Is Less More?

 

When I went into the studio last night and looked at what was on my design wall, I wasn't impressed. What would happen, I wondered, if I removed the yellow? I thought I might use it later in the quilt, but "for now" I wanted to see the blocks without it. Not bad. I needed to make more blocks anyway, so while my dinner roasted in the oven, I did just that.

It was looking pretty good, so I kept going. As you all know by now, even this arrangement is not final. I have a lot of fabrics I can continue to play with.

While I work on moving this idea from "Meh" to "Magnificent" it's worth mentioning a few things.

1. You should never fall in love with your idea. You may need to beat it up to get it where it should go.

2. An idea is only an idea until you make it real. And good ideas change as you work.

3. If it isn't working, or if it's stuck in a rut, "Change partners and Dance," as my prof John Hatch once said to me. Don't be afraid to "Break It, and Break It Good." What the hell, if the blocks aren't sewn together yet you can do whatever you want without any consequences.

4. Just because your friends tell you it's gorgeous doesn't mean you have to listen. If it doesn't sing FOR YOU then who cares? I remember the Selvage Fairy said to me once, "It's interesting to me that the worst thing your quilt can be is 'Nice.'" Nice is nice, but for me, it very often isn't good enough.

5. Conversely, if they tell you they don't like it, you don't have to listen to that either. Just because somebody doesn't LIKE something doesn't mean it is any good. (Read the Value of Meh; link above.)

Well that's it for me today. Time for bed.

Playing Around

I think one of the reasons why my quilts turn out so great is that I never stop pushing ideas around. I never settle. It took me a few tries to figure out how to make a dark diamonds quilt and the result was Dark Majesty. It took me months to figure out how to make a black and white divided-in-half Crayons quilt, but the Black & White Crayons is the quilt my pal Julie thinks defines my work.

I know there's a quilt in that oh-so-modern variation, (the first one in yesterday's post.) I just haven't found it yet. I'll figure it out. It may take months, but I'll crack that nut eventually.

In the meantime, I wanted to play around, so last night I went into the studio and came up with this.
To fill in the empty space, I'd need to make more blocks.

And the more I look at this design, I think shifting it over a bit would be better.

Oh yeah, this is better.

I like this. And yes, these are the same blocks I've been playing with the last couple of days.

NOW, here is something I have observed. These zebras can be really bright, and hard to look at, like in the examples above that have a strong light/dark contrast in the pairs. But these designs can be really successful when the pairs do NOT have a strong contrast, like...

the Golden Zebras,

the Jealousy quilt,

or the Firebird quilt.

 So even though the really zingy examples might not float your particular boat, the variations shown here can be adapted to much more subtle, but equally successful designs.

I would have discovered NONE OF THEM had I not pushed the ideas around.

Change Partners and Dance

 

Sometimes the best laid plans go astray. This is a perfectly serviceable quilt. It's lovely in its own very unique way. But it doesn't sing for me. Clearly I need to do more tinkering. It may be that this quilt is simply better when made with fabrics that do not have a high contrast, like the Golden Zebras or the Jealousy quilts. This quilt is something you could do with the leftovers.

Or you could make this. This was made with the same blocks as in the first version.

And you could probably figure out other things to do with these blocks. That is my next trick or two.

The first batch of blues have arrived. The blue jealousy quilt will be called SAPPHIRE.

Kill Your Darlings

As I have said many times before, we ALL know when it's WRONG. We generally know when we've hit it out of the park, but the absolute HARDEST THING is that place in between - that place where what's on your worktable or design wall isn't going anywhere. The solution?

Be ruthless.

Kill your darlings.

Break it. Break it bad.

Change partners and dance.

The so-called gold I had been working with the last few days just wasn't going anywhere I wanted it to go. If it had simply been a project of my own, I might have stuck with it, but this quilt is designed to be a "how-to" lesson to make a Diamond quilt, and if I wasn't "feeling the love," I sure as hell couldn't convince anybody else to feel it either.

So I tossed the pieces off the wall and dug through my stash. I can show how to make a Diamond quilt in colors that anybody can reproduce. If I've learned anything from my students it's that if I give them good basics, they will figure out how to push ideas around on their own.



You should click, and then double click the photos to get a good look at the big prints. Some of them I've had almost ten years.

Change Partners and Dance... redux

I tried to hang the letters on the front porch on Tuesday, and one of them fell and a serif on the letter "T" broke. I had known they were old and brittle and was worried this might happen. I was worried about the letters hanging in a place where they would be subjected to the wind and other elements that might knock them over, and I guess I was right.

I talked to my Mom later, thinking I would just scrap the whole idea but she said, "Oh, no! Those letters are too special for you to give up. You have to find a way to do it."

Of course she was right, and as I looked at the pieces after taking this photo, I have another idea to hang the letters and make them secure.  It won't happen soon because I have a lot to do, but it will happen. In the meantime I'll glue the little pieces back together and give the letter "T" a touch up.




**
Dear Megan, if you think I have the patience to do hand quilting you are seriously mistaken. I don't and besides, the arthritis in my right hand won't let me do that for very long. 


Terri and Susan, I only close up the studio when the temperatures outside get below 10F. There is an electric heater in that room and I can turn it on whenever I want, so I only use it when I have to be in there working. Right now it's no harm no foul because I have other irons in the fire. You should know me well enough to know that if I've got a sewing project that I'm very excited about wild horses couldn't pull me away from the sewing machine.

Change Partners and Dance

When I got tired of doing finely detailed pencil portraits... (and developed arthritis in my drawing hand)

I did something a bit different. I worked with watercolors and made some abstract 3-D pieces.

Some of them made it into art shows and were exhibited.  I was attending the opening of one gallery show and I was chatting with John Hatch, one of my former Art professors from college, and one of my colleagues, a fellow painter.

"What do you do," she asked him, "when you get stuck?"

John gestured to me with his thumb, as if he were hitchhiking. "You do what this one does." He turned to me and smiled. "Change partners and dance." With that, he took me into his arms, twirled me around a couple of steps, kissed me on the cheek and sailed off. He was then about 77 years old, and he was that kind of guy. Everybody loved him, and he loved everybody.

It was the most succinct and eloquent piece of advice I had ever heard, and I never forgot it (how could I?). Someday I'm going to have to make a word quilt out of it, but that's another story.

Change partners and dance. It sounds so easy, and yet it isn't. How do you find a new partner to keep dancing in a crowded room, or even an empty one?

What he meant, I am quite sure (and I can't ask, he died in 1998), was that you had to look at things differently. It can be hard to do, you get stuck in a rut, and you keep doing the same thing over and over. You may be good at doing the same thing over and over, but to get out of the rut you have to know you're in one.

How you "reframe" a problem can really pay off. There's a new book by Tina Seeling, "inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity" that focuses on this idea. You can (and should) read the article in Fast Company, "How Reframing a Problem Unlocks Innovation."

Seelig writes, "The simple process of asking "Why" expands the landscape of solutions for a problem."

I've solved lots of quilt design problems by asking "Why?"

"Why do I have to have the background fabric in The Black Box Quilt run perfectly vertical?"

"Why do I have to use the same fabric as background all over in a quilt?"

"Why does the dog need to be centered?"

"Why do I have to make the letters the same size?"

"Why do I have to make the letters easy to see?"

"Why do I have to rip this seam?"**

Please read the article about Reframing. I promise it will be worthwhile.




** Regular readers will recognize these questions, and my responses to them.