Quilting Dreams

I love dreaming, and being able to interpret dreams is a passion. I am a pretty wild dreamer, as Stephen is my witness, or anyone who has ever been in a dreaming group with me.

It all started with a 1970s Psychology of Dreaming class that left a lasting impression. I recall owning a pair of PF Flyers at the time and dreaming about flying/floating with them after the first night of class. What a marvelous feeling of pushing off with one foot and floating along for many yards, so effortlessly.

One of the books used in the class was Creative Dreaming by Patricia Garfield. In the meantime I have added Jeremy Taylor to my repertoire. These books and a fantastic teacher (whose name I don’t remember) and his stories have left me with that lifelong passion for dreams.

Who doesn’t like the limitless escapes dreams can offer? Even bad dreams are good, because all dreams offer the potential for self-revelation.

My favorite part of interpreting my dreams is the instant knowledge that I got it right. You feel it all coming together deep inside. It’s one of the few times that life makes sense to me.

Recently I woke up from a dream that dealt with quilting. I had a stack of cut fabric squares about 10 inches high, ready for a project. Beats me why I was carrying it around, but I did, and when I entered a quilt shop I had to ask to put it down so I could look at the lovely new fabrics.

Immediately I noticed they had changed. No more boring or repetitive patterns, but now the fabrics depicted huge paintings over yards and yards. I wondered about the purpose of such huge prints and contemplated that quilting itself might have changed. I could see cutting the fabric into pieces and then getting complementary fabric for between them.

Without buying anything, I was heading out and could not find my stash of cut squares. The employees were different, and no one could tell me where my fabric was. The possibility that it had been sold to someone else horrified me. I was searching for it when I woke up.

I wondered why I was dreaming about quilting, an activity I hadn’t done in a while. I fell back asleep into another dream, where I had a baby. Suddenly I panicked, realizing I had ignored it for days, and could babies survive without any nourishment? When I discovered the baby it was white as snow and, I presumed, dead. I tried moving its limbs, afraid to touch it and somewhat repulsed by the idea I would touch death. But then I noticed tiny movement. I had to feed it quickly, did I still have breast milk after all this time? Yes, and I nursed the baby back to health, not to full rosiness, but to survival.

To connect the two dreams was easy. The baby is my quilting hobby that I have neglected for a long time, but apparently I can revive it. So I have plans for this summer.

I am not your regular quilter, if there is even such a thing. I’m not a precise person, I like eyeballing and guessing. That’s not a trait you want to have for quilting, where precision is highly rated. A good thing there is quilting for the rest of us.

Here is a piece from long ago that likes to be precise and where I somewhat succeeded. It is waiting for completion. Like so many things in my well-lived gemini life. If this quilt looks familiar, let it be known that I stole the idea from a quilting book cover. Sometimes I see things and just need to get them out of my system before I can go on.

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And here is a piece more to my liking and style. I did not invent this process, but Gwen Marston did with her idea of liberated quilt making.

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Here is my 15 minutes of quilting fame. An old article, and two pictures:

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