Art will see us through

Wow has is been a wild/horrific few weeks. Months really. Years? Yes. I’ve been feeling so isolated and disconnected and overwhelmed and honestly fairly hopeless with the state of things since that new/old man has taken over again. I’ve been feeling very unfocused and disjointed. But then suddenly I look up and see that through it all I have been making art. It’s incredible how some things just happen because we need them to. I’ve made three new quilts to bring color and joy into your home. They brought joy to me while making them. The Indigo Portal is something I want to just fall into. A portal to the sky. A bright blue sky with whispy clouds to get pulled away in to.

I’m trying out switching up my system a bit where I no longer make quilts on pre-order (other than the indigo check quilt aka Patchwork Sky - though that may change as well). I want to shift everything to be available only once it’s ready to ship. It takes some time to make this change. It’s a big change for me as I have mostly been doing made-to-order in all of my work for the past ten years! So I’m trying this out. I currently have a few quilts on my To Do list that are the last of my pre-orders, but moving forward, ready to ship will be the thing! I made three special new quilts for the occasion! Check them out HERE. (Update: I’m sticking with made-to-order! Turns out, it’s simply what I know and what works best for me. I will occasionally make one-off items that are ready to ship.)

I also made two new text pieces, made from hundreds of tiny squares. These single word pieces never emerge in quite the same way as my other text works. They’re not exactly planned, they just sort of present themselves to me when a single word, almost always something from nature, comes to me and puts me into a kind of meditative state. It’s wild how a solitary word can be as evocative as a longer poem. I love how just by seeing the word SUNSET, you then picture a sunset in your mind. You create your own sunset inside yourself. Watching the sun set in real time is its own beautiful experience, but the way a word becomes like a suggestion or a spell... I like that it requires the viewer to conjure something, like the work is completed inside the person seeing it. I definitely feel a magic in it, which I hope I’ve been able to pass along to you.

I hope you’ve been finding little moments of peace and joy. Thank you for being here! 💛

Take care,

Ashley

PS: Please check out my new seasonal Mail Club! I want to send fun things in the mail! Let me send things to you! My first edition will be headed out soon!