Posts tagged ‘psychology’
Finished! Matt and Alyssa’s Wedding Quilt
The baby’s asleep — I can get a post up here!
You know what they say about good intentions… and what they’re used to pave…
When my friend Alyssa asked me, roughly a month before her November 2009 wedding, if I knew anyone who’d be willing to make a wedding signature quilt for hire, I jumped at the opportunity: ”Let me do this as my wedding present to you.” I was very sincere in this. Despite having already planned for 2010 to be my Year of the UFO, I thought this project would make a worthy exception. I love signature/album quilts; they’re such a wonderful tradition, and speak to me so volubly of Why We Quilt — they are literally a way for the recipients to wrap themselves in the good wishes of people who care about them. Besides, it was going to be a simple quilt: big blocks, straight-line piecing, nothing fancy. This wouldn’t take much time.
Ha. Ha. Ha. Because this became Murphy’s Quilt.
Everything started well: I prepared a basketful of precut 4 1/2″ squares of the JoAnn Fabrics Kona cotton in a nice cream, prewashed and ironed onto freezer paper, with a 1/2″ seam allowance premarked with blue washout marker. (I figured, mostly correctly, that a marked 1/2″ seam allowance would probably yield a useably empty 1/4″ seam allowance.) As their wedding colors were dark blue and chocolate brown, I brought along fine-tip Sharpies in navy and brown, which I had pretested for colorfastness. Dan made a nice sign for the table at the reception, explaining the project, and the guests did a nice job leaving signatures, notes, wishes, and even some artwork on the squares.
I had planned the quilt to encompass 25 Air Castle blocks, measuring 12″ each, as I wanted it to be big enough for them to share as a couch/cuddle quilt. I chose the Air Castle block because it’s simple, attractive, and contains 5 solid squares; thus the quilt could accommodate up to 125 signed squares. Projected attendance was roughly 100, and I made sure I had plenty of extra squares available to allow for mistakes, but as most couples and families signed just one square to represent them all, and some guests didn’t sign at all, I ended up with only 39 signed squares. This was fine; it meant that I could put a signed square in the center of each block, with a second one in the lower right hand corner of slightly more than half the blocks. It also gave me room to make an additional square to place in the center of the quilt with their names, wedding date, and details.
I had warned Alyssa when I offered to take this project on that it wouldn’t be finished anytime soon; there was no way I could start it before the new year, and she was fine with that. I was able to pull all the necessary brown fabrics from the leftovers from Window on Whimsey, but the not-quite-navy of the bridesmaids’ dresses wasn’t really represented in my stash, so it gave me something to look for on the Shop Hop last year. I then bundled up the fabrics, the sketch, my copy of Marsha McCloskey’s Block Party book, and set them aside. And then my life got complicated. I started this blog; I found out I was pregnant; three weeks later, I found out I was losing my job; and two months after that, I lost said job. Then I started traveling so I could work for the military dental contractor, and next thing I knew, it was the middle of summer and I hadn’t yet started this quilt. (Hello, quilt guilt!) I had taken the supplies to the April guild retreat, but didn’t actually work on it. In fact, I didn’t start the quilt until the weekend before my mini home retreat with Rhonda and Diane; I had started the cutting at my parents’ house during a quilting day with my mom, thinking I’d be able to knock out the whole top the following weekend.
Again: Ha. Ha. Ha.
As regular readers may recall, that was when I mistakenly cut a large portion of my fabric into the wrong size triangles, having forgotten in the criminally long interval between planning and starting that I had changed the block size from the 9″ in the book to 12″. And I couldn’t just change my mind and make either more blocks or a smaller quilt, because the signed squares were 4 1/2″ and could not be cut down. All I could do was get over myself and recut the pieces. Fortunately, I had enough of the brown and blue fabrics, and the cream was a standard solid from JoAnn’s, easy to procure more of, right? Right???
The first time I looked for more of the solid cream fabric was when my mom and I were in Pittsburgh to hear Bonnie Hunter speak, and we stopped into a local JoAnn’s to kill time before the meeting. I couldn’t find anything that looked like what I’d been working with, but I didn’t have a swatch with me for comparison so I didn’t worry. I started to worry, however, when I did take a swatch to my local JoAnn’s and still couldn’t find anything that matched. I remembered having bought Kona cotton, but I started to second-guess myself and looked at all their solids. Still nothing. Could they have discontinued an entire line of solids between November and July? Could there be a missing off-white that no one was stocking? I was really puzzled. I finally bought a yard each of the two closest matches, the Kona cotton and the Egyptian cotton, hoping that one or the other would look significantly different once it was washed.
And surprise, it did! Turns out, both fabrics apparently have so much sizing and finishing additives on them that they radically changed in appearance once they were washed and dried, and the Kona cotton was indeed the winner as I had remembered. Washed, it looked lighter in color, much more matte, and with nearly a seersucker texture even after pressing. If I needed a reminder of the importance of prewashing, this was it. Another obstacle surmounted.
I finished the top and also pieced the back. I’d found on last year’s shop hop not only a beautiful blue and brown large-scale Oriental floral perfect for this purpose on the bargain rack, but also a piece of Gail Kessler‘s life-size piano keyboard fabric, which I thought would be very appropriate to incorporate into a pianist’s quilt. It made the construction of the back somewhat more challenging, but I think it was worth it:
I then basted the quilt and started quilting. And that’s when the final round of Murphyness raised its ugly head. As previously discussed here, I had unprecedented problems with skipped stitches and frayed threads, especially every time I crossed a heavy intersection of seam allowances. In a pieced quilt, there are a lot of these, and it made me nervous about my prospects for quilting both Ruby Wedding and Taupe Winding Ways. Manipulating tension and needle choice solved most of the problem, but I still had to periodically stop, rip out, and restitch throughout the project, which really ruined my momentum and greatly prolonged the process. I was happy with my choice of quilting design, though: a virtually no-mark, Pam Clarke-inspired combination of continuous curve quilting in the blue and brown triangles and in the signature squares, with additional loop and curl embellishments in the solid cream squares and triangles. The light blue thread created enough contrast for visibility without distracting from the primary focus of the top. I finished the quilt with a scrappy binding of all the blues, once again using the Sew Precise, Sew Fast machine binding technique.
If this were a fictional story, this whole tale of woe would culminate with my putting the finished quilt in the washing machine to remove the washout blue marker and the water-soluble thread, and having all the Sharpie signatures inexplicably vanish off the fabric, thus ruining the entire project. Fortunately, this is real life, and I really had tested the markers first, so there was no final tragedy. I was able to give them their quilt on their first wedding anniversary, and they loved it. Despite all the roadblocks I encountered, I am happy I made this quilt for them, and it certainly was a learning experience! Therefore, I’ll leave this happy dance in the capable hands and feet of Mr. Gene Kelly, who danced happier than anyone:
So Quilty I Haven’t Quilted
I've been on the road!
quilty: quilt-y [kwil-tee] -adjective quilt-i-er, quilt-i-est.
1. Related to, but not specific to the act of, quilting.
2. Characterized by, connected to, or involving quilts.
That’s my made-up word of the day. I’ve been very wrapped up in quilty activities lately, to the point of being too busy to actually quilt! This has happened to me plenty of times before, and I know I’m not the only one: shop owners have frequently spoken to me about how they spend all day surrounded by quilts, thinking about quilts, but not finding time to make quilts. My free time has been consumed by some very quilty adventures, each of which is deserving of its own post, but I wanted to give you an overview:
Sept. 16: PA National Quilt Extravaganza and quilt guild meeting
Sept. 23-25: Quilting with Machines, Huron, OH
Oct. 2: The Airing of the Quilts, Tunkhannock, PA
In between, I’ve been working, traveling, and sometimes doing both simultaneously; I left the day after the PA show to work a weekend military dental event in Edinburgh, Indiana, then left again for Ohio two and a half days after getting home. I’ve also been trying to reorganize the studio, because machine quilting requires lots of space, and little things I hadn’t dealt with were piling up and getting pushed off the edge of the table as I quilted. (At least I didn’t do what I once did, and inadvertently quilted a piece of scrap fabric ONTO THE BACK OF the quilt I was quilting. That was damn unpretty.) I now have new thread racks on the wall, including one for cones, so I don’t have thread stacked precariously on the closet shelf any more.
I have also continued a project I started last spring, tracing my quilting stencil collection out onto paper so I have a hard copy of the designs I already own, without having to pull the big portfolio of stencils out of the closet and rifle through them for ideas.
I like the portfolio for storage (an idea I got from Karen McTavish when I took her wholecloth design class many years ago) but it’s a little unwieldy for casual browsing, and leads too often to my ignoring my stencils when choosing quilting designs.
Now I’m well on my way to having a full-size catalog of my stencils that will be much easier to deal with. I’m also flirting with the idea of photographing all the pages into a notebook on my phone so I have a portable reference for shopping; I have to investigate whether that would be a poor use of phone memory or not.
I’m also trying to get caught up with my magazine filing. [Warning: if descriptions of borderline OCD behavior disturb you, you may not want to read about how I organize my quilting magazines.] For the last approximately six years, I have made an effort to stay on top of my ever-increasing collection of quilting magazines by periodically going through them, tearing out the pertinent articles, photos, and patterns, and placing them in plastic page protectors. I then organize them in binders, with subject tabs separating them first into articles, patterns, and inspirations, then further subdividing the articles into topics such as how-tos, history, and interviews; the patterns into paper piecing, curved piecing, applique, big prints, holiday, etc.; and the inspiration photos just into roughly similar groupings. [Look, I warned you. I also sort my M&Ms by color before eating them, you got a problem with that?]
Every year or so I also purge the existing binders of things that no longer appeal to me or that I have better examples of, but the acquisitions far outweigh the deletions. Suffice to say I currently have four 3″ binders absolutely bursting at the seams. They are extremely useful references, though, and I consult them often. It’s much easier than having to sort through piles or magazine boxes full of intact but unindexed issues; and I’ve resigned myself to the idea that if I missed anything, it surely is counterbalanced by the usefulness of the system. (Not to mention, these days, no information is ever truly lost, even if I recycled the magazine it was in.) But as with so many other ongoing quilty projects, I’d gotten behind with it, and now I’m almost caught up.
And finally, before all this new learning had a chance to get old in my brain, I’ve organized all my handouts and class notes from Quilting with Machines into yet another binder. Once again, I had started this project last year, adding to a kind of half-assed “quilt class notes” binder that I’d started years ago but hadn’t given a good effort to. Now both years’ worth of QwM notes are in one binder, properly organized, to which I’m even adding photos I took of class samples.
So while I still don’t have any completely finished projects to brag about, I’ve been making the most of my last month of permitted travel before “my confinement.” All I mean is that the OB doesn’t want me to be more than an hour from the hospital as of 36 weeks, which falls October 23; I just like phrasing it that way because I sound like a character from Jane Austen or “Gone with the Wind.” And I now have a much better organized sewing space, which will allow me to spend more time quilting and less time trying to move or find things as I deal with significantly curtailed hobby time once the baby comes.
More on the actual shows and events soon! With pictures of quilts instead of binders! I promise!
The Final Word on QFNJ: The Judges’ Comments
I got home from work Tuesday to find two big boxes had arrived from UPS: my quilts are safely home. I can finally exhale that little breath I’ve been holding since I shipped them off nearly a month ago. Even though I saw them, safe and sound and hanging in the quilt show Sunday, it’s still a relief to have them home. Of course, the suspense of whether or not my quilts would return to me unscathed was immediately replaced with the suspense as to what the judges had said about them.
Now, I don’t have a very long history with judges’ comments; this is only the fourth judged show I’ve had quilts in. However, I believe in getting quilts judged, because I really want to get feedback from people who are trained to look at quilts differently and more dispassionately than I do. Having said that, I also know why quilters don’t get their quilts judged. Not quite two years ago, I got a judge’s comment that makes my blood boil to this day. I’m actually impressed that I ever entered a quilt for judging again after that experience. Here’s the quilt:
"Quilting Bee," 2008 (with feline embellishment)
It’s nothing special, just something fun I did with a stack of nine-patches from a guild block exchange. I’ve always liked the honeybee block, and it was an entertaining challenge to pick fabrics out of my stash for the machine applique that coordinated with the nine-patches made by other guild members. There was a preponderance of blue and yellow in the blocks, so I chose a dilute blue batik with traces of yellow in it as the background.
Detail, "Quilting Bee"
That, apparently, was my mistake. Because the judge said:
"Appears that marking pen has bled into some of the fabrics."
I recognize that part of this is my problem. This was never going to be a ribbon-winning quilt; I mainly wanted some feedback on my machine applique and machine quilting. As someone who recognizes and appreciates life’s little absurdities, I should have laughed at this. Instead, nearly two years later, it still infuriates me. Because how could someone who is trained and paid to know about quilts mistake a commercial fabric for blue washout marker? Besides, I never even touched a blue washout marker to this quilt! Anywhere!! Part of why I was proud of the machine quilting on this quilt was that it was completely no-mark!!!
Breathe… breathe…
OK, I’m back. But that’s the history I have when I read judges’ comments, so I thought you should know before I react to the current batch.
Detail, "Blue Butterfly Day"
What I thought they’d say: I expected to hear about the fact that I didn’t quilt inside the applique, which was a deliberate choice; I wanted the quilting to help create motion but not to blur the graphic strength of the butterflies. I also thought they might criticize my decision to use a narrow zigzag rather than a blind hem stitch in my turned-edge machine applique. There was also some slight show-through of seam allowances in some of the pieced blocks.
What they actually said:
"Great movement across the surface of the quilt. Blue is a good contrast with the black & white fabric. Amazing collection of black & white fabric. Try for a more consistent stitch length when quilting. Hand stitched binding adds refinement to the quilt."
I can’t really argue with any of that, other than the comment about the binding. Libby Lehman says that having judges pick on your binding is good, because it means there weren’t more egregious errors to call you out on. But I also like Ricky Tims‘ perspective on it (he teaches machine binding on his Grand Finale DVD) that they should judge you on how well you executed the technique you chose, rather than criticizing you for choosing that technique. For the record, I used the machine binding technique taught by Suzanne Michelle Hyland, on her DVD “Sew Precise, Sew Fast Machine Binding.” And I think I did a nice job.
Detail, "Kyoto Ink"
What I thought they’d say: I didn’t quilt the two purple sashing borders sufficiently. I quilted a spine in each of them, planning on doing a feather variation or something out of Megan Best’s “Spinal Twist,” and I ran out of time before delivering it to Quilter’s Palette. Then, since it was done in my mind, I never went back to it. I also expected a comment about thread tension in the quilting, and possibly some criticism of my accuracy in quilting in the ditch.
What they actually said:
"Graphically pleasing quilt. Interesting choice of colors reflecting the oriental theme. A difficult binding technique well handled. Take care to get stitch length consistent when quilting."
Again, not much I can dispute here. I know that quilting stitch length consistency remains a challenge for me (after all, they mentioned that twice!) But I also know that I’ve gotten significantly more consistent in recent years, so hopefully I will either continue to improve, or break down and buy a BSR (probably not.) I definitely appreciated their mentioning, for both quilts, my fabric selections; I think that is one of my greatest strengths as a quilter. I also really appreciated their highlighting the binding on this one, because that was a chore, and I obsessed over it.
Additionally, I like when quilt show judges balance their critiques. I’m glad that the QFNJ judges, Gloria Loughman and Lois Smith, both amazing quilters in their own right, made the effort to give positive comments as well as emphasizing the areas that need improvement, and that they gave the criticism constructively. I’m not a delicate flower who can’t be leveled with, but it’s unhelpful for a judge to say, “bad machine quilting,” without clarifying what about it was bad or how the quilter should go about improving it.
So apparently, the judges agree that I’m a promising quilter with room to improve. That’s an assessment I can live with.
But I’m still going to put some of my bindings on by machine. And I can live with that, too.
Snow Day!
So, I was supposed to leave for Rhode Island tonight after work, to attend TempleCon (a gaming/science fiction/steampunk convention) and to visit my sister and her family nearby. However, this happened:
My street, about 10 p.m.
It’s supposed to snow through the night and well into tomorrow, accumulating up to 20 inches. So even if I could have gotten on the road before the storm started in earnest, the catsitter wouldn’t have been able to get here to give our oldest cat his Xanax (oh how I wish that were a joke.) My husband rode up with a friend on Thursday, so I find myself 1) alone, 2) unable to go anywhere, 3) with a full pantry, and 4) with a whole lot of UFOs.
What’s that spell? SEWING DAY!!!
I would have started tonight, except I also woke up this morning with a very sore throat. It didn’t keep me from going to work, but I did stop at Walgreens on the way home, and I think I sort of panicked in the Cough & Cold aisle:
That's the real-deal Homeland Security fake Nyquil, too!
Judicious dosing and a cat on my lap while I watched RuPaul’s Drag Race (love that show!) seems to have perked me right up, so tomorrow and Sunday will be all about the quilting. Now to decide what to work on…
I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about how I should go about prioritizing the UFOs, and in keeping with today’s snow theme, I want to introduce Dave Ramsey’s Debt Snowball plan. Basically, he advocates listing all your debts smallest to largest, then paying as much as you can every billing cycle on the smallest debt, while only paying minimum payments on the rest, so that you get small debts paid off quickly and you build momentum for eliminating debt. While I can’t completely endorse all Mr. Ramsey’s personal finance advice, I think it has potential if applied to other areas of life. In a quilting version of this method, I would work on the quilt that has the least to be done before it’s finished, in order to be able to get measurable success faster and get me motivated to work on the bigger, more time-consuming projects.
I’ll post again tomorrow as to the identity of the lucky quilt! And good news in the mailbox today, both “Blue Butterfly Day” and “Kyoto Ink” were accepted by Quilt Fest of New Jersey. It’s a nice show, and they hang all the ribbon-winning quilts from Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival. If Somerset, NJ is closer to home than Hampden, VA, it’s worth the trip.
UFOs Part II: Convergence
In July 2006, I helped the guests at my niece’s birthday party to tie-dye T-shirts. This represented my first foray into working with Procion dyes; more on that in later posts. Naturally, it seemed a waste to only dye shirts; I had to dye some fabric as well. One piece looked like a good candidate with which to try Ricky Tims’ convergence technique:
Tie-dye Convergence
The technique starts with an oversized four-patch, either from one extremely varied fabric, or from two, three, or four different ones. The four-patch is then sliced, diced, resewn, resliced, and ultimately transformed, as you see. To two squares of my tie-dyed fabric I added a purple mottled print and a yellow batik that picked up the fuchsia/purple and yellow accents in the predominantly green-dyed fabric. Unfortunately, I didn’t buy much of either one. Generally, I see it as a good thing that I very rarely buy any more than a half yard of a given fabric, unless I know I’m using it for a border. However, in this case, my fabric-buying sobriety backfired. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This project really was more about the process than it was about the end product; I had bought Ricky’s Convergence Quilts book, ate up the pictures and the description of the technique, but wanted to try it for myself, and this tie-dyed fabric offered the perfect opportunity. If it hadn’t worked, I would have just put it aside. But it did work. In fact, my husband, who is normally very supportive of, but pleasantly detached from, my quiltmaking, was quite taken with this one while it was in pieces on the design wall.
But here’s where we get into the obstacles again. The first obstacle was just logistical, a fabric emergency: I wanted to put a border on it, and as I didn’t have enough of the fabrics I had converged, I needed to choose something else. In general, I see that as more of an opportunity than a roadblock; to quote Paula Nadelstern again, “when it comes to fabric, ‘more is more.’” In this situation, though, I had an extremely difficult-to-match fuchsia/purple color AND an extremely difficult-to-match green. Suffice to say, I am unlikely to find a batik or a large-scale print that contains both. I did drag the top to a couple of quilt shows, but I never found anything I particularly liked, and by that point I had lost momentum.
Lost momentum is a majorly recurring theme in my UFOs. I definitely have some personality traits of obsessive-compulsive disorder, albeit fortunately not ones that negatively impact my life in any significant way (although I have been known to put the toilet paper roll on the holder the right way in bathrooms not my own.) In many ways these personality traits have been assets: I can become extremely focused on a task until it’s complete, I am a scrupulously thorough researcher with a Boy Scout-like conviction to be prepared, and I always have clean hands. The downside is that once a particular obsession has run its course, it’s difficult to kindle up enthusiasm for it again. I can eat, sleep, and breathe a project for a while, but if I get distracted (ooh, shiny!) or derailed (no border fabric!) the project loses its Most Favored status, and if there’s no deadline for it, off to the UFO cabinet it goes.
This project also reeks of Quilt Guilt. I’d had pretensions of finishing this quilt to take to the Ricky Tims Super Seminar last May to have Ricky himself autograph the label. Didn’t happen. I even feel guilty about the fact that this was one of the few quilt projects my husband really took an unsolicited interest in the mechanics of, and I didn’t get it finished so he could enjoy it. This is something I need to work through and just get over; once again, this seems like a “Hoarders” impulse, attaching unwarranted emotional weight to an object. It’s not the quilt’s fault I didn’t get it finished; I shouldn’t wrap all those negative emotions up in it.
I just read a New Yorker article about a form of nightmare therapy in which sufferers of recurrent nightmares are encouraged to spend daytime hours visualizing the upsetting scenes from their nightmares and reimagining them to be less upsetting; one example given was of a woman reimagining the sharks circling above her as she tried to swim to the surface of the ocean to breathe, as a circle of friendly dolphins. Perhaps I can visualize making all the negatives, all the “should-haves”, into tangible, squishy objects. I can visualize myself placing them into the Convergence quilt top center, then gathering up the corners like a hobo sack. I can visualize myself carrying that sack full of gelatinous, drippy, toxic emotions down the upstairs hall to the back bedroom and out the door to the balcony. It’s a bright sunny day, and I can just let the edges of the Convergence quilt top fly, waving like a beautiful, colorful flag in the breeze while those lumpen blobs of guilt tumble forth — and are gone.
I’ll report back when I get that border on.
And In the Darkness Bind Them
The tone-on-tone storage is bursting at the seams
Another acronym I like is SABLE: Stash Accumulation Beyond Life Expectancy. That’s a problem I believe I already have unless I cut back radically on my fabric buying. There’s a quote I’ve loved for years, attributed to bibliophile A. E. Newton (italics mine):
“Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity… we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.”
Substitute “fabric” for “books” and you get the philosophy that has led me to my current stash situation. I — like the title of the blog says — love fabric. I love the feel of it. I love the potential it represents. I love the surprises inherent in it: how the same fabric can be a light or a dark depending on its neighbors and how small it’s cut. I love it even when it disappoints me, when something that looked good in theory looks dreadful in reality, because that result is a manifestation of that same ability to surprise. I love the different effects that directional designs can create depending on the decisions I make with them. I’ve said in the past that I have no interest in computer design programs like EQ because if I knew exactly what it would look like before I made it, I’d never actually sew it up. However, I think I was even a little premature in saying that, because fabric is ALWAYS surprising. Even with the programs that allow you to scan in your actual fabric and design with the digital sample, it can’t create the true effect of the fabric.
...while the collections threaten to creep out of the closet
So every time I go to a quilt shop or a quilt show, I am inundated with The Dream: that every piece of fabric represents a fabulous project, just waiting for me to see its potential and bring it to fruition. Every fabric that catches my eye is a What If? — and that’s the most exciting question in my world. Novelty prints constantly call out to me with the potential to make gifts for the people in my life they remind me of. The most recent piece of fabric I’ve purchased (and this is me on a fabric diet) is covered with dachshunds wearing little shirts, to make something (what? and when?) for my mother-in-law.
The problem is, though, that I already own an embarrassing quantity of beautiful fabric. I’m not ashamed of that; it’s great to be able to make a project entirely out of what I already have, and it’s a wonderful feeling to find the perfect use for a favorite fabric I’ve held on to for years. What I’m ashamed of is the fact that it’s coming in to the stash so much faster than it’s being used. It’s a perfect metaphor for weight gain: because the acquisition is so much more easily pleasurable than the disposition, it just keeps piling on. And the key is the easy pleasure — I find quiltmaking very pleasurable, or I wouldn’t do it; it’s just that fabric shopping is a lot easier than cutting, piecing, appliqueing, or machine quilting, and gives instant gratification. However, the thrill of finding a beautiful piece of fabric and fantasizing about what I could potentially make from it resembles a little too closely the emotions I saw cross the face of one of the subjects of the A&E show “Hoarders” when he pulled a picture frame out of a dumpster.
...and shameful overflow piles occupy the basement.
I’ve become obsessed with the show “Hoarders” because I recognize a lot of my own tendencies in it. I am not a hoarder, as those of you who have been to my house know — but I recognize the impulses. It’s like the scene from “The Two Towers” where Frodo is rapturously stroking the One Ring while Gollum mimes the same action, remembering when he used to do the same thing. (It’s not on YouTube, I looked.) I, too, have felt the power of the Ring — I mean, the emotional pull that objects can have on a person. I want to make certain that I’m collecting fabric for good, constructive reasons, not for its own sake, or next thing I know, I’ll be Dumpster Guy.
So SABLE I’m OK with — within reason. I just need to watch out for FANGAWHODS: Fabric Acquisition that Negates a Girl’s Ability to Work in Her Own Damn Studio.
ABC: Always Be Closing
I want to be a finisher.
I have been very fortunate in the past six months to be privileged to hear both Bonnie Hunter http://www.quiltville.com and Gyleen Fitzgerald http://www.colourfulstitches.com speak at guild meetings. Both of these ladies make fabulous quilts and are wonderful motivators, cheerleaders for the hobby. Most importantly, though, they are FINISHERS, and they want the rest of us to be finishers, too. Getting to hear both of them speak was the extra push I needed to declare 2010 to be my Year of the UFO, and to start this blog as a way to both work through the process myself in a (semi-)organized fashion, and to have some accountability for it as well.
I’m a fantastic starter. I love to start projects. That’s an intoxicating, fascinating stage, like falling in love. Choosing the fabrics, puzzling through the design decisions, imagining the finished product — this to me is what it’s all about. I’ve long said that if all the quilts I’ve made in my mind somehow popped into being, my house wouldn’t be big enough for all of them. Unfortunately, my house is starting to appear to not be big enough for my unfinished projects.
Almost every quilter I know has UFOs — the dreaded UnFinished Object. The few quilters I know who DON’T have UFOs tend to be the hyper-organized, one-at-a-time type that I can’t relate my personality to, and I don’t necessarily want to emulate. Quilting is my hobby, my playtime; when it becomes too achievement-focused I lose the happiness behind it, and then what’s the point? I like being able to switch projects when something’s not working, when I need inspiration, or just when a project isn’t speaking to me any more. I never want to be so rigid in my quiltmaking discipline that I can’t make that wedding, baby, or prayer quilt because it’s not on the schedule. If I see a new idea or technique in a magazine, at a meeting, or on a show, I want to feel free to play with it while it’s fresh and compelling rather than waiting until the current project is cleared. Worst of all, from past experience I know that when I’m forcing myself to work on just one project and it’s not going well, I just stay away from quilting entirely rather than work on a project I’m not feeling passionate about.
The problem arises when the set-aside projects never make it back to center stage. Instead, they stay in limbo, becoming the source of my Quilt Guilt. It’s a lot easier to start something new, with exciting new fabric and new ideas, than to pull out an old project and attempt to get myself back in that frame of mind. Why did I abandon this piece? Did I run out of fabric? Did something not work? Is there something actually wrong with it? Or did it just get “bumped” for a gift or a deadline?
I hope, through this blog project, to go through my backlog of UFOs and try to identify the reasons they ended up in a cabinet or closet instead of on a bed. In the process, I hope to learn more about myself as a quilter and as a person, and hopefully keep from building up such a collection again. I also hope I manage to entertain those of you who choose to read this, and perhaps inspire a few more Finishers.
The title of this post comes, of course, from the classic David Mamet movie, “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Early in the scene, Alec Baldwin (so young! so thin!) as the nightmare consultant to an office of down-on-their-luck real estate agents, tells Jack Lemmon, “Put down the coffee. Coffee is for closers.” While I certainly don’t want Alec Baldwin’s character’s style of motivation (Tim Gunn would be far more helpful), that speech was the first thing that popped into my head when I said I wanted to be a finisher.
Enjoy! (Language alert, it’s Mamet.)
