Quilting as Practice

Sewing the blocks of my quilt together yesterday, it came to me that quilting is an excellent practice. Here are seven lessons quilting offers me.

Stay in the present moment. In quilting, every detail—measuring, cutting, sewing the seams, and pressing—demands your full attention. If you drift off during any of those processes, it will catch up with you later.

Baby steps work. Some things that look impossible can be achieved one small step at a time. In quilting, you combine patches to make blocks, then join blocks into rows, and then sew rows together into a quilt top. Even complicated patterns are combinations of simple steps.

Small problems multiply when ignored. Let's say you're cutting squares and you cut a stack that's a sixteenth of an inch off. A sixteenth of an inch. What could that matter? Right? Wrong! By the time you add four of those squares to a row, the row is off by a quarter of an inch, and that quarter inch will create real problems when you join two rows together. Reminds me that many angry relationships are the result of a collection of small miscommunications.

Not everything can or should be pretty. If you use all pretty fabrics, they blend together and the overall effect becomes kind of mushy. Quilts need a few fabrics that stand out, that draw the eye, and the ones that do that typically aren't pretty in a conventional way. Isn't it also true that the ugly parts of life provide contrast for its beauty?

There is no one right answer. For example, joints are stronger if the seams are pressed in opposite directions, but seams in dark fabrics can show through if they're pressed toward light fabrics. In quilting and in life, sometimes you have to choose the best of the imperfect options.

Humility helps. Sometimes you can work around challenges. Other times you simply have to admit you made a mistake, rip it out, and start over.

Perfectionism kills. Absolute perfection doesn't exist and trying to achieve it stops progress like nothing else. To finish a quilt, you have to accept that the best you can do is, indeed, the best you can do and it's good enough. Our best is always good enough.