Daily Practice Quilt for 2021: Taking Each Day As It Comes
This is another in my series of yearly quilts, where since 2014 I have tracked goals, habits, and personal practices, representing them through patchwork, stitching, and handwriting.
For 2021 I decided to simply “track” the days in my patchwork, nothing more. So each of these log cabins documents three months, moving through the year clockwise around the quilt. Again, I used a strip of goldenrod yellow on the 23rd day of each month, a way of marking time. I pick the 23rd day because of my birthday, September 23, which I love!
I was thinking about counting things in my life, perhaps because I had a goal that year to put on my roller skates 365 times. This got me considering other things I could count in my life that year… number of times I finished a quilt, number of times I yelled at the kids, number of lectures I gave. And things I did during the year countless times… walks, covid calculations, study hours, naps…
I wrote some words about things counted and not counted throughout 2021. Notable events from the year, big and small. I copied a few entries from my daily line-a-day journal. I embroidered all these words around the border of my quilt. That took a long time! The result is a new sort of a record of my year, similar to other quilts in this series but different too.
The text on this quilt is intentionally hard to read. I wanted it to fade into the border of the quilt, and for the viewer to have to come in close to read it. That said, I may have taken this concept a bit too far as it’s actually pretty hard to read, even in person (and harder through a screen). I will document the text here, for anyone who wants to know what it says. Big thanks to my photographer Mitch Hopper for taking all these extra photos for me so I could have images of all the words I stitched.