Self Care Pattern RELEASE!!

It had been a really rough week.

I’m talking multiple meltdowns (from myself and the toddlers), some of which ended up with me hiding in the bathroom for just a breather.  It was July 2020 and I had just purchased my brand new HQ Amara longarm and was feeling the financial pressure. We had just had house guests for a week and I was left feeling deflated from hosting but mostly because I knew I wouldn’t see my bestie again for MONTHS. Our little family was trying to adjust to the new norm of pandemic living, and my beloved hubs had done something to push me over the edge.  I don’t even remember now what it was that had been the straw to break this momma’s back.

 But I had snapped.

And I knew one of the only ways for me to find my center again, to remember how to be a patient momma again, and to not hate my hubby again (sorry babe!), was

SELF CARE! 

Self care is a hard thing. We moms often feel guilty for taking time for ourselves. Taking an extra five minutes in the shower around here usually means I’m stepping out to possible milk spills, wet toddlers playing in the bathroom sinks, and bandaids everywhere, whether or not there was blood.

Welcome to motherhood.

For the year leading up to the pandemic I had actual begun allowing myself time for self care. And hubby had been my biggest supporter when I cried off and snuck away for a few hours.

 So he didn’t even blink when I declared this summer Friday a day of Self Care!

The kids ran amok, the house was a mess, and I hid myself in my sewing room to do whatever the heck I wanted. No customer quilts, no blog posts, no patterns waiting to be put together.

I had just picked up a new charm back from my local quilt shop Quilter’s Attic. It was called At Home by Moda.  I instantly loved the navy blues with green and white! I’ve said it many times:

I’m a sucker for navy and white!

So I thumbed through a few quilt books looking for inspiration and ended up just cutting into a few blocks to see what came about.

And that’s how my Self Care Quilt Pattern was born!

After all that sewing I did feel much better.  The struggles and heaviness that comes from regular life and living through a pandemic didn’t go away. They didn’t even get any easier. But taking time for Self Care has proven to make me more resilient to handle life’s everyday stressors.

I hope that quilting does that for you.  I hope it’s a stress relief, a creative activity you look forward to after a long day of work! I hope you keep finding joy in the challenge of trying new techniques and seeing your hard work come together. Quilting represents so many things to me, and as long as quilting is more fulfilling than draining, it will always remain my go-to form of self care!

Here are a few pics of how I pieced the blocks together.  It was a lot of fun to play with the blocks to change up the layout. 

One of the fun things about this pattern is that it’s a “one block wonder”! This means you only make one type of block to make the whole quilt!

There is a tricky bit in getting the smaller triangle where you need it to be, so I spent a lot of time with my pattern testers giving me feedback to find the best way to describe it.  You’ll have to get the pattern from my shop to see if I made it clear enough! Lol!

You can pick up the pattern from my new Shop Page, and you can check my Instagram page for photos of the finished quilt!