Sew for Joy

The quiet rebellion against the machine.

I don't remember meeting anyone who created for the love of it until I was in my 20s. My mum sewed when I was a kid because it was cheaper back then to make your own clothes. We had friends who were musicians, but they only wrote or played music for church. Art was something you did if you were a famous artist or an art teacher. Art was something you did if it could be justified by its income or religious purpose.

I've spent the last 15 years slowly shifting my perspective. From needing to justify my sewing, to embracing it as a gift I'm going to enjoy gratefully and unapologetically. From putting others' joy first, to valuing my own enough to pursue it.

This road to joy started in my early 30s when I took up sewing. I had just had my second baby, finished my university degree, and was all set to be a stay at home mum of 2, but the adjustment rattled me. I was lonely and so bored and surprised that the thing I'd always wanted wasn't as easy and fulfilling as I'd always assumed!

I started making kids clothes and selling them on Etsy and at local markets. I loved working on something that was just mine, putting thought into colour combinations and marketing and numbers. I used the scraps to make quilts which was, by far, my favourite part, but because people generally weren't willing to pay what they were worth, I didn't feel like I could justify my fabric spending and time sewing if it didn't pay for itself.

Then, a couple of years later, I suffered a miscarriage. For months, I couldn't bring myself to do anything for money. I sewed only for survival. I sewed for expression, for processing, for the life-giving beauty I craved.

Before this, I hadn't really considered creativity as essential to my existence. It was more of an add-on. A special treat for when all the other ‘important’ items were checked off. A reward, or a special skill I could bring out at Christmas and birthdays. Soon, however, I was skipping the kids clothes altogether, and diving straight into the quilting part.

I stumbled across my Ice Cream Soda quilt design while playing with different paper shapes, moving them around on my dining table to learn how they tiled together. Tim and I had spent our whole adult life living as a part of a tight-knit Christian community and, then in our mid 30s, we were starting to chafe. No longer content to follow someone else's vision for our lives, we were longing to take responsibility for our own direction and purpose. I spent HOURS in those months moving paper shapes around, letting the world around me fade, letting these shapes make new connections in my brain, letting the swirl of impending change process away in the background.

Like songs that become theme music in our teens and 20s, my Ice Cream Soda blocks became the backdrop to months of late night discussions with Tim, quiet longings, fear and excitement, slow plans falling into place. We left all the community we'd ever known half way through my quilt, with no money, no work experience and only a thread of a sense of direction forward.

The years following that were the hardest I'd experienced. When starting a family or losing a baby, I knew the dislocation or grief I felt was normal, and shared with other women. But here, I felt embarrassed. I felt like we were running 10 years behind everyone else, that we'd made a huge, stupid mistake investing all that time and work in something so nebulous, and often ill-fitting.

All the while I made Ice Cream Soda quilt blocks. I would pick out 3 fabrics that I thought would go together, and, two times out of three, the finished block would look completely different to how I imagined, and kind of ugly! I started to tune in, purposefully taking on the posture of someone glad to be learning from my mistakes. The lessons that needed to be gleaned from the rest of my life were too big to process, but right here, with this quilt, I could study and learn and grow.

Slowly, I taught myself which fabric combinations brought out the best contrast between the rounds, which prints worked best for the smaller shapes, and which for the large. Which to fussy cut, and which to cut freely. I tuned in to the rich, beautiful, scrappy, slightly messy, but not too overwhelming, feeling I was trying to create with this quilt, and started pulling fabric to match it, rather than just looking for any prints I hadn't used yet.

I loved the feeling of progress, of improvement, of seeing which blocks I loved and learning how to replicate it. I loved having this small corner of growing confidence and skill to focus on.

When I finished all the blocks, I kept every single one and sewed them into this quilt, and to this day, it's my most precious. My story in stitches of embracing learning, of moving forward, of creating a beautiful life even out of the ugly or painful or ill-fitting bits.

I have been a student of colour ever since. And, a student of joy. I'm trying not to just offer myself up to the machine like I was always taught (whether the church machine or the family machine or the work machine) and to tune in like I've learned to with my quilts - to do things on purpose, to work in step with what I love and what I'm good at. And rather than dragging myself along, to care for myself deeply.

A lot has happened over the past 18 months since I first wrote this post on my blog for the beginning of the Ice Cream Soda Club. I’ll be launching my 2025 EPP club next week, and as I was searching through what I’ve written before, getting ideas, I appreciated this reminder of how human and soft and treasured we are. Even after writing that I wouldn’t feed myself to the machine again, here I am, almost two years later, so easily led astray by the constant need to either produce things or consume information. I hope next week you’ll join me in trying to walk the third road, the path of creating, of tuning in, of slowing down, of allowing ourselves space and joy and life.

I’ll be back Monday with more!

Jodi. xx

PS. If I’ve inspired you to make the Ice Cream Soda Quilt, you can buy the pattern and templates here! I kind of hope you wait, though, and join us for the club. ;P