Signs of Health

You know you're a quilter when...you decide you're on the road to health when you finally feel up to handling a rotary cutter.

I've been sick since I returned home from Thailand with bronchitis, 4 weeks ago. I had a small handful of halfway decent days the second week when I thought I might be on the way out of it...but then apparently got hit with a second cold-type bug on top of it and the two things didn't play together nicely, so I ended up in bed again most of last week. Since I work at home, it's unusual enough for me to take one sick day let alone four in a row. Yeesh.

As frustrated as I was to be missing work and to have to keep cancelling out of events and responsibilities and to have to keep relying on my husband and kids to take care of everything while I was sacked out in bed for days on end, I was probably most put out over the fact that even the thought of standing at my cutting table or sitting at the sewing machine exhausted me. Sharp edges and serious cold medicines? Not a good mix. No, the closest I got to sewing for 4 1/2 weeks was the pages of my quilt magazines and one evening messing around with my quilt design software.

This week, I'm starting to feel like maybe I've turned that corner again, for the second time, but hoping it sticks this time. I'm also doing better at listening to the advice of my family and my doctor who have all told me to keep laying low this week. Do only what I need to do--don't send myself into a tail spin again.

Do only what I need to do.... I need to have my hands on fabric. So tonight I put the binding on my son's quilt; that felt fairly straight forward and like something I could feasibly handle. I got all the way through it until having to make the ends meet. Never an easy part of the binding process for me, I knew that it might particularly hitch me up tonight. And yep, I sewed them together together all twisty-like, and not in a creative way. I ripped them out and had a brief debate with myself about whether I should try again when I remembered everyone's advice to lay low and reminded myself that there was no rush; the binding could be finished just as easily tomorrow night when I was fresh.

So the last four weeks have been a long lesson in learning to listen to my body, to practice the art of self-forgiveness, and to just be patient. I have to remind myself to give my body the time and space it needs to get healthy again. Like when I was on sabbatical, I had to remind myself it was OK to have a couple of weeks of non-productiveness, although I do confess to spending much of that time watching a lecture series about the Middle Ages on DVD so that I could at least feel like the time wasn't totally wasted. Admittedly, I believe I dozed through quite a bit of the 11th century.

But I've been able to play with fabric again today even if just for a little while. And since I got a shipment of new quilt books and a surprise gift of fabric from my sister today as well, I'm going to go celebrate my stuttering return back to the quilting life with a little time in a comfy armchair petting new fabric and dreaming of future quilt projects.