French Knot Flowers

I have started a new long term project. And by long term, I mean looooooong term! It doesn't look like much yet, but I'm hoping it will eventually be pretty. 

Kitty of Night Quilter has been making milestone quilts for years and has created a whole membership community around the idea of quilting your life. While I'm not a member of the Quilt Your Life Crew, I have always admired the interesting quilts she has made and the whole idea of the positive feedback loops created by earning quilt blocks. Kitty's most recent project documents her daily core strengthening exercises, using a coloured strip for each day she does her exercises and with a plan for this to be a quilt with no end. 

I loved that idea, especially since core work is something I struggle to be consistent with, too. I have muscle spasms in my back that cause nagging pain and my physiotherapist prescribed planks, clamshells and a few other exercises to strengthen my core and fix the issues. That means I have plenty of reason to be doing the core work, but somehow finding the motivation is still hard. How is it that I can find more than an hour to go for a walk most days, but the 15 minutes the exercises take is almost impossible? It all comes down to interest. I love my daily walks, but there's nothing very exciting about doing planks!

On a walk I pondered ways to turn Kitty's tracking quilt into something I could stick with and I hit upon the idea of a hoop of french knot flowers. 

It hits all the right points for me:

• I don't need my sewing machine. This was a big one, because I wanted something I could do right away after finishing the exercises, without needing to set up my sewing machine or switch it from fmq mode if I was in the middle of quilting something.
• It's super fast to do each day's knot. I didn't want something that would take much time each day because I'm more likely to actually do it if it's fast.
• There's no prep time needed each day. I know that I'll put off cutting fabric or tracing more flowers or anything like that, so I designed the flower hoop so that all the prep work is done, other than cutting a length of thread now and then. That much I think I can manage!

I wanted to make it almost impossible to fall behind with this project because I know myself well enough to know that if I fall behind, the whole project will likely fall by the wayside. More than wanting the flowers to eventually be filled with colourful french knots, I really want to be stronger and pain free!

So far the plan is working 😊 I drew the flowers, did my exercises and then made my first french knot on Halloween, in between trick-or-treaters. I now have 9 french knots, after not missing a single day since I started! That's already more consecutive days of core work than I've ever done before.

Is this going to take for.e.ver? Yes, yes it is! But that's kind of the point. These are exercises that need to become part of my life, so I might as well have a motivation that's going to last a long time, too 😊