Mud Season Elicits New Projects…

Sounds like a newspaper headline, eh? Only in Maine though!

“Mud Season” is an actual season here in Maine. Truly. It is then followed by “Blackfly Season”, a month of Summer, and then our absolutely stunning Autumn. Though I do get a little grumpy at this time of year (muddy dogs on the couch, muddy shoe tracks through the house, muddy pant legs on my way to the car, etc), I have to admit that I absolutely LOVE the smell of the air at this time of year. The earth just exudes such a rich, earthy scent of spring. It is delicious in its way. It is a foretelling of spring blossoms, green grass, bird songs, late evening sunsets, etc. Yum!

Though the mud around our country home often feels like quicksand … (note Isaac’s missing foot)…

we love to take walks through it. And apparently, so do many other creatures (note the various footprints)…

And with the sureness of spring and the promise of new life (the birds and bunnies have already begun mating) , I am recovering some hope that I lost when Josh left us. Slowly, but surely, hope renews itself in the promise that there is always life after death … both literally and metaphorically … both here on earth as well as in the beyond.

With all this new life, new hope and delicious spring mud … I am feeling rather creative. I came in from our morning walk with the want to dive into a new creative project. It has been a while since I made a quilt (perhaps 8 months or so) and I felt the want to try a new pattern altogether. But my problem is that I find it so hard to settle on one particular project/pattern. There are so many to choose from! So, I did the only thing I could do to narrow my choices down…

I picked up a quilt magazine (out of an enormous pile of them) and told myself that I had to pick out a project from that issue. No looking at any other magazines or quilt books. Not only did that turn out to be a great exercise for me .. but I think fate played a key role as that issue contained a pattern that completely appeals to me right now. And here it is:

The next step was to choose my fabrics. I had to find 34 different coordinating fabrics (something I have never had to do before as I think my previous max for coordinated prints for a given project was somewhere around 12). And here is a photo of all but 5 of those prints (the other five were found after I took the photos).
I would really would like to reproduce the same 1930’s style look for the quilt as the one pictured in the article, but could not find enough fabrics to do so at this time. But I think I am going to like the look of these fabrics together as well.

Anyway, so begins my latest spring project. And I will chronicle it here as I go along. I leave you now with a picture of Halis’s “spring fever” project …

… though Halis has had trouble sticking with his desire to learn the guitar … there is always hope 🙂

Love,
Jodi

Jodi Renshaw

About Jodi Renshaw

Jodi is a homeschooling Mom, a photographer, a wife, and a proud resident of the city of Bangor. She spends part of her time working at a locally-owned shop in the downtown area, part of her time homeschooling her favorite young man, and most of her time behind a camera lens. She often writes about adoption, family life, homeschooling, and community.