Getting a Perspective on a New Year • 2017

January 5, 2017December 28, 2024 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

My friend Leslie sent me this knitting gnome (so I had to share it with you), and although the holidays are past and gone, I think many of us have been as busy as this little guy, creating and sending them out our quilts and things with a heart full of love.

Here is a composite of What I Did Over the Holidays:

I made bread from a bunch of gifted persimmons, hugged a sleepy elf (and his brothers) in my kitchen, enjoyed watching my oldest son Chad and my youngest son Peter make home-made pasta for our Christmas Eve dinner, pieced a quilt with Sarah Jane fabrics (always lovely), shopped for a new car (but I didn’t like any of them better than the one I have, so I came home without one), and cleaned up my sewing room (always an event).

I jumped into the En Provence Mystery Quilt, hosted by Bonnie Hunter of Quiltville and had fun trying to find the color periwinkle in my stash and in shops, as I decided to slant it that way, instead of the straight purple.

Here’s a picture of HER finished quilt–mine is still three clues behind and mostly in pieces. If you ever needed a good blog post to encourage you to save your scraps, *here* it is, courtesy of Bonnie.

But I do have one finish I can share. I finished up the binding (my quilter did the quilting) on my Halloween quilt. I’ll be updating the final post of the Quilt-A-Long on this pattern to include these two photos (front is above and back is below), but I wanted to say…

…Happy Halloween to you all!

But wait. Isn’t it January? Full of snow and storm and putting away the holiday boxes? Watch this.

This is how I feel when I’m working on something not in the season it’s intended for. I’m am distracted/entranced by the cues all around me. In July, I see red, white, blue, stars, stripes, but not green pointy growing things called Christmas trees. In April, it is flowers flowers flowers and complete absorption into planting my summer garden. It is nearly impossible for me to focus on turkeys and fall decor. Or snow. As a result of this focus, I rarely see the proverbial gorilla among the basketball players.

perspective-six-and-nine — *Perspective, exhibit A*

Yet so many of us work “out of season” in planning, buying and creating that I thought I’d look into it. The 99U article (where the video is found) noted that “We see the world, and our work, through countless lenses of assumption and habit—fixed ways of thinking, seeing and acting, of which we’re usually unconscious.” The author, columnist Oliver Burkeman (a personal favorite of mine), observes that “This urge toward making things unconscious is a blessing if you want to do the same thing, over and over, ever more efficiently. But it becomes a problem when we’re called upon to do things differently—when you hit a roadblock in creative work, or in life, and the old approaches no longer seem to work.” He suggests using physical or temporal distance to get perspective, to get past that creative block.

When you use physical distance, you institute physical distance from your creative problem, such as when you take a break from piecing or quilting to look at Instagram, or take time to research, perhaps see something in a quilt book. Or you might take a trip and get your best flash of insight while flying over the country. Research has been done that shows that for many people implementing creative ideas begins with recognizing creative ideas. While this sounds circular, it’s fairly common: how many times have you read a magazine and decide to add two new quilts to your List of Quilts To Make? You recognize the creative in others, and choose to implement it for yourself.

To proximate temporal distance, Burkeman suggests that we can “externalize our thoughts by writing them down in a journal. The point isn’t necessarily that you’ll have an instant breakthrough, but that by relating to your thinking in this ‘third-person’ way, you’ll loosen the grip of the old assumptions, seeing your thoughts afresh, and creating potential for new insights.” Sounds like an argument to begin a creative journal to me.

forced-perspective-changed-angle-photography-3 — *Perspective, Exhibit B*

The title of his article is “You Don’t Need New Ideas, You Need A New Perspective,” and I thought it fitting to start out the new year with this creative idea of perspective. Now that all our holiday boxes are up in the rafters, the tinsel and glitter and ornaments and the fall boxes with autumn colors are all put away, the minimalist environment we live in come January can provide a clean slate — and a new perspective — for our creative work.

Quilts

Resolutions vs. Being the Best Self I Can Be

January 10, 2015December 28, 2024 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

from *here*

I read this article, “Resolving to Create a New You” in the New York Times last week. I cut it out, kept it by my sewing machine and read it all week long. I read it again today and finally, finally, I think I understand it (the author, Ruth Chang, is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University). It helped that I listened to Ms. Chang’s TED Talk about “How to Make Hard Choices” (take the time–it’s enlightening).

Resolutions, even those quilting resolutions of Finish A-Longs and their sort, have a problem because basically we are trying to (as Ms. Chang put it) “to steel our wills to do what we already know we should be doing.” Yes, I know I should finish Quilt XYZ and yes, I still make myself a list of quilts every quarter and hang them on my cupboard door. Sometimes they are helpful, like when I don’t feel like doing much. It can give a goal and a direction. But I have two quilts I have had on that list every quarter for the past two years. They are hard quilts. I don’t quite remember what I want to do with the “Good Luck Quilt,” one that I dreamed up but now have no idea what I mean, nor do I know what I want to make with the fabric that I spontaneously bought in a stack from an online quilt shop one summer’s day (and which I call “The Mexcian Day of the Dead Quilt”). Each quilt has its appealing qualities. Each is a quagmire. And every quarter I resolve to finish them.

Ms. Chang says instead of looking at resolutions as just another set of Things To Do, we should view these as opportunities “to create ourselves anew.” Each of those hard choices between two sets of alternatives, gives us a chance to “make ourselves the authors of our own lives. Instead of being led by the nose by what we imagine to be facts of the world, we should instead recognize that sometimes the world is silent about what we should do.” Nobody cares if I ever start my Good Luck Quilt. Or cut into that layer cake or jelly roll. And even if you do make it and post it on some blog and someone has rounded up prizes for what you finish, you aren’t winning a prize because a quilt has taught you a new skill. You aren’t winning a prize because you spent more time on the borders that you did on the quilt (like my current tortuous creative project). You are only winning a prize because you finished something and your name was selected by Mr. Random Number Generator. And if you ask me, an online app that can “lead us around by the nose” is probably NOT the best way to develop yourself as a quilter.

Instead, Ms. Chang suggests, by making hard choices, “we not only create value for ourselves but we also (re)create ourselves. . . . to reflect on what kind of person we can commit to being when making those choices.” So whether it be challenging yourself in a new quilting endeavor, or resolving to become the kind of person who would rather go on a walk than eat a brownie, or the kind of person who can set aside the digital screens of her life in order to concentrate on the small people near her, if we can commit to that task, generating our OWN reasons for choosing that direction, we “make ourselves the authors of our own lives.” We won’t just make another “Scrap Vomit” quilt because everyone else is. While we might choose to use up our scraps, we’ll do it in a way that suits us, that refines us, that contributes a little bit of something to the inside of us.

She ends her article by saying: “So in this new year, let’s not do the same old, same old; let’s not resolve to work harder at being the selves that we already are. Instead, let’s resolve to make ourselves into the selves that we can commit to being.”

Dive into the quilt quagmire and make that hard quilt. It may take you three months or three years, but you will have become a different and better self for having tried it and finished. Use that pattern in the drawer, but make it up in fabrics you envision. Go ahead and make a quilt that mimics the one online, but make it better. Make it different.

Make it yours.

Happy Old Year Ending (Wrap-up)

Happy Old Year Ending: 2014

December 27, 2014January 1, 2022 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

I see wrap-up posts often on people’s blogs, and while I feel like my 200 Quilts List (above) is sort of a way to move through my quilts, I present, one more time, 2014’s quilts:

One thing for sure, I certainly don’t work in a series, or make quilts that all look alike.

There is one more quilt that is not here which will show up in next year’s feed, although I count it as one of my fifteen quilts for this year. What else have I been doing?

Circle Blocks. The next one will arrive at the beginning of January.

How about some bags? 2014 seemed to be the year of making bags, including a Mini Sew-Together Bag and the dreaded/beloved Weekender Bag (I did my own version of this).

I snuck in one more Bee Block, a Dresden Plate block for Rene of Rene Creates.

And the last things in the sewing categories were odds-and-ends and wonky, silly crows for a Halloween decoration. We took a big trip to Croatia and Budapest, we ripped out lawn in our front yard and relandscaped for better water conservation, we visited children and grandchildren and parents and sisters and lots of other relatives. It’s easy on those “don’t want to get out of your pajamas” days to think that you haven’t accomplished a thing. But in these year-end reviews, I can see I’ve really given my sewing machine a work-out.

Happy Old Year Ending!

Quilts · WIP

WIP for the New Year

January 8, 2013December 28, 2024 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

I can’t believe I’m still working on this. No, it’s not the Christmas quilt, although that is still very much in play. It’s the Autumn Quilt.

Since I started collecting fabrics for this oh, 8 or 9 years ago, and started cutting and sewing this quilt 2 years ago, it’s no wonder that I let it sit for a while after getting it back from the quilter as I couldn’t figure out what to bind it in. You know we all hunger and thirst over the cute bindings that Red Pepper puts on her quilts, but sometimes it’s best not to over think this quilting thing and just move forward. This is a plaid that was in the quilt, spliced up with a couple of other prints, as I didn’t have enough of the plaid.

I don’t know why, but I love the autumn colors. Living in LA, I get autumn about NOW, in January, when the liquid ambers turn maple-like colors. I went looking for quotes about autumn to find this quilt’s title, and all of them were about the fall that they have on the Eastern seaboard, or New England or mid-western areas of the country–so romantic about leaves and color and the “twilight of the year” and death and harvest and so on. I found a quote I like, but I’m still letting it mull over in my mind.

I mean, I can’t just call this “Autumn Quilt,” now can I?

And this is where I am on the pillow shams for my wonky star Christmas quilt. I decided to make a normal star, as they are 16″ finished, slap on some fabric on the top and bottom to get it to equal the size of a pillow sham: 20″ by 26.”

I want a flange around the outside edge, so I cut about another 100 2-1/2″ squares, and sewed them together in strips.

So now they look like this. I stopped because I’d taken the quilt over to the quilter, and gave her the red/green thread I’d purchased at Superior Threads when I’d gone through there at Christmastime.

I stopped because I had to get the syllabus and the course calendar and the expanded course calendar done and sent to the school copy center, and while I was at it, I sent over vats and barrels of more things to the copy center, trying to prep up for the first few weeks of school, which starts next week. But it was oh-so-nice to not have to create those things from scratch–to be able to find them on the computer and send them over with minor alterations.

I may actually get more quilting done this semester than last, given the fact that I’m teaching a course I’ve taught before. And that is a very good thing.

And lastly, I had a lovely surprise from a fellow quilter: she heart-attacked my door on my birthday, which was this past week. I’ve never been heart-attacked before, so I laughed and took a picture to remind me forever. Thank you Lisa! I had other lovely gifts to celebrate that day from other friends and family, phone calls from my children and some friends. A good birthday, for sure.

And then, just to remind me that I’m no spring chicken anymore, my back went into spasms the next day and I’ve been ~~wincing, whining and moaning~~ a good girl and not complained once about it. Like all things, this too will pass.

Hope you are all getting your new year off to a good start!