Sunday, November 11, 2007

The whole is not necessarily the sum of the parts...

I have been working on a new quilt. Not in my usual color palette, not in my usual style. Let's just say that I was making some headway on it and then the pieces of it started to look...let's say bad.
In my opinion.
I kind of got lost in the pieces of it, for about a week.
I was coming off of this big quilting high...after my horse projects and this one really got me down.
I just kept seeing the pieces and they did not look like anything good to me. Today, I had an hour or so and I decided to just finally sew what I had finished together and take it off of my design wall for a while. (I just COULD NOT look at it any longer.)
So, I sewed and the time was ticking away....I kept thinking if I could just sew this together a bit faster then I could actually sew on something that could look good...
And I sewed and I began to get more than a little bit annoyed that THIS quilt was taking up so much of MY time. I finished it and then threw it back on the wall and rushed off to a birthday party.
******
******
Wait for it...
When I came home I walked in to my craft room, looked up and saw this most BEAUTIFUL piece....no, gnomes had not crept in whilst I was away and woven something from spiderwebs....This quilt now looks like I thought that it could, all together you can see the secondary pattern, which I sometimes find more lovely than the primary pattern.
How short-sighted can I be? I forgot the idea about the whole being more than a sum of its parts, can you think of a better way to describe quilting?? life in general?
Well, I am going to ride this creative high for a while. Sometimes you have to relearn the basics every so often....I swear, it was really so ugly.
JMB

P.S.
Here is my quilt that I finished for my Grandma. She loved it. I talked to her this morning and she said that she screamed when she unwrapped it and then cried because she liked it so much. You just HAVE to love a Grandma like mine. Love you Grandma Flora!

3 comments:

emilyruth said...

what a sweet grandaughter you are!
do we get to see the ugly/beautiful quilt?
i hope so...

:)

Yaz and Rob said...

Ok, confusion.. so the pic of the quilt in the entry is not the one that was so frustrating, right? Well, the one posted is beautiful. I also, think a good lesson in seeing the big picture is what I need right now. Is their a bigger picture to the constant humm / chaos of kids?

Tonya Ricucci said...

love your Grandma's quilt - no wonder she shrieked with joy. lookign forward to the quilt that tortured you while in progress.