Stage 2 de-clutter – the patchwork goes

It is time.  I am ready.  I now know that I do not need all that fabric – truly.  Yes, it is beautiful but it has been superfluous for many years now and someone else can add it to their collection or perhaps they may even cut it into little bits and sew them back together again.

These wonderful colours were hand dyed by me in Keri Keri in the 1990’s.  I was a new mother in a new town and joined the Keri Keri Patchwork club.  The ladies were lovely and I loved the geometry and colour of the quilts but never got past design and admiring the hues.  Perhaps that was the limit of my skills or I just did not get the thrill of segmenting beautiful fabrics to re-create something new.  On the other hand, I did enjoy the colours and a challenge of mixing colours with incremental changes in the hue.

The digital scales gave me precision with colour mixing – a journey in complimentary colours

Armed with bolts of white cotton lawn, soda ash, salt, three dye colours and scientific digital scales, I went about turning metres of white into 66 colours of four intensities.  My clothesline was a rainbow – I loved it

Twenty-sixteen gave me time to re-evaluate what I liked to do.  Patchworking was on the re-evaluation list, do I want to be a patch worker?

Being on a house sit or in-between house sits, I do not have a base so my belongings went through a stage 1 de-clutter before storing, but de-cluttering has stages which cannot be rushed.  Eighteen months later I am ready for stage 2 and I no longer want to be a patch worker.

I did try again with hand piecing but my heart was not really in it.

Just because I am re-housing my colours it does not mean colour is kaput.  I can still explore the geometry and colour of patchwork with a piece of paper and colour pencils that fit easily into my travel kit.

What is your de-clutter stage?

Now I can draw the geometrics and paint or colour in

A colour study of complimentary colours and tints