I did manage some progress on the Compass but I'll save that for the next post, but although I say I didn't do much quilting realise that actually I did complete a good bit. I took my sister to my local quilt shop to help me choose backing fabric for my round robin Mama Africa quilt - a group of 11 of us finished a two year border round robin in late September, and we found a beautiful fabric from a range by Jinny Beyer's Rajasthan Spray. We then saw all the 19 variations of colours and I mentioned how it would make a great quilt project to work with colours and we decided to buy a fat quarter of each, divide into two and create a quilt each. My sister has never quilted and after watching a bit of progress on the compass and absorbing Leah Day's 365+ Free Motion Quilting Designs, decided to take Leah's advice that you might as well practise free motion on a quilt as on endless test quarters and dived in. By the end she was limitless in her creativity and fearlessness in trying something new and our agreed 20 minutes a day of quilting just extended and extended. I'd go to make a cup of tea in the evenings, come out to find the living room empty and hear the sound of my sewing machine purring away and Marcelle "just doing another couple of minutes". Enjoy her progress and work and remember this is a quilt from someone who hasn't sewn much with a machine and has never made a quilt and be wowed. She really is an inspiration and a bit of a kick up the butt for those of us who want everything to be perfect before we free motion.
Oh and I also managed when I could wrestle the machine off her to finish two large nap quilt tops for family members which I had promised myself I would do this year. So all I have to do is to sandwich those and quilt away with more Leah designs to have them finished BUT only after I finish the Compass. Still taking that time away from the Beast was a nice break it was lovely to have fun quilting my own Crazy Quilt just picking designs from the 365+ and seeing which ones I just had no problem and the others that really scuppered me. I really pushed myself not to be anal about my feathers and just got into a flow of doing and not marking. It was very interesting to see how I could manage a decent set of feathers when curving in one direction, but how my brain just couldn't engage with the pattern in another. Another lesson learnt about trying designs in different directions and seeing which direction works and which doesn't.
A final point. When Marcelle started she was distressed about her first couple of blocks and was ready to get the seam ripper out. I advised her to just leave them until the end so she could see how she had improved and then to make a decision on whether to rip or not rip. By the end she would complete a block show me, and then point to the first blocks and proudly show the improvement. So the moral is, just do it, and keep on doing it, and don't stop to remove the signs of imperfection but enjoy the process of learning and growing. By the time she got to the end Marcie was adamant that she would not unpick those first blocks and in fact got huge amounts of pleasure in looking at successive blocks and tracing improvement, skill and also acknowledging continued errors without feeling weighted down by them. There is something magical to look at your own imperfections in parts and still see that the whole is perfect and precious – I think both of us really saw if that we could see this in a quilt and embrace it, then why we can’t embrace that about ourselves – in parts imperfect but as a whole totally wonderful.
