Pico Iyer, a well-respected travel writer noted that “The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context.”
Translation for this week: I can’t be a slave to the needle and thread all the time, so no new projects to show, nothing finished, a few things eyeballed but no energy to tackle them. Ever have times like this?
“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” (He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone, but then he wasn’t a quilter.)
Ever go to your social media to check something and then put your head up one hour later? The feeds, the algorithm are designed that way. When first I taught about the internet, just as it was beginning to take its toll on the students, an article I read described them as “digital natives,” meaning, they had to choose to leave the internet, whereas, I — not a digital native– had to choose to engage with the internet. But currently, that doesn’t really matter.
Now it engages me. It brings me my friends. It wastes my time. It brings me joy and connection. It wastes my time. I find quilty fun. All of the above.
James Clear makes the point that even though many things are good to do, if they are not your top priorities, they will distract you from what’s most important, and from what should be given your best and undivided attention.
He notes that “Every behavior has a cost. Even neutral behaviors aren’t really neutral. They take up time, energy, and space that could be put toward better behaviors or more important tasks.”
Or, as I like to say, saying yes to some things means saying no to others. You think I would have figured this all out by now.
“The world is this way, we wish the world were that way, and our experience of the world—how we see it, remember it, and imagine it—is a mixture of stark reality and comforting illusion. We can’t spare either. If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning, but if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we’d be too deluded to find our slippers.” –from the book Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert
Occasionally in Adam Mastroianni’s substack there are these fascinating-makes-me-think-or-go-aha sorts of observations. His missive this week happened to coincide with two other events: a couple of days at the beach and the making of a Hawaiian quilt block.
First, the quilt block. I posted I was starting this Hawaiian style of quilting and immediately a couple of quilters commented that it was a total fail for them, didn’t like it, tried and never doing it again. But it was Block Two of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the Indian quilt-a-long and since I already had finished the first block, I was determined to try the second. I also have never attempted a Hawaiian Block.
Second, the days at the beach came about because one of my sons was bringing his family to Oceanside, and I asked if my husband and I could tag along for part of their trip, and then the other son, who lives in the area, also joined us. Their dog Misa is above; she hated their pool when they first moved in to their new house, but now, she loves it. (Misa, too, is a part of this.)
Back to Mastroianni. He writes “The internet gives every social trend a pair of rocket-powered roller skates, speeding it toward its…final form. On Twitter, for instance, memes go from punchy to passé in a matter of days rather than decades. But if we could play culture on 1x speed rather than 10x speed, if we had time to screw around with different strategies before the game reached its cutthroat stage, we might have discovered different paths entirely….Instead, in a hyper-competitive marketplace of ideas, we end up with the same few memes, all done to death” (source is above).
We quilters have also been subjected to this rocket-powered roller skates. How many rainbow-ordered quilts have you seen in the last few years? How many quilts have you seen that really don’t need a pattern because they are so simple — but somehow they are everywhere and we all make one? Sometimes it is because we all read the same Instagram posts, or that the pattern writers are counting on the viral effect of social media to send sales skyrocketing. Fair. It’s a marketplace. But I can’t tell you how many guild show-and-tell nights I have sat through where every quilt somehow resembles the one before it, or the one before that.
Mastroianni calls this “de-frictioning.” He describes it like this: “We’ve forgotten how much time people in the past spent consuming content that they didn’t actually want to consume: the unskippable clunker of a song that came in the middle of an album, the late-night infomercial that you sat through because there was nothing else on, the magazine you read cover-to-cover in the waiting room….Each new media technology reduces this friction…they all allow us to spend more time with the content that we supposedly desire. And what happens when this friction goes away?”
Two Russian artists, Kolmar and Melamid, decided to find out, and interviewed people in many countries about what their most wanted painting was, and what was their least wanted painting. Here’s USA’s (source via Mastroianni):
If you were to interview quilters what their most wanted quilt block was, and what their least, what would we see? We would probably see what they were seeing the most. If they saw a lot of printed panel quilts, they may be looking for their favorite panel. If you were at a modern guild, you might get something abstract or perhaps boldly colored. We tend to go with what we see, what we are used to.
The weird thing was that so many people’s “most” pictures were similar, but their “least” pictures were quite different and interesting. Mastroianni notes that “people are capable of acquiring more interesting tastes, if you give them the chance. This is the work art does for us—it stretches our desires, rather than merely satisfying them.”
And this is the work that the little bit of friction of a new project can also do.
So what to do when a quilt-a-long comes into your view and it is a Hawaiian quilt block? Or you are moved into a house that has a swimming pool and you have never been in one before?
Or you go to the beach and get out of your regular routine and you see a group of beginning surfers feel the friction in the few inches of whitewater high up on the shore?
Then instead of sitting there like a lump, you reach into your bag and carefully pull out the pinned Hawaiian block, and really get going on it. No, it’s not perfect. You probably won’t make it again. But you don’t want to read the magazines you brought, the family is all at lunch and you are guarding their stuff, so you thread your needle and get going, and by the end of the day, and after good conversations and an occasional walk on the beach, the block may have a certain coconut suntan-lotion fragrance and perhaps some sea salt spray, but it’s mostly finished.
Another deviation from my usual.
And here’s where I got my quilter roller skates on and skated right into the sameness, but this time, happily so. More info here, and how to get her free pattern. Audrey is looking for more, so make one and send it off!
According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary: “In English, redux describes things that have been brought back—metaphorically, that is.” So I’m bringing back this quilt from about ten years ago, as I had a request from Sue for information about this pattern.
I noodled around on here, but noticed it wasn’t really a pattern, just a loose set of instructions embedded in three different blog posts, as I made while I was recovering from shoulder surgery. I took on the challenge to get its ready, and spent the 3rd of July redrawing the pattern, typing up the instructions, figuring out the wording.
So Happy Independence Day with a free pattern, on this the day we signed the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago.
Download it now for free here, as soon it will live in my pattern shop for a small price, as it’s a PatternLite pattern. You can find it here when that happens.
Happy Fourth of July, everyone!
And when was the original?
Me, sewing a blanket stitch around the stars with my arm in a sling, two days post-op.
It’s a big, fancy year for the United States, this 250th celebration of those men in white powdered wigs slaving through the heat of Philadelphia in 1776, trying to figure out how not to have a king, but something else. As Honest Abe Lincoln described it 87 years later, we wanted a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” The three documents that were eventually crafted, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are known collectively as the Charters of Freedom. And so we celebrate this beginning.
We’ve done this celebrating before.
The first one I remember was in 1976, and it was the summer of the Bicentennial (200 years). This is about all I can recollect: a picnic with my toddler.
This year, the Semiquincentennial (250), that son will be celebrating the 4th with his family of five in another state, and hopefully they will remember more than a picnic.
When starting a government, or a marriage, or a school, or any great endeavor, there might be some failures. According to noted historian, Joseph J. Ellis, author of The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding, there were “two unquestionably horrific tragedies the founders oversaw: the failure to end slavery, and the failure to avoid Indian removal” (Kindle, p. 8). Ellis’ book discusses these contradictions, and we are still grappling with these today. Between 1500 and 1800, while “five times as many Africans as Europeans were carried to the New World” (ibid., 13), only a small portion of that diaspora was carried to North America, making us a predominantly white nation of interlopers on the Native Americans who lived here.
Those aren’t the only mistakes we’ve made.
Thomas Jefferson declared in The Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This year, we celebrate that, but I do keep wondering: are we moving towards that beautiful idea, or away from it? And with all the examinations and navel-gazing, maybe we can acknowledge that we aren’t perfect as a nation, but that we generally are pretty amazing?
While I try to hold all these disparate thoughts in my tiny brain — for this 250th celebration, I made a quilt.
My childhood nickname was Betsy, so of course I loved this panel for the back.
This is Quilt #317 and many of the details are on the label. I actually had a different title, but this week decided I wanted to call it The Betsy Ross Quilt. So I made a new label and took off the first one:
(Photography location scout and quilt holder is my saintly husband.)
Washington Monument
So this year it will be probably a more contemplative celebration, given the tensions in our national dialogue. I like people on both sides of that dialogue, but my overriding desire is to see how we can care for each other — the people — rather than just going for power or for ruling over the populace. There’s a reason why those Founding Fathers eschewed the idea of a king, and I kind of think they knew what they were doing. The dialogue — fraught as it may be — will continue.
Samuel Adams, 250 years ago this year, was on to something:
Freedom of Thought and the Right of Private Judgment in Matters of Conscience, direct their course to this Happy Country.
While I don’t have any great answers about how we make our way to that Happy Country, I just know I want us to keep trying. As a quilter, I honor that spirit of making mistakes, recognizing them and unpicking a few stitches in the process, so I’ve put out all my red, white and blue quilts around the house to jolly things up over here. To celebrate well.
• The post about Betsy’s Creation, my version of the flag quilt, talks about America (of course), with a link to free download and instructions to make the quilt.
My husband once had a year-long sabbatical with the Department of State, and I got to know that beautiful city well. Here’s the George Washington Monument in November, when the late fall sunlight turns it golden, taken from the World War II Memorial.
This quote, on the side of the Supreme Court, gets at that delicate balance between just being right vs. recognizing that our liberty needs to be guarded by justice.
My favorite memorial of all was the Lincoln Memorial, especially when I could catch it at odd times, when all the tired tourists had gone home.
Below are some paintings on the ceiling of the Capitol Building (in addition to the Samuel Adams quote, above) that remind me how we stitched our country together:
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 