None of us is without bad days

We all get the blahs, we all suffer from lack of motivation.  Some of us suffer from outright depression and anxiety.  Plan ahead for a bad day, and get the serotonin boost you need to pull yourself out of the doldrums. 

I personally deal with a lot of weird fluctuations in my mood and my ability to attend to tasks.  In particular, when I finish big projects (like filming a long class that took a lot of effort), I have numerous days or even weeks of “what do I do now?”

Creatively I spin in absolute circles, crippled with decision paralysis, then I start to get depressed for wasting time and being hard on myself for my poor focus.

Enter: The Emotional Support Quilt

Plan ahead knowing you are going to need it!

Did you know I have a degree in Art Therapy?  Well, I do.  When our brain enters depressive or anxious fogs, and to a lesser extent, just the blahs…the first thing to suffer is our Executive Function.  This is the thing that is responsible for planning and making decisions in order.

Meaning, you will LITERALLY not be able to make a plan for when you need it.  You will NOT be able to think what to do and then act on it.

On a good day, decide on an easy “no brainer” piecing unit and prep some.  Stick it in a drawer.  When you feel terrible…you don’t have to do any thinking.  Just sit and sew your unit.

You do NOT need to know what you will do with your unit later!!

When your mood gets better and the world stops spinning you can create a plan for your units.  

Setting up a pile of pre cut colored squares and a solid to make into half square triangles, as in the first image is all I felt capable of working on once last year.  This bout of depression turned into that lovely floral quilt I used for a class sample!

Making sheets of string piecing fabric to later cut down is another great plan!  In this image, those sheets were cut into squares, and again made into half square triangles. 

Emotional support quilting is not about the outcome, even though we can turn our sewing sessions into something nice. It is about having a non-demanding repetitive creative plan we can go to when our brain is telling us we CANNOT. We empirically KNOW that taking action lifts mood. ANY therapist will encourage you to take any small step when you are in emotional crisis and move the ball an inch. But doing so feels nearly impossible. Create a plan now when you feel decently ok, it will be there later for you.

Pull a precut and apply a rule, then your emotional support project is ready in your drawer

For this new project, I chose an ombre dot jelly roll.  My rule was to sew two similar color family strips together, light to dark.  I also decided I wanted small logs, so I sewed both sides of the strip together, cut it down the middle and re-sewed.  That might be overcomplicating … simple strips is enough. 

There are a lot of fun ways to cross cut a strip like this!

I cross cut into square rail fence components but you could also try:

• rectangle
• 45 degree diamonds, which make great star blocks
• 60 degree triangles

Any of these units can later come together with a cool plan.

Being in a creative slump is inevitable.  Facing genuine metal heath creative disruption can be terrifying and a self-fulfilling loop of executive function failure.

Knowing you WILL face tough days…make a plan on a good day of what your unit will be.  You don’t need to know the end of the plan to get started.  The act of sitting and creating WILL boost your happy hormones, which will do their job, and help banish the blues.  

Plus…bonus! Your painful day can turn into a lovely project down the line.  You can keep the finished quilt…or re-home it to a charity and truly banish those blahs.  

Happy quilting friend!  Be kind to yourself.   ~~Bethanne