I thought I’d share a project I finished a few weeks ago. It was a birthday gift for a very special member of my family. I do a monthly creative embroidery class which has really challenged me, and Joy, the lovely lady leading it, has taught me so many new techniques.
Anyway, this is a Kindle case made with a combination of appliqué, hand and machine embroidery. I really enjoyed doing it and I’m so pleased with the result. The background is a gorgeous gossamer-type material that reflects hues of yellow, green, blue and pink as it catches the light. It’s layered over a pale coffee-coloured imitation silk and the background is free machine-embroidered with variegated thread. It’s lined with the pale coffee material and has wadding between to protect the Kindle. The photos don’t do the colours justice.
The difficulty with a project like this is knowing when to stop; when to finish, put it down, let it go. I could have kept on embellishing it forever (though I’d have missed the birthday it was intended for!)
Knowing when to stop something, when to finish, put down or let go has been a bit of a theme for me over the last couple of years. Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time for everything, and everything has a season. A couple of weeks ago amidst the snow in April, my son asked if it was Spring yet. It seemed even Winter wasn’t quite ready to let go and let Spring take its place.
And that’s the point about letting go. When we are holding so tight to one thing, we can’t then pick up something else, and that new thing, like Spring, is a new beginning, a time of new growth, a time of blossoming and developing.
So what season is overdue to finish in our lives? What needs to be let go of so that new growth might emerge? What might we need to put down in order to pick something else up?
It can be daunting to let go. We can be scared of the change or the new thing, but as Ecclesiastes suggests, we can’t just stand still; change is inevitable because…
“there is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
janelydialoves 