Lately I have been feeling a little overwhelmed and maybe slightly, how should we say, well inadequate I guess. Why, you might ask. Well, I am in the process of quilting a special project. The project called for custom quilting. Now I am not a novice quilter however, like anyone else, I tend to stick to the designs I know and know I can do well. That is all very well and good but sometimes you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone to grow and improve. Of course leaving the comfort zone is scary but it is the only way to move forward in learning new quilting designs and in life.
So, in trying to decide what quilting designs to quilt on the quilt I have been doing a lot of research both online and looking through my vast library of books. Of course, when you do this you will find two things, the first is that my quilting is as good or better than some, the second is that I have a long way to go to get as good as some of the award winning quilters.
Now, do I want to be an award winning quilter, I don’t know but I do want to be as good as I can be which of course means moving out of my comfort zone and learning and growing my designs and style.
Back to the quilt I am in the process of quilting. My designs had to cover a few areas
- I have a time frame so they had to be doable without taking hours and hours
- The quilt still had to be cuddly so couldn’t be quilted to death
- It needed feathers so what type would I quilt
- Some of the designs had to push me out of my comfort zone but with taking number 1 into account.
So here is what I came up with.
I used Lisa Calle’s tracing paper method I learned in her iquilt class Divide and Conquer. I didn’t really divide and conquer this quilt as I liked the lines of it as it is.
So I am not quite 50% done the quilting on this, I will be going back to it as soon as I am finished writing this post. I am never 100% happy with my quilting, I always feel I can do so much better, which of course is true, however I am learning (most of the time) to not beat myself up too badly. When I am working on a quilt and make a mistake I cringe but I have learned two things.
- Unless the mistake is really really glaring once you take the quilt off of the frame you really don’t see it.
- My mind always makes the bobble or wobble out to be much worse than it actually is.
I have taken almost all of Angela Walters Craftsy classes and her motto of close enough is good enough is something I am trying to remember. If I don’t do this I am going to drive myself crazy especially when I am learning how to quilt a new design.
So, on this quilt I have two new designs. One is the wishbone design and the other is the hump and bump feathers. Both of these are looking ok and for the purposes of this quilt my quilting is fine. I still have a ways to go with the more formal feathers though, they are a lot harder to do than the more informal “long arm” feathers.
I am not totally happy with the wishbone design, however I am not ripping it out. As Angela Walters says no one became a better quilter by ripping the quilting out. I have several more of these to do so by the last one I should have it mastered, well ok better.
In the end, when the quilt is off the frame it will be beautiful and I will have grown out of my comfort zone and continue to improve my quilting of these designs. So I need to remember not to compare myself to those award winning quilters. They have spent hours practicing their quilting and many have been doing this a lot longer than I have.
Just quilt it
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