for the love of patterns
There are many ways to be yourself within the world of quilting. You can be wildly improvisational or you can follow a pattern to the letter. You can use unconventional fabric combinations or use a tried-and-true collection of colors.
Most of the time, I favor improvisational processes (see my blog post from earlier this week called for the love of improv.) I feel free and happy while slapping fabric together every which way. I love to UNDER think everything. I love to set a timer and just stitch for an allotted length of time. Go go go.
But…sometimes I fall in love with a pattern. And then I might find myself making a quilt from a pattern. Right now, I’m mostly done with a quilt made from Jaybird Quilts’s Disco pattern. And I have bought and started selecting fabrics for Elizabeth Hartman’s Preppy the Whale quilt pattern. And I’m working on Carolyn Friedlander’s Stripes paper-pieced pattern as well.
Most of the time I mix up fabrics. I want my quilt to have a different set of fabrics in it than what I’m seeing online or in my quilt guild. I want to personalize. I want the play of prints and colors to be something I made, not something that was made for me.
But…sometimes I fall in love with what fabric designers have done. I love their combinations so much that I just want to leave them as they are. And then I might find myself making a quilt from a single fabric line, as with my Flyers Quilt made from Hand Drawn Garden–a quilt that is both my own pattern and not as it is made from a traditional block, but the layout is all my own.
The point of today’s post? It’s pretty well summed up by this embroidery pattern from Dropcloth:
Love what you love. Make what you make.
And here’s the thing: I still feel happy and free while working from a pattern, because I chose the pattern. And I chose some other things–the fabric, the size, etc. And I chose to be in conversation with the pattern designer and pattern writer, to enter their heads and see how it works. It’s fun.
Limitations can breed creativity. In fact, google “limitations, creativity” and you’ll find that it has been argued over and over and demonstrated over and over, that sometimes reducing the number of choices we have to make can really help us to make choices.
Quilt what you quilt, my friends. It’s all good.
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Here, Here…I'll toast to that!
I love this post. It's far too easy to fall into the not good enough/cool enough/ original enough trap, especially when surrounded by social media, when really just the process of MAKING is enough
Agreed.
yes, yes, yes!
Point well made. I couldn't agree more.