Edit! Redo! and Revisit!



So, I had been working on these letters. Using some of my favorite fabrics, it was going gang busters. Then, BAM! I realized I didn't have enough room. It wasn't working, Some letters were too thick and others, as my skills grew or by luck, were artful and delicate.
I sat and looked at it for a couple of days and came to the conclusion that this project was shelved. Oh I'll go back to letters and may even do this project but I need to edit my out the losers and remake a fair portion.
I do this alot, start a project, learn a skill ( like letters) struggle with it, then drop it.  Going back a while late later and finally finishing something happens too. 

So this is on my pile... I'll cannibalize it for parts I'm sure and the strings I have can go back to the string drawer.  And once I've processed the lessons learned, I'll return to letters and make something I'm proud of.
I had a ceramics teacher who was a fanatic about editing. He thought it was wasteful not to recycle projects that sucked. Why fire and glaze something that in 2 months your eyes would outgrow?
Now that I have a several years of quilting under my belt I can more clearly see the my own need to edit my first tries. To get the fluff out of the way and get to the better quilt that is lurking behind that fluff. I struggle to find that space that captures whimsical improvisation and artful piecing, while leaving out that clunky forced look of homemade crafting. 

So now you what I'm not working on. What am I doing?  Playing with some Liberty Scraps, going to the dog park, hanging out with my elder,  playing with 60degree triangles and teaching classes over at Modern Domestic.





Quilters Rock!

2 comments:

Vicki said...

I did words for my madrona road challenge quilt. It's still not quilted, it's 4 words made into a little quilt top though. I really don't love the first word I did; I changed the style of letters for each word and that little project is full of lessons learned. I'm going to quilt it even though it's full of things I don't love. And maybe one day I'll make another word quilt that will be more of a successful project.

Cheryl Arkison said...

Love those little pieces on the left!