Patchwork Glasses

So it was just under a year ago that I started wearing reading glasses. I found it quite a depressing experience and also a slight struggle to get used to the practical aspect of wearing them initially. Well, in just under a year I've gone from only slightly needing them, and sometimes skipping wearing them, to being almost incapable of reading small print without them. More depressing than ever! Nobody told me that as soon as you do start wearing glasses your eyes quickly become completely reliant on them and your unaided sight deteriorates so much more rapidly. Definitely lessons to be learned there with other body parts!

I have another eye test booked for next week because I'm pretty sure it's now more than just being dependent on the reading glasses I have. Using a screen and hand sewing have become a definite strain on my eyes too. So in an effort to reconcile myself with this new sad state of affairs I finally finished up the mini quilt I started last year when first trying to adjust to said glasses.

The text came from a poem, Desiderata, which you can find here on Wikipedia. I am trying hard to be completely convinced by my words from last year:

"These lines seemed very appropriate to me at the time. And although they don't completely dissolve my dislike of ageing, I do definitely feel that I'm wiser, more mature and confident in myself, a more balanced person than when I was a spring chicken, so perhaps the need for reading glasses (as well as numerous other physical signs!) is a reasonable trade off for my accumulated wisdom and experience!"

I wrote more about how I go about printing on fabric back then too. I did warn in that post that my printing does not lead to colour fast results, so is only useful when you won't be washing your item. Sadly I didn't heed my own warning sufficiently carefully, not quite enough accumulated wisdom and experience! I had used a water soluble pen to doodle a few lines on to the fabric to follow when starting the quilting. And just the tiniest amount of water to rinse off the pen also set my ink running.

I wasn't feeling the love with this project enough to start again from scratch, so I just reprinted my words, cut them out and sewed them over the smudged mess.

After all, give it another year or two and everything will look like a blurry mess anyway!

The glasses themselves are made from patchworked fabric, lots of very small scraps in shades of green. And I think there's definitely a gap in the market for real patchwork spectacle frames. That would make the whole situation much more bearable! Glasses cases come, or can be made, in all kinds of patterns/fabrics/designs but the glasses themselves are just not quite there yet.

So wish me luck for next week with round 2 at the Opticians!

Sally.