April Quilt Block (Patreon)

The Recap:
At the beginning 2020, I decided to embroider a panel to represent each month and then at the end of the year I'd combine all 12 together into a quilt that would serve as a big blanket-y memento of my life in what turned out to be quite a momentous year. You can catch up with my previous quilt blocks here.

As always, I sat down and asked myself "How you doin', Erika? What's goin' on in the ol' bean?" and I wrote the first few things that came to mind, which were, 

"The last month has been calm and grounded. My mind revs up with bad thoughts but I let myself feel them without drowning. I'm proud of myself. I'm doing a good job. I'm really enjoying Matt's company during quarantine." (A bit of context that may be unnecessary, but I had just graduated from the Dialectical Behavior Therapy program at the hospital a few weeks earlier, so feeling grounded was a big deal. Also, quarantine had just baaaaaarely begun. Ha! So long ago, now.)

With those words in mind, I dug through my magazines looking for images that reflected those sentiments back to me. Looking back at this now, I have no idea what "Man standing in wheat" represented to me, but the the world cage loosely signified being locked down at home in quarantine, I think. Man, who even knows what Erika of April 2020 was thinking? Not I, my dudes. Not I. 

I decided to lean in on my final sentence and the cage image, focusing on my gratitude for feeling safe and secure with Matt in our home while the outside world was just a bunch of fear and question marks.

It reads, "Apr. Quarantine with Matt is actually really nice. I feel so grateful for so many things right now." I was behind on embroidering the panel passages, so I did February, March, and April's all together on the same fabric.

The cage turned into a bell jar, the wheat is the messy outside world that's engulfing our home and us, and the birds are Matt and me. 

The white fabric on the bell jar is some left over Ikea curtain that I picked out because it's just a bit transparent, so you can still see the background fabric's design through it. 

There we go!

Done, the end!