Lots of changes in life and business later, we are officially back in the same place! Meghan and her fam arrived in Norwich, UK this week and are settling into their new house, while AT THE SAME TIME (get it?!) Lydia and her family are moving to a new home in Norwich, where she has lived for the past 5 years. Outside of Pom Pom the business you have seen in print and online, us Poms are close pals IRL! And after over a decade with 5,000 miles between us, we are now a mere five miles away from one another.

Very soon, we will share a studio again and try our best not to chat too much (we are both very chatty). We are so very excited about the creative possibilities of being in the same place. It’s been a chaotic few weeks (months!) for both of us, but hopefully by next week, we’ll be settled in and making some textile magic together.

In the meantime, have we been knitting?? A little bit! Kind of parallel making, which feels fitting. We are both working on kid-sized Scrappy Checkers pullovers, and we are both using yarns leftover from previous Pom patterns. Here’s Lydia’s, using Manos del Uruguay Ideal leftover from our Sophia blanket in Crochet How with some Malabrigo Rios in Black.

And we’ve caught a sort of zigzag bug and are both working on chevron-y potential knitting patterns - watch this space to see how they develop…

To wrap things up before we are back in the studio next week, here’s a pic from the Good Pie (not goodbye) party Meghan’s friends threw her in Austin. The sweetest thing. Bye!

So to try and get myself away from it I used a few different tactics. I thought about the friend who this quilt is for, and looked for a combo that reflected her (in my opinion! she might actually hate it who knows, although of course I hope she doesn’t). This friend has a lot of terracotta and rust in her home, and various blues, often ones that leaned aqua. Blues aren’t a comfort zone for me, so I decided to use some other colour prompts too. One thing I like to do when I am colour-combo hunting is looking at paintings I love, so I dug out my Georgia O’Keeffe book. I associate her work with rusty tones, I think because of all the New Mexico landscapes she painted, and blues because so many of her paintings include the sky. I found a few paintings that featured blues and warm red-ish tones, including this one;

I would really recommend this way of looking for colour inspiration, and specifically off screen if that’s doable. For me it was such a useful exercise to help break me out of my current colour routines. Maybe it’s time to start a list of ways to change up our colour habits? I’d love to know what other people do!

So anyway! Below you can see the combination I came up with, along with the finished (crib size) quilt top. I decided to use the red and orange colours as the background so that the overall piece would have warmth as the overarching feeling, but I really was torn because those blues are so inviting too.

When colours are all decided for a quilt I always have the feeling of ‘well that’s it! job done!’ and then I remember that after the patchwork is finished (and basted, my personal least favourite bit) quilts have to be quilted. So the next question is; how shall I quilt this? For the OG sample I did stitch in the ditch, meaning I followed the seams on the blocks (although not all the seams, just the ones I wanted to highlight). I chose to do it that way because I wanted to highlight the patchwork without distracting from it, but making the quilt again is a nice opportunity to try something different. I mused on adding a diagonal to the quilt like so:

But in the end I settled on the idea below. I like this version of the stitching because it kind of creates another overlaid check design on top of the quilt, and maintains the grid. I would really like to make another one and add a diagonal to it though, I think it’s always interesting when quilting diverges in some way from patchwork.

So with this quilting design in mind I chose a colour for my thread (I went with the aqua blue), and got started. Just as an extra note in case it’s of interest; I often use these vintage threads for quilting - Sylko 40 Mercerised cotton. I find them in charity shops all the time and for me they work well, but the thread is a little bit more tangle-prone than the cotton quilting threads that are designed for hand sewing (like the Gutermann one on the far left). I keep meaning to dig out some wax to treat the thread with while I am sewing but so far I haven’t got round to it. Watch this space.

One downside of not stitching in the ditch is that the quilt has to be marked up before you can quilt, I have been using my version of a Hera marker (a butter knife) and my quilter’s ruler to keep my quilting lines as un-wobbly as possible. This is a low fi video of how I do it. The larger squares in the design are 4 1/2” so I am marking them at 2 1/4” for the stitching.

Looking at this quick snap of the finished marking I find it hard not to be frustrated with my slightly slapdash approach to things. The lines are definitely wobbly (partly due to the safety pins I didn’t rearrange), but when I feel like this I return to this beautiful painting by one of my all time favourite artists, Margaret Kilgallen:

And this quote from her:

'I like things that are handmade and I like to see people’s hand in the world… my hand will always be imperfect because it’s human. And I think it’s the part that’s off that’s interesting, that even if I’m doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line and trying to make it straight, I’ll never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that’s where the beauty is.’

The other thing that can cause stalling for me at this stage is that I find it isn’t easy to tell whether the finished effect will be what I want it to be. Isn’t that so often the case with making? You can plan, and mock up, and swatch. But in the end the final piece is rarely exactly as you pictured it; it becomes more than the sum of its parts. In some ways that’s part of the fun, but sometimes it can feel very daunting, and makes me second guess myself. This can mean things sit partly made for months (or even years on end). When I really think about it, the fear that is stopping me is that once I have finished whatever I am making that’s it and there’s no going back. I can’t change it and if it’s not quite right I will be disappointed, not only in the object but in myself as a maker and creative.

But with every project that doesn’t go to plan comes learning. If fear of ‘failure’ is standing in the way I have to remind myself that the only failure when it comes to creativity is never making anything at all (this I have taken from one of my favourite podcasters, who talks about this a lot!). And of course when it comes to textiles, often there actually is an option of ‘going back’! You can unravel, undo and redo, or you can leave it and let it be, and maybe one day you will change your mind about it. In this case the fact that I have made this design before means there are fewer unknowns, which I find helpful when that fear of getting things wrong rears its head. Iterating on a design is a pleasure. The question that I often start with when I begin designing, the one that asks about all the various ways something can materialise, is answered a little more fully with each new version. It’s important to me that I remember that feeling of excitement and exploration for what something can become, and use that as my guidance, rather than the worry that it won’t be what I expect.

With all this in mind I am carrying on with my stitching; reminding myself that it’s better to make something than be paralysed by the fear it isn’t perfect. This chugging along with hand sewing is the part of making that I always think of when I am imagining relaxing with a project, but it’s often quite hard to find the way here. Once I am relaxed into it I love this feeling of space to enjoy the feeling of just chipping away at the actual making, getting there stitch by stitch, and letting my mind wander.

xx Lydia