You Have to Break a Couple of Eighths to Make a Blanket

Change is a good thing.  Having worked as a cashier, I know this for a fact.  There was one night when I ran out of quarters, then dimes, then finally nickels.  By the time my shift was over, I had two pennies left.  Counting out ninety cents worth of nickels is not easy, but coming up with ninety cents without any change is imposable.  But weather you are changing dollars into cents or making changes in your life, change is necessary.  As the old saying goes, you have to break a couple of eggs to make an omelet.

One criticism I have heard about quilting is how ridiculous it seems to take perfectly good fabric, cut it up and sew it back together.   I will admit that this does seem impractical, but sometimes you have to break a couple of eighths to make a blanket.  If the goal was simply to make something to keep you warm, this could be done with a whole lot less effort.  But quilting is about more than that, it is an art form.  It is about making something beautiful.  No one who looks at a well crafted log cabin or English paper piecing quilt could think that the fabric or the time had been wasted.

The truth is, often in order to make something beautiful, you have to cut up what you already have.  This applies to quilting, writing, and even our lives.  Sometimes we have to “cut up” the life we know in order to make something better.  We have to make changes in order to keep growing.  As hard as it is, change is a good thing.  Sometimes we need cut up our security, cut up our complacency, or even cut up our expectations in order to make something better.  It may be easier to keep things as they are, but then we will never know what we could have made from it, what beautiful patterns will emerge or what surprising twists and turns we might find.  The only way to know what we are capable of is to keep challenging ourselves.

Attitude of Success

There is a great power in positive thinking.  Before an athlete comes up to bat he will visualize hitting the ball in order to help him actually do.  We are taught from the time we are younger that we need to believe in ourselves, as though this alone is enough for us to reach whatever goal we may strive for.  There are numerous books on the subject that explain everything from the psychology to the karma to the physics of the issue.

I don’t know how productive positive thing is, but I know how damaging negative thinking is.  It only makes sense.  Imagine that same athlete coming up to the plate with the attitude of Eeyore, “Well I probably won’t hit it anyway, but I guess I’ll go up there.”  Or worse yet, he never even gets up to bat because he’s certain he will strike out.  He has failed before he’s even tried.  Positive thinking may not guarantee success but negative thinking does seem to guarantee failure. 

Perhaps the real strength in positive thinking is that it keeps us going even when we do fail.  A quilter’s best friend is a seam ripper.  This seems to be a universal truth. No matter how good a sewer they are, mistakes will be made sooner or later.  The mark of a good quilter is not the absence of mistakes, but the ability and persistence to fix them.  More than anything else, you can’t give up.

There is a famous quote from Thomas Edison that says, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”  In life we may get up and fail thousands of times, but we only have to succeed once.  That can only happen if we never give up trying.  Perhaps what we were told when we were younger is true, we can do anything if we just believe that one of these times when we get up again we will in fact succeed.

Dear Santa,

As I'll be starting a new adventure this coming year, I'll only be needing a few things for Christmas:

1. Courage
2. Hope
3. A little luck
4. A Lot of chocolate

Everything else I already have or will find along the way.

Sincerly,
Heather

The Challenge

One thing that I like about quilting is that there is always something new to learn, some new challenge to conquer.  You learn to piece squares and you move on to triangles.  You master triangles and you go on to curves.  Then there’s paper piecing, English paper piecing, appliqué, and the list continues.  I have known women who have been quilting their whole lives who say that they are still learning.  New tools come out.  New methods are discovered.  This is one reason that quilting is so addictive: there is always something more to learn, some new skill to discover.

There is an optimal level of difficulty for kids (or adults) to learn.  If it’s too easy, we get bored, if it’s too hard, we get discouraged.  This applies to anything you might learn, math, sewing, music.  As important as it is to add, if you don’t move on to multiplication and algebra, you will get pretty bored.  And you would never be able to grow as a mathematician.  In order to grow, we have to face new challenges.

The same thing applies to life.  As much as we may like where we are, literally or figuratively, there comes a time when we have to move on to something else.  We have to continually challenge ourselves in order to become better as people.  Change may be hard, but just like appliqué or paper piecing, the hardest things in life are the most worthwhile.  They are also the most fun.

Decisions, Decisions!

There are a lot of decisions that need to be made when making a quilt.  Everything from the pattern to the colors to how it is quilted is a choice to be made and every choice affects the overall product.  In fact, a major part of the art of quilt making is the art of decision making.  Some people with some projects can make decisions quite easily.  There are in the shop and out again with the right fabric in a matter of minutes.  Other can take hours.  They spread out every possible fabric on the tables and ask the opinions of everyone in the shop before finally deciding.

Throughout the course of the day, all of us make dozens, if not hundreds of decisions.  Should I have pancakes or cereal for breakfast? Should I go down 5^th street or 4^th street to get to work? Should I talk to the person behind me in line at the store or remain silent?  Most of these are not earth shattering, life altering decisions, but like the quilt, they affect the overall product of our lives.  They form our lives like the blocks and squares of fabric form a quilt.

There are other decisions that are, or at least seem to be, earth shattering, life altering decisions, decisions that feel like they could tear a person in two.  What career do I want? Should I really marry that person?  Do I attend a school that’s across the country that offers a new life and adventure in that great unknown or do I choose a school that is closer to the home and family I know and love?  Try as we might, these decisions cannot be made simply through deliberation and council.  Not that these tools aren’t helpful, but with these decisions, corny as it sounds, we must follow our hearts.

Had I followed logic, I may have become an engineer.  It has good pay and job security and utilized many of the same skills that I employ now with quilting like geometry and creativity.  With the right education and training, I may have been quite successful in that field, but I didn’t think I would enjoy building bridges and designing submarines as I do building stories and designing patterns.  So the decision was made, for better or worse or, more likely, both.  The facts and statistics can only bring you so far when it comes to these decisions.  In the end, we have to decide what we really want, what will make us really happy.  Like the quilts we sew, the decisions we make in our lives will make the difference, will make it unique, will make it beautiful.

How to do anything

I have often had the experience when I show off a new project that someone says, “I could never make that.”  I’ve always thought this an odd statement as these are usually people who don’t quilt or sew at all and have never even tried.  How do they know they can’t?

We are told when we are young that we can do anything if we only try.  When we get older we believe that this is just one of those things you tell children to encourage them like nothing is impossible or dreams come true.  When we get older our eyes are opened to all of the impossibilities that exist all around us.  Perhaps we misinterpret the famous Yoda quote, “Do or do not, there is no try.”  This could be misconstrued to mean, “If at first you don’t succeed, you may as well give up because clearly you can’t do it anyway.”  All due respect to Yoda, but I tend to believe what Thomas Edison said on the subject, “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

In my opinion, there are only two skills you need in order to be able to do anything: the ability to learn, and the ability to work.  These are two skills anyone can have.  Think about it, anything in the world you can do if you just learn how to do it and work until you have it right.  That’s not to say that some things won’t come easier than others, but I have a hard time believing that things are completely beyond our capabilities.

My sister is a teacher.  When her students tell her that they can’t do something, her response is simple, “You can’t do it yet.”  (She has also been known to use this same line on me from time to time.)  Just because we can’t do something now doesn’t mean that we never will.  Just look at what we have learned already on our short time on this planet.  When we got here we couldn’t walk, talk, eat, read, write, sew, dance, play sports, paint. . . you see what I mean.  Everything we can do now, there was once a time that we couldn’t.  If we can do all of that, we can do anything!

2+2=3 1/2

When I was in elementary school learning math, I was told, like so many other students, that no matter what you do, you will need math.  How right they were.  I use math every day at the quilt shop and not just to figure up the cost when I ring up a sale.  I am often asked to figure up the yardage needed for a quilt or how many five inch squares can be cut from a half yard.  Not to mention that I have to convert inches to fractions to decimals just to get the yardage from a pattern to the checkout stand on nearly a daily basis.  I will forever be grateful that I knew how to find the circumference of a circle when a customer asked how much rick-rack she needed to go around a circle 40 inches in diameter.  Geometry, fractions, measurements, even algebra I use on a fairly regular basis.

Yet the problems that I deal with are not anything like the simple, straight forward word problems that we were given in elementary school.  There should have been a whole section in school just for quilting math.  Even simple addition is different in quilting.  Normally an addition problem would look like this: 2 + 2 = 4.  Simple.  Yet if you were to sew a two inch strip of fabric with another two inch strip of fabric, you would normally get a 3 ½”.  Somehow, with quilting, even the most fundamental rules don’t seem to apply.  Really the equation looks more like this, (2 - 1/4) + (2 - 1/4) = 3 1/2 because you need to account for seam allowance.  Probably the most common question I am asked is to figure the yardage for a backing.  In school, figuring the area of a rectangle was pretty straight forward.

L x W = Y

Length times width equals area.  Figuring a backing, however, is a little more difficult.  You also have to take into account the width of the fabric.  The real formula looks more like this:

(L/42)(W+6)=Y

36

Of course, even this doesn’t take in to account that L/42 must be rounded up before multiplying it to W+6 or that L and W could be switched if that would use less fabric and be more affordable to the customer.

For those of you who think you could hack it as a quilt mathematician, here is a story problem, one that I actually had to solve at the shop one day:

Suzy would like to make a quilt using the disappearing nine patch pattern.  How many layer cakes would she need to buy to make a queen sized quilt without borders?

Now, for those of you who are not quilters, you may think that I haven’t given you enough information: And you are right, there are no numbers in this story problem (unless you count that nine which is really part of the title and really doesn’t help much).  How can you solve a math problem with no numbers?  Most quilters will recognize the hidden or implied numbers.  So, in fairness to any non-quilting readers, here are a few hints to help you out.

1. A layer cake is a set of pre-cut, 10 inch squares and there are usually 40-42 squares in a pack.
2. A disappearing nine patch is made by sewing squares together in sets of nine, 3 down and 3 across, and then cutting these assemblies in half twice, first up and down and then across, making four blocks which are then rearranged and sewn together to form the quilt 
3.  A queen sized quilt measures about 84” x 92”.
4. Don’t forget to account for ¼” seam allowance.

These problems won’t get you an A+ or a gold star.  There is no prize for excellence in the area of quilt math or a trophy for the first person across the finish line with the right answer.  Yet there is something rewarding about solving these convoluted problems.  It is something akin to solving a Sudoku puzzle or answering trivia questions on a game show.  It’s good to challenge your knowledge and reasoning abilities sometimes, to test yourself and stretch your brain and really think.  This and the ability to help those that come into the shop is really all the reward I need.  To those of you who wish to take the challenge, good luck, have fun, and make sure you show your work!