs, and other stuffed things, and the rest is history!

Love that you used fabric from the garment district for your first quilts. Your "Point of No Return" especially caught my eye. I've heard that design called a Barrister's Block, and I've got one pinned on Pinterest for inspiration that's done in red and white. But I'm a big plaid lover, so yours really makes my heart sing! Thanks again for sharing this part of your journey!