Michele Bilyeu Creates *With Heart and Hands*: Healing Hearts Textile Arts

Healing Hearts Textile Arts

FAITH. HOPE. HEALING

♥️ May prayers of strength and love surround you with healing light ♥️

Finding my balance in a world that is incredibly out of balance, where others follow false idols and fractured dreams.

It is by connecting with my heart's journey, by doing those things that give me great peace...creating and giving to others.

It's truly the simple things from my heart and with my hands that connect me to my soul's purpose and that is the spiritual catalyst for the alchemical manifestation of love in action.

For only love crosses all dimensions of time and space. Only love will survive when egos are stripped away.

Love is all there truly is and all we are meant to learn about and experience."

Michele Bilyeu

www.with-heart-and-hands.com

If you have been a follower of my blog, then you know that I have been making prayer or healing hearts quilts for community and charitable giving since I first learned to sew and quilt as a small child. I started with bits and pieces of scraps from others and learned to piece them together into patterns that filled my heart with creative energy and filled my soul with the knowledge that these are the gifts of heart and hands that make me happy.

When I'm not making quilts, I'm making pillows, pillowcases, fabric bags, small format art cards and prayer flags.

Doing this creative work has been part of my heart and my healing arts journey since I was a very young child. It is simply who I am and what I do in the simplest meaning of my life.

I learned early on that my gifts with "healing with heart and hands" work, whether in my own home, in others homes, in doctors and therapists offices, or in hospital settings, was too short sighted in the big scheme of things, and too exhausting, personally, for me to continue doing only that form of loving energies healing work.

And it didn't seem to matter how many recognized forms of mastery I naturally had (Therapeutic Touch and Non Touch, Healing Touch, Reiki I, II, III, Spiritual and Intuitive Healing Arts, or even my own intrinsic but ancient forms of Qigong (qi gong, chi kung, or chi gung ).

No matter what anyone says or writes, when you give from your heart as much as I do, it exhausts you. And because I believed that this ministry, keeping in mind it is non-denominational in all ways, was my life's purpose, I realized that I needed a different way to work physically, spiritually, and energetically with my gifts.

Making Fidget Quilts for Alzheimer's Patients

Making an Alaskan Kuspuk

With my passion for sewing and quilting, I realized that I could reach more people and infuse more goodness into my work by the creation of quilts, pillows, kuspuks, prayer pocket pillows, and prayer flags, than I could by helping people one-on-one

And this became my own healing journey. True healing is not just of the body and all of the aches and pains and all of the ills that beset it. True healing is finding your way, your path, your journey that goes out beyond the ego's desires for acceptance, approval, applause or accolades.

It is about doing what you were meant to do..beginning with understand why you are where you are..right now, in this time, in this place wherever that is in your life.

Once I understand that for me the path was about creativity combined with family, heart, voicing my inner truth and sharing that truth with others I could see a pattern that begin as a child and moved and grew as I did and as I learned to create in the all of the ways that I have.

Initially, back in the 70's and early 80's, I made the simplest of quilts and patchwork pillows...one of every design in the "Quilts, Quilts, Quilts" book.(when it finally came out).. and those pillows ended up on the reading couches of elementary and middle schools in the Salem, Oregon area.

Later, I began to make and then give away my quilts...first simply made, and then with more detail and creative patchwork. I've given to survivors of natural disasters...hurricanes, fires, floods, and tornadoes.When Hurricane Katrina, and then Rita, hit the Gulf states in 2005, I sent 6 quilts within a month, and 25 of my own quilts within a year's time. After those initial delivery trucks winded down, I made them for the Salem Interfaith Ministry...a group of many religious and spiritual denominations who simply band together, and help others.

Making Prayer Flags

I knew then that I could sew quilts, pillows, bags, clothing, and prayer flags, and give them to others in need.... and that the wonderful feeling that the giving gave back to me, was far greater than winning awards, or writing a book, or receiving personal recognition in any way! It was just deeply moving and made me truly happy inside!

I've made quilts for a number of hospitals in a number of states, for several organizations that help abused children, for mission trips to Africa and other countries, for programs to help mothers and children leaving abusive situations, children in foster care, and those in need of all ages from neo-natal preemies, to the elderly in hospitals or in need of a passage quilt in hospice care.

It is by far the most meaningful giving I have done after a lifetime of volunteer work in schools and social service organizations from Alaska to Oregon. While being in the education field taught me about community...both families and individuals..it is my own personal non-denominational healing ministry that has, by far, taught me..and given back to me, the very most.

Whether we give a quilt to comfort, or to wrap up and warm, or help buffer the pain of a hurting and loss filled heart, all such quilts given with love and made with both our hands and our hearts are 'healing hearts' quilts. But my quilts are made with the infusion of healing touch energies, a gift that I was born with, but that I later learned was inherited from my paternal grandmother.

Later, many of my tiny art quilts were given to charitable organizations to raise funds for research, but even then...those tiny art quilts still go to someone who has found a heartstring connection and meaning from that quilt to their own heart....for we have all shared in love and loving, loss and losing , of those loved ones that truly are the very deepest and most meaning filled parts of our selves.

As long as it was in operation, I made and donated small format art quilts to the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative. It brought my own hurting heart great peace and comfort. 15 members of my own family have faced the dreadful disease of Alzheimer's (12 with my DNA) and now those beloved family members have all passed.

I ended up creating and donating 75 quilts to this group, even as I traveled back and forth to Alaska to care for my parents for as much as 6 months a year and up to 4 trips a year, I still made and donated quilts. If there is a will, there IS a way!

Even breaking and dislocating my wrist and requiring immediate surgery didn't stop me. Within two weeks I was sewing with one hand, and three months, creating adult bibs for my mom and designing quilts for AAQI, and helping Alaskan school children design and sew their own kuspuks!

So, if you think you don't have the time, or have other challenges, if I can do it, so can you! Here's just some of my donations to a variety of causes and projects:

Make a simple fabric postcard, a pillowcase, a journal cover, a little heart shaped pillow, an adult bib for a nursing home patient, or any other gift from your heart!