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Monday, January 13, 2014

A lesson learned ...

... in more ways than one.
I've had a quilt top waiting to be layered and quilted for a couple of months. It was a top that I was really pleased with as it expressed my idea as well as it could. For a large part of the surface I used the fragmented log cabin technique that I fell in love with last year but I decided I wanted to try something other than the narrowly spaced lines of quilting that I've used in the past. The narrow lines tend to blend the pieces and make the piecing disappear - I wanted to try something that would echo the piecing so went for a horizontal and vertical grid of  'not quite straight' lines. And I don't like it! I was right in that this style of quilting does echo the piecing but it's all a bit too much. So lesson one is don't use this quilting pattern again.
But for me lesson two is the exciting one - as it became apparent that the quilting wasn't going to be to my taste, rather than trying to unpick a lot of stitching or putting it to one side to ponder over (Something that can go on for weeks whilst it niggles and irritates me!) I put a concerted effort into finishing the quilting on the basis that I can do another one and try something else! Wow - so simple, I can allow myself to get things wrong knowing that I can try again. How many years has it taken to learn that? So, here's to tomorrow ....





5 comments:

Margaret Cooter said...

Wow, hurrah!!

One of the best bits of advice I gleaned at "art school" was from a talk by Idris Khan, who said something like "take it to the end, even if you can see it's not working - you'll learn something" - so, he seems to be right??

Linda B. said...

Absolutely! But the difference between 'knowing' that he is right and 'feeling/understanding' that he is right has been amazing for me.

The Idaho Beauty said...

Brilliant! Why does it take us old dogs so long to learn new tricks and attitudes? ;-)

Sandra Wyman said...

yAY! Great way to start the year. Will paste this quotation on the studio wall.

After all if you don't make new mistakes you're playing too safe, right? And not going anywhere...

Heather Dubreuil said...

Could we see this quilt? I'm really curious now!