Nurturing sparks

Reconnecting with my former (more creative) self

It’s wild how rapidly time can pass. How one moment you’re waxing lyrical about the splendour of trees; the next, a whole year has passed and that version of you feels like a distant memory. I never intended to take over a year’s break, but here’s hoping that absence really does make the heart grow fonder.

I started this Substack with a view to write about slow living and quiet creativity. Well, reader, life has been neither slow nor creative recently, and I found myself looking back at 2025 with a distinct lack of clarity. Yes, I bought a house (about bloody time!), and I did, finally, go on honeymoon (‘I’ should really be ‘we’ here, as I achieved neither alone), but between those two milestones, I can conjure few distinctive, joyous memories from the past 12 months.

One year that I can remember in microscopic detail is 2022. I delighted in nature-filled excursions with my favourite boys (both human and canine), threw myself into container gardening in the tiny outside space we had available, went camping, caught Covid, and watched a horror film a day throughout the month of October (both a joy and a chore). It was the year that sparked the idea to launch this Substack, and the time period where – I can say with confidence now – I felt the most myself. I think I have quilting to thank for a lot of that.

Those of you who have been with me since the early days might remember my Folk Quilt – a creative exercise in which I immortalised each month of 2022 with a quilt block. I can tell you the exact moment each design symbolises; the precise emotion I felt when I looked back at each passing month. The physical quilt (or quilt top, I should say, as I haven’t yet stitched all the layers together…) may currently reside in my attic, but, for me, the final product is far less valuable than the experience itself.

Last week I felt a strange glimmer of once-familiar excitement that had me gleefully rushing to Pinterest. While I lost most of 2025 to evenings at the laptop and way too many conversations about mortgages, 2026 beckons as an irresistibly blank canvas with which to reclaim my creativity. The plan is to notice more, savour more, sew more (write more…? Hello!), and by January 2027, perhaps I’ll look back on this year more fondly.

So I’m going back to what I know. If you need me, you’ll find me dusting off my fabric scissors, gathering my biggest moments from January, and spinning them into a quilt block. Perhaps it’s my past year spent in the antiques world; perhaps it’s the fact that I feel like a vessel of jangled thoughts, feelings and ideas right now, but this time I’m anchoring each month with an illustrated vase motif. Classical-meets-Bloomsbury-meets-folk-meets-Matisse-meets-me. You get the gist.

Maybe I’ll actually quilt this one. Maybe it’ll merely serve its purpose as a tool for bringing me back to myself. The true test will be whether I can stomach further questioning from my husband. “But why is it not ready to use yet?”

Time – in its ever-speeding glory – will tell.