I had the good fortune to take a couple months off from corporate America and concentrate on shedding my stress and anxiety and focus on activities that I find good for the soul. I spent many hours creating art quilts for friends and teaching others to create their own pet portrait quilts. I got the opportunity to spend time going on day trips with my husband (always with camera in hand) to visit places in the Connecticut area that I never slowed down long enough to enjoy. I spent time relaxing by the pool with one of my dogs always by my side. I even built a stained glass panel for a friend that has been a Rush super fan for years. I literally spent my summer relaxing and using my abilities as an artisan to make other people happy. Reflecting on my summer makes me realize that although it’s important to take a corporate job seriously and do the best you can every day, you shouldn’t let your job define you to the point you work every waking hour and lose your true self in a job. In reality, nobody is ever going to remember you after you’re gone because you wrote really good data requirements for an insurance system or you put in 60 hours a week to make sure that system delivery dates are met. People are going to remember you for your kindness and sharing of whatever gifts you have to give – it may be something simple like baking cookies for your neighbor or growing beautiful flowers and surprising friends with bouquets. The point is that I got so much more personal satisfaction from creating artwork for others than I ever did sitting behind my laptop analyzing data.
Now that my summer has come to an end and I’m rejoining the corporate world, I want to share my summer projects to remind myself to not lose myself in my day job. I will work as hard as I need to make my corporate team successful but I will try my best to balance my job with my love of creating artwork to share with others.
Here are some of my accomplishments this summer:
This one is my depiction of the Rush album cover for the Fly By Night album. It was a fun project to make:
I also completed a couple of art quilts and started some other ones. Here are a couple of them:
The following quilt is aptly titled Fiesta – not only because my friend Deena was enjoying a bottle of wine by her pool with the company of her cat but the cat is named Fiesta. Fiesta is known to many of Deena’s coworkers because she often joined Zoom meetings while everyone was working remotely during the pandemic so it was my pleasure to turn this sweet cat into a quilt.
I created a quilt of my friend’s dog Dudley and used this quilt to provides a step-by-step tutorial for the students in pet portrait art quilting class. He’s a beautiful little labradoodle and made me smile while his little face came alive in fabric.
Dudley’s mom liked his portrait so much, she asked me to take a shot at creating a likeness of her first dog, Sandy. She explained that Sandy was that once in a lifetime dog – you know, the one that you have a special bond with that can’t ever be recreated. Well, I gave it a shot and here she is!
Next on my list was to create a likeness of my friend Jill’s Corgi that crossed the rainbow bridge a couple years ago. Again, Jake was a special dog with a special bond with his mom. She sent me her favorite picture of him and this is my finished quilt.
I also created a quilt for my mom to give to a friend that lost her adult son quite unexpectedly. After his passing she starting seeing cardinals and was sure that it was her son making his presence known to her. The cardinals gave her comfort so my mom asked if I could create a cardinal quilt so she would always have a cardinal nearby. I added the dogwood flowers because dogwoods have a wonderful story associated with them that also can bring comfort (google it….it’s a great story).
Finally, I have a couple of quilts in various stages of completion. These include a hibicus flower, a sunflower and my pooches Dug and Finnegan (they don’t always get along so when my husband caught them together, he quickly snapped the picture – we call the picture Dogpile but in reality, they were competing for my lap and attention).
One of my other favorite experiences this summer was teaching this quilting technique to others. I will share my students work in another post but to see folks that have never done this technique before create a beautiful pet quilt made me so proud to be able to work with them and many of these women are accomplished quilters so I had the opportunity to learn a lot from them too!
I will always fondly remember my Summer of Kathy because I understand how fortunate I am to be able to take some mental health time for myself to regroup and refresh and ground myself in what is really most important in life.